Complaining About Bad Coverage Is the Surest Way to Amplify It
A public attack on negative media coverage can transform a minor story into a full-blown reputation management crisis. After robotics company 1X criticized a Wired article on social media, its complaint generated millions of views—vastly amplifying the original coverage. The lesson for crisis communications, media relations and PR professionals: don’t inadvertently make bad news go viral.
By Nathan Burchfiel, writing for PR News
The most reliable way to draw more attention to negative media coverage is to complain about it publicly.
Look no further than 1X on X.
The emerging robotics company recently demonstrated this though a social media thread. Its misguided posts amplified the negative framing of its flagship product to 150 times more people than the article earned on its own.
The So-Called Bad Coverage that Caused the Issue
On July 9, Wired published a piece on 1X Technologies, a Norwegian robotics company promoting a new home robot with advanced hand design. The article’s subhead characterized Neo the robot as “the soft, weirdly sexualized home-robot [that] has been given some very tactile hands.”
Two days later, 1X’s Vice President of Product and Design, Dar Sleeper, posted a multi-tweet thread calling the piece a “betrayal.” He suggested Wired should have given 1X more positive coverage in return for “the exclusive.”
Wired’s own promotional tweet for the article attracted less than 15,000 views. Sleeper’s complaint drew 437,000 views on day one and 2.3 million within a few days.
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