Please advise if you would consider the following situation a supplier HiJack and what you would do in this situation...

Today we released a Social Media / LinkBait campaign that we have been planning in conjunction with a very large scale event (which takes place in the very near future).

We have been working very closely with a PR agency on this campaign. We had been planning to put the linkBait live today and monitor Twitter activity for the optimum moment to deploy this campaign. As soon as we notified our PR agency that the project was live, some of their team members started tweeting links to the vast majority of key contacts that had been identified. We had been under the assumption that we would be tweeting to this list ourselves (as this had been the case for all previous similar campaigns - of a smaller scale).

The tweets were sent from personal accounts and took credit for creating the content on our behalf (which they had done).

The problem we have with this is that it was all done before we had deployed the campaign ourselves. We are unsure what to do, as we feel like this innovative campaign is now promoting the PR agency first and foremost with a link to our content.

My issues are that:

1 - We are now unable to tweet these contacts, as this would be overly spammy considering they have already received a link (i think - please advise)

2 - The contacts (who we have previously tweeted with similar campaigns) now know that a company has created the content for us and it removes a level of innovation and ownership from us (especially seeing as PR is supposed to be a kind of an invisible ‘dark art’).

I would be very keen to hear any advice / opinions on this matter.