What were they thinking!?

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Internet Marketing

To be in business today you have to realize that public opinion is vital to your success. You have to be aware that what you present to the public gets passed around, commented on, analyzed, and if you’re presenting something the public doesn’t agree with, it’s going to come back and bite you in a big way.

Two prime examples recently have been the Chrysler full-page ad debauchery (in conjunction with the automaker fat-cats taking their private jet to ask Capital Hill for billions in bailout money), and not quite so much in the spotlight–Gatehouse Media, Inc. sued the New York Times Co. for linking to their news stories.

If you haven’t somehow seen it already, Chrysler spent hundreds of thousands to take out a full-page ads in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and USA Today to thank the American public for their support.  This created a maelstrom of negative feedback. Blogs lit up all over with nasty comments on it.  My personal favorite was, “I’ll put my kids on a mule before I’ll put them in a Chysler.”  Basically, this “thank-you” came across as a slap in the face to Americans who are already angry about footing the bill for automakers. Patrick Di Chiro at Idea Driven Marketing summed it up best, “They have so misjudged the mood of the country and bungled the essential PR challenge of building support for their cause, that it’s now clear that they cannot be helped. No matter the rightness of their case.”

What were they thinking!

In the second case, when Gatehouse Media, Inc. sued the New York Times Co. for taking snippets of news, it created a hub-bub in a different crowd. As an SEO company, we stress to our clients constantly the value of link building. You can optimize your site all day long, but if you don’t have quality links coming into your site, you really aren’t going to get noticed by the public or the search engines. This major flub by Gatehouse Media, defies the logic of this simple truth. How could you not appreciate a huge company like the New York Times Co. taking the time to link to your site? They have since come to an agreement that the New York Times Co. has agreed to remove all GateHouse feeds that contain headlines and ledes from Boston.com. I’m betting in the future that the New York Times Co. will likely pass up any opportunity to link to Boston.com and other sites will be leary to do so as well. So while this may not have been as big of a deal in the news as Chrysler’s muck-up was, I think in the long run this is going to have a very negative effect on Boston.com’s value.

What were they thinking!

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Tags: Chrysler, Gatehouse Media, link building, New York Times, PR, public opinion

3 Comments to What were they thinking!?

Greg Reibman
January 28, 2009

I understand the concern of those who are under the (inaccurate) impression that the case was about linking. Many involved in online journalism have unfortunately assumed that this case was about some broadly applicable principles, rather than the actual facts about what was going on with competing community news and information websites for Newton, Needham, and Waltham, Massachusetts and whether the verbatim copying of a competitor’s content is fair use. I would encourage you to read Dan Kennedy’s piece for the Guardian and Bill Mitchell’s piece for Poynter Online. Both point and link to the report of Professor Doug Lichtman, submitted on GateHouse’s behalf and part of the public record of the case, for a better understanding of what the case was really about, and what it was not. Consistent with the point of your post, GateHouse encourages online journalists and bloggers to link to our sites within the boundaries of fair use and our Creative Commons license. That has never changed. Thanks.

Greg Reibman
Editor in Chief Metro Unit
GateHouse Media New England

Dayne Kaufman
January 28, 2009

@Greg

One of the links you provided in your comment — the one linking to “what the case was really about” — led me to another interesting article:

Rights in a Digital World

Greg Reibman
January 28, 2009

Thanks Dayne

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