I was reading and skimming through my Google Reader the other day and was more than pleased to find a blog post from Social Media Today that Ford had Won a PR Week Award for “Best Use Of Social 
The PR Week awards are touted by PR Week as the Oscars of PR, so I was keen to find out more.
The post linked to the original post at Social Media Group, both articles were quite brief. Below is the original post
Ford wins PR Week Award for Best Use of Social Media!maggiefox, March 13 2010
“We’d like to extend our sincere congratulations to our client Ford Motor Company for this week’s win at the PR Week Awards! This past Thursday in New York (where we were all very dressed up, including Ford Digital Communications Manager Scott Monty in black tie) the team took home a very prestigious and competitive award – Best Use of Social/Digital Media (some of the other nominees included the Queensland Department of Tourism and their “Best Job in the World” campaign).
When we started working with Ford in 2007, their social media activity consisted of a lone (unauthorized) YouTube channel. It has been incredibly gratifying to be a part of such an amazing evolution and to watch our client grow and master these new and emerging tools and ways of communicating, and be recognized by their peers for doing so.
Congratulations! We are so proud!”
I have recently taken an interest in Ford and social media competitions and have written several articles about Ford including “The 7 Secrets to Ford’s Social Media Marketing Success” and its best practice of social media marketing with its Ford Fiesta Competition. So I did a search on Google and found that there was a very little information about the awards.
I was starting to feel some frustration about not being able to obtain more in depth articles or blogs and to find out why Ford had won the award, not just a short PR announcement.
I then proceeded to enter a search into Twitter to see of there were any Tweets with any links to more in depth reports or analysis of the PR Week awards but to no avail, just tweets. Here are a couple of Tweets from the very deserving Scott Monty and Maggie Fox who were obviously very excited about the awards.
The next step was to go to the PR Week website and blogs and I found a really a page listing the different awards. Below is a a snippet from the page
I then clicked on the link and found a page with a very brief introduction and they then asked me for $9.95 to read the rest of their award news.
So it is buried behind a paid wall and I am sorry PR Week but I am not paying $9.95 to read a news article, so you missed out on some free PR on a social media blog. The news will eventually surface on some elses blog or news item and someone else will steal your PR because it will not be behind a paid subscriber fort.
Am I being too sensitive? Shouldn’t this type of information be freely available? What do you think of PR Weeks strategy of a pay wall garden for its news?
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