Just this summer, Samsung was in court defending itself against Apple and it now finds itself in the court of public opinion against tech bloggers. In the actual court case, Apple claimed that Samsung had copied the iPhone. Samsung lost in court and now owes Apple 1 billion dollars.
As this story began to fade from the tech spotlight, another story unraveled. This time two bloggers claimed that Samsung had threatened to strand them at a tech conference in Berlin if they did not write stories depicting Samsung in a positive light. Samsung had paid for these bloggers to attend the conference.
Samsung later released this statement: “Samsung Mob!lers is a voluntary community of active Samsung mobile device users, who are offered the opportunity to participate in our marketing events across the world. At these events, all activities they undertake are on a voluntary basis. No activities are forced upon them.
We regret [that] there was a misunderstanding between the Samsung Mob!lers coordinators and the relevant blogger, as we understand he was not sufficiently briefed on the nature of Samsung Mob!lers’ activities at IFA 2012. We have been attempting to get in touch with him.
We respect the independence of bloggers to publish their own stories.”
The statement that Samsung released seems to tiptoe around the issue and not admit what the real problem was between the bloggers and Samsung. It may have come off as more genuine if the company directly addressed the severity of the issue. At a time when Samsung is under such intense competition with other tech companies, it is also necessary that they take steps to make sure they stay out of the spotlight for negative reasons this fall.
Do you think Samsung’s statement was a sufficient response to the incident? Let us know!
This guest blog post was written by PRowl Public Relations staff member Kyra Mazurek
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