* Trying to get to the bottom of a Novell PR delay
This is positively the last I want to say about the Novell/HP seminars on “Delivering & Deploying Linux Across the Enterprise.” I told you about the seminars, I reported back on what goes on in the seminars and what the take-aways are. But there’s one last thing I have to say about them and it’s painful to have to say it.
Over the years, I’ve always been able to get at least a chuckle from an audience whenever I’d say, in my best Jerry Seinfeld imitation, “And how about that Novell marketing?” You know, the folks that brought us “IntranetWare” and the “Lego logo”?
Rarely did I, or any other Novell product user, have a good word to say about Novell marketing. Usually the bad words I said about it were richly deserved. You can read about some classics, such as the eDirectory versioning fiasco about a year ago at the link below. Once in a while, I do say something nice about marketing, but I usually regret it very quickly.
So it was easy to blame Novell marketing for not telling people about this important and informative seminar tour. Turns out, though, that marketing actually did its part. Many of you have written to tell me that you were notified weeks, even months, before the seminar came to your town. As long as you were on Novell marketing’s contact list, you had plenty of time to register for the sessions. The earliest dates, in fact, were often standing-room-only because so many people had heard about, and registered for, the roadshow.
Was I the only one who didn’t know?
I went back to Novell’s hard-working, and always friendly and cooperative, press relations staff and asked them – did they fall down on the job by not letting me (and my journalistic colleagues) know about the seminars?
While admitting that the press release was rather late getting out (most publications simply ignored it because of the lack of lead time before the first seminars were held), I was told that PR had written the release many weeks before the first sessions, it just hadn’t been sent out. “Why not,” I fulminated, scenting a scandal in the PR office. Turns out, though, it was a different department that held up the press release. A department that even I will agree is often more inept at public relations than marketing is. Yes, when I asked whom the bozo was who held up the press release so that it didn’t get the wide dissemination it deserved, the answer came back “it was some lawyer over in the Legal Department.”
