Bill Ralston Blogs:
It’s taken the mainstream media long enough to wake up to the fact it has been cleverly duped by an extraordinary guerrilla PR campaign.
Well, some in the media are now waking up to what bloggers like Cactus Kate and Gotcha’s Whaleoil were warning about days ago.
Exceltium is a savvy PR company run by Matthew Hooten and it seems it has waged an extraordinarily effective campaign on behalf of their client Diagnostic Medlab Ltd (DML) against their competitor Labtests NZ Ltd.
Labtests recently took over the lucrative contract to provide services to Auckland’s District Health Board and the loser, DML, has been screaming like a stuck pig.
Disregarding the fact many of the Labtest’s opponents and critics have a vested or pecuniary interest in overturning the contract the gullible media has been suckered into hysterically hyping the teething problems of the new service thanks to some very effective seeding of “bad news about Labtest” by Hooten’s Exceltium.
Exceltium even went to the extent of filming interviews with disgruntled Labtest customers and running the videos virally. These gained traction when an unquestioning ONE News ran the highly selective DML/Exceltium propaganda video clips.
Matthew Hooten, PR maestro of the Right
The NZ Herald in its news coverage was similarly hyped, shrieking about every alleged failure of the new lab company.
This is not journalism, it is sensationalism – and it shows how easy it is to manipulate a media desperate for viewers and readers in these current tight times.
From Labtest’s corporate relations perspective, the events of the last week are the PR equivalent of a mugging, being unexpectedly hit over the head with a baseball bat.
Yet the company has responded, I think, in an extremely effective fashion. The CEO has stood aside and Labtest has flown in some international heavy hitters in a public display of putting things right.
Labtest has opted for an admission of culpability that things are not all as they should be and it has pledged to remedy any defects.
It has gone onto the front foot, effectively muting criticism.
Will we hear on ONE News in a few weeks time that all is now well on the Labtest front? I somehow doubt it.
Will we hear an admission of culpability and gullibility from those news organizations that blindly swallowed the Hooten/DML line? Fat chance.
Still, for anyone studying Communications 101 the affair provides a classic case study in how to manipulate the media and how to combat reputational damage.
If I was Matthew, I’d include this blog post in his pitch to clients to hire him
We will do one on you next week DPF
Links Bill/Janet, links, do I have to come and teach you, for a fee that bloggers give links, and then they received links.
Oh and I can teach you all about Twitter too. (for a fee)
See I’m learning, just like Bomber.
Oh for heaven’s sake! I’ll have to upskill rapidly here. Links? Hmmmm. That’s today’s project.
Yea great work, scared patients, worried professionals, and staff at labtests villified for just trying to do their jobs.
Still who cares, money talks.