It looks to me like the Warren Kremer Paino Advertising agency is still living in the early 1990's - the huge impact of the internet as a meme spreading mechanism hasn't really occurred to them yet. I've talked about this at conferences, as I discuss my job of promoting Cincom Smalltalk.

When you want to evangelize, your first task is to point out the good (and hopefully unique) things about the product/service you are promoting. The other thing you do is use aggregation and search tools to look for commentary on your product/service. You do this for a couple of reasons:

• You'll find some success stories that you didn't have to work for
• You'll find other people who are natural allies
• You'll find the negative commentary

The last one is crucial - there's simply no escaping it. Any reasonably sized community will attract gadflies, and you'll have to deal with them. You don't want to pull out the big legal hammer unless there's really no choice - and you certainly don't want to pull it out as your first response.

Which gets me back to what I wrote on this the other day. If you are involved in PR, there's something like the Hippocratic Oath involved: First, do no harm. Meaning, don't create negative PR events for your clients. What do you think the Warren Kramer Paino agency has done for the State of Maine with this huge suit against a small-time blogger? They've created a negative PR event. This is actually worse than the negativity that came of Jeff Jarvis' "Dell Hell" posts - that was an act of omission, as Dell and it's marketing folks tried to figure out what to do in the face of negative publicity from a channel they probably hadn't been looking at much. Here, the PR staff has gone out of its way to create a problem - and both they and the client will be left holding the bag. Heck, go ahead and Google them now - notice how the negative stuff has floated right to the top? That's not how you want net searches for your firm to work, and they have no one to blame but themselves for that.