So a few months back, a tech PR agency got in touch to ask if I’d like to try out a particularly desirable bit of kit. They would send it to me, I could try it out, perhaps Tweet my impressions, and then I’d be free to keep the item in question.
I thought about it for, ooh, almost five seconds, and said yes please, I’d love to try it.
A few days later, the courier brought my new gadget. I turned it on (I don’t read instructions) and it didn’t work. Hmm. I reset it, turned it back on, still didn’t work. I read through the instructions to check I wasn’t missing anything, and I wasn’t. It just didn’t work.
I took out the batteries, did a hard reset, and the device still didn’t work. I read the instructions cover to cover, to see if I could solve the problem. No joy.
I emailed the PR, told them about the problem, and they offered to get back to me. The next day, the PR sent me a suggestion. I tried it, but it didn’t work. The next day, another suggestion. That didn’t work either. The third day, the techie guys at the client sent a suggestion. That didn’t work.
So, back the gadget went to London, and a brand new device was sent out in its place. Guess what? It didn’t work either.
After a bit of back and forth, and a week of messing around, the second gadget sprang to life. Sort of. The clock goes haywire at random, several of the apps don’t work, some features only work intermittently, and the whole thing is really a bit of a waste of time. I put it in a drawer with my equally pointless iPhone (sorry, I’m just not a believer) and forgot about it.
Then the PR emailed me to ask when I might be Tweeting about my new gadget, and said she didn’t want to miss it.
I emailed back, politely, and said I hadn’t written anything about the gadget because, in my view, it didn’t do what it’s supposed to do. I pointed out the problems I was having, and said that my view as a journalist is that you don’t review a faulty unit, as it would be unfair. You give the company the opportunity to supply a review model that isn't broken, basically.
And... no reply. Not a word.
Which I find sort of interesting. If the problems I’m experiencing were unusual, or down to a faulty unit, I’d have expected the PR to offer a replacement. Or, if there wasn't a replacement available, an assurance that I'd just been unlucky and maybe I could try the next version of the product when it's available.
But total radio silence just suggests that, actually, the PR and the client are actually more than familiar with the problems. It suggests to me that the product is known to be unreliable. In which case, why on earth are you sending them out to bloggers to review? Could it be because – gasp – you think bloggers are going to go easier on this product than anyone else?
