Before our eyes today, PR and its brothers are seeing a naked attempt at harvesting another’s users, and it just isn’t cool. Peter Shankman’s invaluable helpareporter.com (HARO) has been providing free many-times-daily queries to PR folk and a lot of others who want to be quotable sources for quite some time—doing what he can to help us get connected. Harnessing the crowd-sourcing nature of the Internet has successfully proved that literally anyone can be a source. (A recent query asked for a bat expert. Surely somebody out there knows their guano, quite right!)
(Peter Shankman)
HARO has become so successful that the tool is being co-opted – nay, stolen. Imitation is certainly the sincerest form of flattery, but petty larceny is bushleague.
The culprit is the joker behind the clunkily URL’d http://www.reporterssource.com. (Note the double “s” in the middle. Hilariously, Shankman owns http://www.reportersource.com, which points to the main HARO page.) Frankly, this squatter isn’t even trying to hide his intentions – that is – he wants to steal from our friends at HARO.
Here’s how absurd the RS guy is: He (she?) has taken to following Shankman’s multitudes of @skydiver Twitter followers and constantly – for instance, 12 times between 5 and 6 p.m. on May 28 – tweeting about his "amazing" http://www.reporterSSource.com. Little does he realize that twitterers are brilliant buggers. Shankman’s followers are blocking the doofus, (name deleted to protect the idiot) en masse.
So, (doofus' email address redacted), if that’s your real name (reporterssource.com is registered with ICANN anonymously) we at Bad Pitch have our eye on you! Consumers know and trust a good product, and cheap imitations will not be tolerated, especially when that product is so hard to come by.
A lot of the PR game is based on intangibles. When a good, solid product comes into being that gives a pro something to sink his teeth into, it is worth its weight in platinum. Peter Shankman has created such a product, and our community will rightly reject outright the usurpers. Shankman has been getting emails from a bunch of fans asking “What is going on with this copycat?” To which his response has been: “Nuttin’ but a cheap wannabe!” It’s simply another example of some bad seed who wants to make a quick buck off someone else’s smartness. (This is not the first time someone has tried to unsuccessfully copy the HARO thang. See the PR Newser story here for more dirt: http://bit.ly/HAROvsExpertClick)
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Speaking of Peter: In some nowhere-near-as-ridiculous but truly exciting news, HARO announced just today addition of veteran PR man and executive Thom Brodeur to its senior management team. Brodeur joined the company as its COO, where he assumes the kit and kaboodle responsibility for corporate strategy, marketing, sales, biz development and ops.
(Thom Brodeur)
After serving as SVP of global strategy and development at Marketwire for two years, Brodeur left in April. Before Marketwire, he was a VP at Brodeur Partners (or Brodeur Worldwide), providing marketing, PR and plain old good counsel to companies in the consumer, high technology, aerospace, services and telecoms. Incidentally, Thom Brodeur is not related to Brodeur Partners founder John Brodeur. How do you like them apples?
Prior, he was a start-up software and SP sales guy with, among others, AOL Latin America, Johnson & Johnson and Paramount.
During his tenure at Marketwire, Brodeur worked on the release of the company’s Social Media 2.0 Plus product suite, that thing to help marketers craft social media press releases and includes iTunes podcast integration.
In announcing the news, Shankman said with trademark jumping up and down: "Bringing Thom in made sense on several levels, not the least of which being his impressive track record for corporate growth.” Amen to that.
More on HARO and the rest of the PR world via http://www.twitter.com/laermer
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