The Brinkwire blog

Facebook’s TechCrunch prank underlines the speed challenge PRs face

Posted on 17. Sep, 2009 by Andrew in PR

One of the biggest challenges facing PR professionals today – agencies and in-house teams too – is that of speed. When something happens on the internet it is very often the case that a delay of minutes can make the situation ten times worse.

On the 10th of September blog powerhouse TechCrunch fell into a little practical joke set up by Facebook’s PR team. Michael Arrington’s own post “Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us” explains it all.

Here are some of the key points. At 5:05pm TechCrunch emailed Facebook to get an official response on a new feature they thought they had spotted. By 5:29pm TechCrunh, without a reply from Facebook, TechCrunch decided to run the story. That’s a wait of 24 minutes. 24. Perhaps there’s a Jack Bauer of the PR world who could react and research in that time.

As it happens Facebook’s PR emailed back at 5:47 with a response – a response that held a clue that TechCrunch was being set up. Facebook emailed again with 5:51pm with another response.

A big company will almost certainly take more than 30 minutes to fact check, compose a reply and then communicate.

This delay mushrooms very easily if an agency is involved. Of course; good PR practises of pre-scripting rebuttals or being prepared for any predicted situation help greatly reduce this delay but all too often something happens that does require some fact checking.

Related posts:

1. Bravo Facebook. Facebook bans sponsored status updates.
2. TechCrunch caught in Twitter Exposé fire storm

Tags: facebook, techcrunch