Back a thousand years ago when I was overseeing PR for Java at Sun Microsystems, we urgently needed to finish the briefing doc for spokespersons at JavaOne. It was 1996, so Google Docs didn’t exist. It was after 7 p.m., and there I was at Moscone with our CMO and VP of Engineering. We decided to go into the empty press room and use one of the computers there. No one at Sun was allowed to use Windows, so I wasn’t an expert in how it worked, but I turned on a machine, opened Word, and stumbled through it. We wrote up our document. Then I closed and deleted the document, turned off Word, turned off the computer, and thought we were safe.
The next morning, a reporter sat down at that machine, turned it on, and found our doc as the last document written in Word. Oops. He printed it in his publication nearly verbatim. Oh no! Disaster!
But wait, was it? Our document was full of soundbites we wanted our spokespersons to say, like “Without a Java strategy you’re toast.” This story printed a dozen of these gems. As I read the story, humiliation turned to glee. I wanted all of these soundbites to show up in print and there they were . . .
Harold Burson, the great communications leader credited with inventing business public relations, once told me that he often counseled huge corporations who could not get the media to cover their strategies. He’d tell his clients to describe their strategy and point of view in an internal memo. He’d then find a way to unofficially leak it to one reporter. No reporter can resist the leak of a big internal strategy memo, so they’d print the whole thing verbatim. It would be a huge scoop! “Fortune 100 company strategy leaked.” Every other publication would follow on and write the story of the leak and voila, the company’s message is in the media. Clever, Harold, clever.
Sometimes, leaks are good.
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