By Flora Haslam
The tech PR industry can be a fiercely competitive place – we’re all looking to get better results than our counterparts, so it was with only slight surprise that we made the shocking discovery this week that a ‘psychology student’ who’d asked for help with some research on cybercrime was in fact an ‘International superstar trapped in the body of tech PR Manager’ (with thanks to Twitter!). Turns out it wasn’t an innocent academic request, but rather an information gathering exercise in an attempt to discredit one of our clients’ news stories.
The reason? Apparently one of our clients has been “pulling out all the stops to raise awareness of the latest threats and make themselves stand out from the crowd”. Ahh, I see the problem. But can anyone else see the irony in sending out a press release to berate a security vendor for using “publicity seeking gimmicks to capture computer owners’ attention”?
If I was a cynic, I’d suggest that this vendor might just be so desperate that they’ve resorted to sending out releases about other, more media-friendly companies, in order to secure some coverage...
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