ZDNet’s Ed Bott captures the pains of interpreting the do’s and dont’s of a corporate NDA in a media environment where bloggers are increasingly receiving the same levels of information and access as their big media counterparts, but are oddly being held to different standards of disclosure — which is the case, right now, with Microsoft’s Office 12 beta:
“I noticed that Microsoft’s army of Office bloggers (at least 17, by my unofficial count) and a large corps of external reviewers from print and online media had been given carte blanche to publish as much detail as they wanted about Office 12 Beta 1. That’s cool, unless you’re an official beta tester with a blog (like me) who is staring at an EULA that strictly prohibits any commentary of any sort.”
Not surprisingly, Bott’s post sparked a response from Robert Scoble (read: “The flattening of the press world“) and a host of others, all of which is now working its way up the meme trackers, with the typical set of media 2.0 prognostications, stating mostly that the NDA is dead, and that it symbolizes the last bastion of control in the PR universe, that PR people aren’t adapting, oh, and that we’re mean and that we all drive gas-guzzling cars and eat our fast food from the old styrofoam containers and club baby seals in our spare time…blah…blah…blah.
Alright, I’m exaggerating, a little.
Joking aside, there’s no easy answer here, at least not today. This is one of those issues that will continue to surface as companies transition from old communications models, where hierarchy, control and exclusion remain the PR tactics de jour, to new models of communications, where horizontal thinking, open access and inclusion are the standard — but we’re far from this place right now. I also think trust plays an incredible role in this discussion, which complicates things, to the extent that it probably warrants a separate write up to do it justice. But for the time being, like it or not, IMO, the NDA is here to stay.
Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.
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