An exercise in turning good news into bad by Canon

I was alerted to this story by Robert Scoble over on Twitter.  It’s a fine example of very poor PR and Scoble himself blogged about it here.

A day or two ago a good deal of people on the web were getting hugely excited over the new Canon 5D MKII’s video capabilities.  Many of them were directing each other in hugely positive terms to a site called SmugMug which was showing one of the HD videos.  Then, as the videos were going viral with not a single negative comment Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, wrote that Canon had forced him to take the videos down.

I’m sure Canon feel they have good reasons but surely if they’d sat down before this all happened and thought of how they would like the PR to go - they’d have jumped at the viral buzz created by Don’s post. Instead he’s had to take the videos down and Canon will now … erm … hang on … follow their earlier plan and get as much good coverage?

Sometimes plans change and, if having read the comments that the SmugMug Canon post were generating, I think most of us would be temped to say, “let’s allow this one to run”

Well hello again!