What happens when an influencer outreach initiative backfires – spectacularly?  Nokia and PR firm Mission have just found out.   Yesterday, one of the top five technology tweets on Tweetmeme was ‘The Tale of the PR and The Blogger’.  The PR was Mission and the blogger was Muireann Carey-Campbell, who writes the Bangs and a Bun blog.

Muireann Carey-Campbell was invited by Mission to run a half marathon, part of the Nokia Outdoor Series, and then write about it on behalf of their client, Nokia, in return the PR agency made several promises.  It all turned very sour.  Carey-Campbell wrote a letter to Mission a couple of days before the race on 10 October to explain why she felt it had not delivered: ‘I’m disappointed to report that over the past four months, as I trained very hard for this half marathon, devoting huge amounts of my time, energy and money, none of the things promised to me have been delivered.’  The blogger described Mission’s response as a ‘half-baked’ apology.

She then yesterday publicly published her letter on the Bangs and a Bun blog detailing many of her complaints to ‘purely to highlight the massive disparity that currently goes on between large companies who claim to specialise in social media platforms and the way they actually treat bloggers’.

Ouch!  The issue went viral within hours and caused a real Twitterstorm.  The MD of Mission and the Head of Communications for Nokia have since called personally to apologise and accept responsibility, which Carey-Campbell today said was ‘to their great credit’.

‘At least now, both Mission and Nokia are taking a serious look at what went wrong and other agencies are looking at how they handle blogger outreach’.

A cautionary tale indeed.