Local entrepreneur, Leonard Lin has been making waves with his very popular game, BattleStations and has even been interviewed twice by us. Recently, he suffered a possible case of media coverage gone wrong.

Leonard was featured in a My Paper article (13th March 2009) that according to him, painted “a very negative” picture that he disputes.

Article in question. Click to enlarge.

Leonard’s comments on the article was sent in an email to MyPaper and also made its rounds on Facebook (you have to be logged in to view the note, otherwise, it’s appended at the end of this article) and has gotten many sympathetic responses. Suppose you are the entrepreneur involved, and you feel that your words were twisted to sensationalize the article, how would you feel?

We are here today not to conclude Leonard’s case but will use this example as a case study for all entrepreneurs who at once hope to get (print) media coverage but are fearful of the ‘final result’. This ‘final result’ is the finished, published article (potentially read by the thousands) and how it makes the entrepreneur and the business look. There are ultimately only two ‘looks’ the entrepreneur can be given: good or bad. And these adjectives are only entered into force when the entrepreneur in question assesses the article him/herself. Basically, it doesn’t matter whether you think the entrepreneur looks good or bad; what matters is whether the entrepreneur thinks the article made him or her look good or bad to readers.

Obviously, in this case, Leonard thinks the article misrepresented him and tried to make a stand against the article. Disregarding the potential success or failure of his campaign, Leonard’s note does two important things that forward his cause:

Personal Voice vs Impassive Journalistic Input

It is personally written, and it helps that he posted his comments from his personal Facebook account, giving a more individual human voice to it. As opposed to the professionally written journalistic input that necessitated a detached, impassive voice, Leonard’s informally-written note speaks directly to readers.

Leveraged On “Automatic” Supporters

By posting on Facebook, Leonard’s note would be broadcasted to his ‘friends’, both virtual and in real life. This pre-selected crowd of target readers would presumably already be on Leonard’s side. And if these people comment on his note, they would most probably be on his side. Strangers or other friends seeing the note for the first time might be influenced by the comments on the note, setting into motion a positive feedback loop.

You may have tried your best to demonstrate that awesome self of yours during the interview, but you still feel like the final article didn’t do you justice, give you enough due credit, simply misquoted you or worse, misquoted you and spun a good story out of it.

Remember that whatever you do in an interview is controllable and up to you. What is not up to you is how the journalist takes the interview to construct a piece on you.

What can you do to mitigate potential negative consequences resulting from less-than-stellar coverage of you? Start communicating with your customers.

1. Have a voice

Write a blog, keep in touch and up-to-date via personal emails. Make sure you start showing who you are early, rather than let the media do it for you (might end up in disaster).

2. Allow customers to contact you

Keep open channels for your customers and readers to contact you. Be it via email, a private message on social networks, Twitter @ tags or direct messages – any mode available helps assure that as many users as possible are able to contact you. Face it, not everyone replies to emails, but send them a private message on Facebook and they reply within two minutes.

3. Accept that the article will not be rescinded

As soon as you accept that the journalist and publisher behind the article will not bother to clarify what went on during the interview, the happier you will be. No matter how many times you email or call them, your ‘bad’ article will not be corrected or noted in the next issue under “Errata”.

4. Attempt to clear your name

If the bucket has already been spilled, use your channels to speak to your customers and readers. This is the time to test the strengths of your communications. Let them know that you think that you have been misquoted and the article you appeared in seemed to have given a misplaced point of view.

The success of your attempts really depends on how much rapport and credibility you have built up over the months and years. This is where points (1) and (2) above are made all the more important. For they need to be done with foresight, and not with hindsight.

Written by Leonard Lin, CEO, Tyler Projects.

A very negative article was written about me in MyPaper today. I would like to make the following clarifications to anyone who read it.

1) I did not say: ““My bottom line is money, not passion like most entrepreneurs.”

I have a strong focus on our bottom-line and I watch our bottom-line very closely (that’s a CEO’s job). I did not say “My bottom-line is money”, that carries a very negative connotation and has a completely different meaning.

I did say I started the business to make money (which should be the objective of any business unless it is a non-profit) and not because of a passion or love for games.

2) “I wanted to be a big-shot investment banker, but I realized I would make more money with this.”

I want to work in an investment bank as an asset manager, not investment banker. I got a job as a risk management analyst but I did not want to be an investment banker.

I’m quite certain I didn’t say I wanted to be a “big-shot”. That’s not my style and it leaves a negative impression.

3) “Their money-making secret? Convincing gamers to pay money for virtual goods such as weapons and action points to get ahead in the game.”

Convincing gamers to buy virtual goods IS the virtual goods model. This is something well known and used by many Free to play MMOs and their players. By labeling it a “money making secret” it sounds as though we are trying to trick and deceive our gamers.

If I did not care about them (our gamers) I wouldn’t stay up till 3am almost every day to help them with their queries and orders.

I also would not have bailed out one player for S$1000 who needed financial aid.

Additionally I do not actively convince or try to sell to anyone that they should buy stuff from our game so that statement wrong.

4) My surname is “Lin”. Not “Lim”

5) The title “Money-driven Gamer” carries a negative connotation.

I wanted to get a bank job to earn a high salary, I decided to focus on my startup because based on my calculations it could make me more. Most people want to be rich; It is NOT the same as being “money driven”.

I’m quite certain I did not express that money was all I cared about in the interview. I care about my staff, I care about our gamers, I care about the games we make.
Personally I feel that the article carries a lot of personal opinion that isn’t mine. I’m not sure if that was intended.

This will certainly decrease our willingness to work with MyPaper on future interviews and press releases.

Editor’s Note: Leonard has given us permission to publish his comments.

We would also very much like to hear from you. Have you, as an entrepreneur, had a bad experience with the press? Been severely misquoted? Are you a journalist and feel like the press has been wrongly painted as the bad guys who seem to give erroneous reports all the time? We need your voice now.

Photo courtesy of mary_gaston22.

• PR is not marketing: In Singapore, most big companies have a corporate relations unit, and they usually lump them up as a marketing unit. In the SMEs, the situation is even worse where PR is often labeled as marketing. The important question that a start-up or business must ask, “How do you let people know your service or product and how do your customers can have their problems solved by using your product?” At the start, most entrepreneurs need to get the word about their product or service out to the market. Hence the PR department will perform operations similar to the marketing department. However, as time goes on, both units will start to diverge and specialize into specific units that helped the company in different roles and responsibilities. It starts to diverge when customers start using them and generate feedback, it is the PR department’s job to gather feedback and perform crisis management should anything major happened. It is also their job to engage the public if there is any unhappiness generated from a faulty product. If you need a case study, think of the battery incident in the US where most computer manufacturing companies had to recall their batteries. In that situation, a customer showed a blog entry of a badly burnt computer Recently, a food company in Singapore has suffered from a disaster of having a lot of customers getting food poison within a day. In fact, it is only through the crisis, we realized that the company has no PR department to help them with the crisis management. Of course, one can outsource the PR to companies which specialize on this, but they don’t come cheap. In today’s world, with the advances of technology, start-ups can use social media (web 2.0, online social networks and virtual worlds) to create community and buzz for their new products before and after their launch.
• Getting Media Attention for a start-up centred on a CEO and a brand: In the start-up phase, it is easy to associate a start-up with a founder or CEO. Paddy talked about his case, where both the designs of his company and his personal blog are similar. He noted that it is essential for a start-up to get the message out there, and there are different roles for different blogs. For example, his company blog will specifically pinpoint on the products and services, while in his personal blog, he can talk about the industry in general and his passion about the company. It creates a human face that can constantly engage their customers in the process. However, he noted that once the company start to take off, there needs to be a slow disengagement between the official company blog and his personal blog. The reason is that the company will need to stand on her feet with a brand and not by a person.
• Sell your company at the appropriate time and place: It is important to know where and when to sell your company, particularly a start-up. Credibility is a very important trait that is required at that stage. If you want an example of creating poor PR, this incident from here will offer a good example. There are two issues with selling your company. It needs two ingredients: first, it must be relevant to what the customers want as a solution to a problem and two, you should not sell something in a place where it is totally irrelevant. Of course, sometimes, not talking about the product but about the industry (with subtle mentions of your company) in general generate credibility for you and your company.
• Rules of Engagement in the Online World: We come down to the few rules which are important in any PR engagement in the internet: 1. Never engage in a heated discussion on an online forum which does not belong to your company. 2. Never respond to flames and heated comments in your blog, and always get someone more neutral and within your company to do the engagement, and 3. Keep a calm mind in the midst of a crisis such that the actions to resolve the problem is almost immediate.

Acknowledgments: We thank other members in the group, for e.g., Michael Cheng, Andy Tay, Daryl (DK99) and Nicholas Aaron Khoo for their thoughts and input on the issue.