First up, I was attending an HTC launch in Kensington (yeah, yeah, it was for my Smartphones Show, ok?) and I happened to notice a big Sony Ericsson store. I did a double take and popped inside for a look. I asked the first salesman how many other similar stores Sony Ericsson had in London and was told "Sir, this is the only one in the world!" Impressive, to have hit upon it by chance then.
Right, I thought, this will make a great feature article on AAS, loads to photograph (artily) and generally put the concept of a Sony Ericsson flagship store on the map. Out of courtesy, I checked with the salesman before I started snapping away with the E90 and was stunned to receive the answer "Sorry, sir, you can't take photos in here."
"It's OK, I'm press and from AllAboutSymbian", I said, "I want to run a feature on this store on the site." A million unique readers a month, and so forth. "Sorry, sir, you still can't take photos."
I headed for someone who looked more senior and asked again, to be given the same answer. "But I'm trying to give you guys some publicity!" I spluttered. "How will people ever find their way here if you don't tell them about it? I also write for PDA Essentials magazine and do a video show that goes out to up to 100,000 phone addicts!" Still no joy.
And guess how many customers were in the entire store during this saga? None at all. Sigh. Hey, Sony Ericsson, why not actually embrace publicity rather than shunning it?
Motorola were next to impress me with their anti-PR, this time at the Smartphone Show. As has been widely reported, they were showing off loads of Z10 prototypes running a new onboard video editing suite of their own creation, filming basketball jugglers and the like throughout the day. Great idea to show off the phone and tools. Or so you'd have thought.
I tried to photograph one of these Z10s (the followup to the Z8, Motorola's first UIQ 3 smartphone) and was repeatedly told that I couldn't do this. I queried this with Motorola's senior guy at the event and was given a quite reasonable answer, "These aren't really finished Z10s, they're prototypes and the finished hardware will be different'". OK, I do understand, really I do. No problem. But the point of the whole stand demo was to show off their (very impressive) UIQ 3 video editing software suite. I asked if I could film or take photos of (or even screen grab) the video software instead.
"No, sorry, none of those are allowed." "But I want to write about the software and tell the world!" "Sorry, you still can't take photos."
So there you are. The only thing I was allowed to photograph were the err.... basketball jugglers. I know, I know, you'd rather have seen a Z10 proto or some great new software, but.... blame Motorola.
These two anecdotes seemed to epitomise the attitudes of the two companies in recent years, certainly from my point of view. Sony Ericsson and Motorola are appalling, quite appalling at keeping journalists informed and resourced. While, in contrast, Nokia consistently go out of their way to keep a flow of press releases coming, to provide all press materials needed, to run a sumptuous blogger relations program, to think of new and innovative ways to fire peoples imaginations, and so on. Yes, Nokia's a bigger company with more money, but that's no excuse - being good at PR is something even tiny companies can manage in this connected, Internet age.
So, next time you think about accusing a writer about being Nokia-biased, please see it from our point of view. It's tough to write about companies that seem to actively shirk being written about...
Steve Litchfield, AllAboutSymbian, 23 October 2007