ANTHONY HARRINGTON

When a reporter is immoral or dissolute or prostitutes their trade, they deserve such just one epithet. The Scotland on Sunday reporter fits the bill well.

He writes:

CORPORATE social responsibility (CSR) may at one stage have been little more than a public relations exercise for a good section of corporates. Today, however, it is central to how many leading-edge companies do business.

Is it, I ask, moral to be the user of information from Public Relations people and yet call what they do as 'no more than an exercise'?

In the article he even reports what Public Relations people say and called them to get more information. There is no restraints in his use of the work of people who only do this as 'no more than an exercise'. The service is in one moment worthless and at another accepted as part of his work. Indeed, it s the primary route by which information is derived for the article.

Is this the proper conduct of a journalist in seeking the truth. Is the checking of fact so evidently outside the influence of despised pariah Public Relations?

Even more improper is his passing reference to the identification of publics without proper investigation of the truths and sciences behind them.

He airily notes that

In broad terms, CSR reporting is generally seen as having four facets or "impact areas" across which companies measure themselves. These are the marketplace, the workplace, the environment and the community.

His view is partial, Fredmanseque and lacks any depth, an unrestrained blurting opinion, based on peripheral knowledge of a dissipated who has lost any sense of journalistic rectitude.

Just spin then!

When pitching leave contact details

I talked about specialist vertical search engines yesterday and got a comment that was really a pitch.

It was anonymous. There is no evidence of who owns and runs the company, there is no contact address and it may easily be a scam from the Spanish Mafia without delving into the labyrinth of Companies House. The sites that are being promoted equally do not have contact information that helps so we do not know who this is and are expected to reveal our email address to them.

On yer Bike!

Of course I will not post spam comment especially if it could come from the man in the moon. But this serves as a lesson in how not to do online PR in the bloggersphere. Transparency is vitally important.

This is what the comment said:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Vertical Search":

Hi, David We would like you to check our vertical search sites: - Trovit Jobs - Trovit cars, second hand cars - Trovit Homes, real estate We hope you like them!

As it happens, the site is registered to Enrique Dominguez of Rossello 277 6, BArcelona, 08034, Spain and was registered in March.

I still would not trust this site with my email address.

Xanga have criminal tendancies

A social networking website has agreed to pay a $1m fine to settle with authorities over allegations that it collected, used and disclosed personal details of children under 13 says The Register.

The Xanga site stated that children under 13 could not join, but then allowed visitors to create Xanga accounts even if they provided a birth date indicating they were under 13, it said.

Xanga has 25m registered members (mostly in the USA).

Of course, it should be shut down. Marc Ginsberg and John Hiler, the founders, need to be exposed for what they are.

One great reason for having a real voice

An article published today by the BBC Spam trail uncovers junk empire gives a clue about the size of some 'marketing programmes'.

This scam is about retailing pharmaceuticals using spam. The numbers are jaw dropping:


...Every day for 14 days the spammers behind the junk mail campaign pumped out more than 100m messages.
...there were more than 2,000 variations in the content of the messages making up the ... run.

....Over the course of the weeks when the spam was being sent a new variant of message was despatched every 12 minutes.

...more than 100,000 hijacked home computers spread across 119 nations had been used to despatch the junk mail.


This is one of the reasons why, even on a small scale, people have to be alert to spam tendencies whether it is spamming emails, blog posts, trackbacks, wikis and other forms of communication infrastructure.

It also emphasises the advantage of the 'real' and human voice.

A recommendation on a citizen blogger is useful and human. A recommendation from an organisation may be informative but if you mix up the two it is spam and the penalty when found out will get ever greater as the online community gets ever more fed up with being hijacked by 'marketing programmes'.

So that will be £200m paid to publishers then

I do not recall a time when the media complained about the amount if money governments spend on press advertising.

I am getting fed up with hearing snide remarks from journalists, some anonymous as in the case of the Evening Standard who say:

.....recent figures showed a vast rise in the Government's spending on spin doctors and public relations - up from £111million in 1997 to more than £300million last year.

Spin doctors are mostly journalists who like to put their own 'spin' on a news story. Public relations people are involved in building mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their constituencies.

Ergo ...I wonder what sort of back-handers have been made to the anonymous journalists employed by the Evening Standard to spin ggovernment stories - or am I reading too much into this?

Judging by how well newspapers are doing, this may simply be a hidden subsidy to the publishers.

Fools only fool the foolish

I like this article by Nicola Natina. Is shows how a a corporation tries to fool people about its social policies using tricks and obfuscation.

The company is Disney and it is found out.

Its reputation has been further damaged.

From her post one will assume the company is a tricky customer. It is a sham. Would you trust your child to a person who was as devious as this. If you read Nicola's post what is your new relationship with Disney corp?

Does the reality match the rhetoric:

The Walt Disney Company has remained faithful in its commitment to producing unparalleled entertainment experiences based on its rich legacy of quality creative content and exceptional storytelling.

A cynic might say: Yup - its all exceptional storytelling.

What I am saying is that transparency is a way of life. Its use is part of the strategic DNA of the organisation and if it runs contrary to the aims and mission of the organisation, it has immense power to destroy.

This is about reputation of course but much more powerful and much more damaging is the effect on relationships.

Teach flint knapping to PR students

Robyn Lewis, writing in PR Week (subscription required to read on-line) reports on a poll that has discovered that just seven of the 27 CIPR-approved higher-education PR and comms courses in the UK offer modules dedicated to new media.

Which say a lot for the CIPR; demonstrates PRWeek's 'new media' credentials in the UK and sloth among PR academics.

The target of 50% school leavers to get a degree education will create some stunning flint knappers. Hooray!

The face of old PR - its rubbish

Where do these people come from?

Talk about killing the goose...

An email from a PR, complaining about the fact that although his company advertised in a recent supplement I wrote some copy for, they were not mentioned in the editorial. “We advertise heavily in [name of publication]” he wrote, “and would therefore expect to get a mention.”

This folows a more detailed rant about so called PR people.

All about Tags

We keep hearing about them. Tags I mean.
There are XPRL tags, Technorati tags, Social Media tags, bar coded tags, part of speech tags, and they all mean something. This article in New Scientist offers a spooky insight into where all this might lead us.

Social media tags are all over the place and here are some social media vendors that use them:

• Del.icio.us - A social bookmarking site that allows users to bookmark many sites and then tag them with many descriptive words, allowing other people to search by those terms to find pages that other people found useful.
• Flickr - A service that allows users to tag images with many specific nouns, verbs, and adjectives that describe the picture. This is then searchable.
• Gmail - A webmail site that was one of the first to allow categorization of objects using tags, known as "labels" on emails.
• LibraryThing - A social book cataloguing and community website, tags feature heavily here.

Practitioners might want to make sure that tags used about a client, product, service, brand or key employee is most associated with content that aids the PR strategy.

In Yer Face Doc Martens

One of the worst advertising sites I have come across was shown to me by e-consultancy. It is the silly, all flash, Doc Martens site.

Saatchi’s MD, Neil Hughston, said to Ashley Friedlein “we’re not looking to sell products right now, we’re looking to engage likeminded people. Over time we’ll look at measuring how brand perception has changed…”
Try it for yourself... engage if you can.

Its a poster. A nice poster but a poster and belongs on a wall in Slough not on the Internet.

Engage means engage mind to mind not poster to eyeball.

Varnish PR?

Toni has a great post about PR as the 'varnish'.
He quotes Sir Martin Sorrell's view of responsible corporate behaviour as a coat public relations varnish.

Toni says

Maybe it would be useful if the CEO’s of the many H&K’s and B-M’s which form the roster of the conglomerate’s pr firms and contribute to his personal well-being, demanded a public apology.

Hear Hear!

What does WPP really own?

Publicity, Propaganda or PR -the Cliveden set don't know

About a dozen propaganda and psyops specialists met at Cliveden, Berkshire, last week to discuss how America and its allies can use strategic communications more effectively in the War on Terror reports The Times.

Its a big bucks business.

The United States Government is thought to have earmarked at least $400 million (£213 million) since September 11, 2001, to enlist private companies to supply skills and ideas for an information war, covering propaganda and psychological operations (psyops).

These advisers are bringing corporate ideas to the military. Rebranding is one example.

Call a dog a different name because its mission has changed seems to be the BIG idea (wow1).

This is propaganda. In an age of social media it is simple an AK47 aimed at a delicate part of the anatomy.

Another corporate idea is the use of the chief executive as the voice of persuasion during a crisis (wow2).

The Times reports:

Nancy Snow, of the University of Southern California, who is a former propagandist for the US State Department, said: “There has been too much emphasis on having the President as persuader-in-chief and it isn’t working because he lacks credibility, especially abroad.” (wow3)

The information war experts also pointed out that private companies were motivated by the need to win short-term contracts, while military goals were long term (wow4).

This is publicity. It stems from scream marketing, a practice well known to command and control freaks.

Well what a surprise!

What I am trying to find in all this is Public Relations.

David Robertson, a Times hack thinks this is PR but what does he know? Marginally more than the headline writer is nearly obvious. The Times really does need a proper cub reporter who has, at least, some idea of the nature of relationships, how they are effected and nurtured for a common good.

The critical thing here is that there is a need for grown up public relations. This requires a clear understanding of the goals and ambitions of the governement (s) involved followed by research, planning strategy development, testing, monitoring and tactical application that is constantly monitored in the creation and flowering of relationships among many stakeholder groups all of which are interconnected.

The reason that the government cannot get a public relations person to prepare and execute a plan is that the client is awash with ego and bumbling about with sound bites delivered with 'personality'.

Lloyd-Webber would be a better option than a PR consultant. At least we would have tunes instead of the noise of a washing machine behind the spin.

Doctors don't like spin - pubs dont like quacks

A report suggesting Oxford has the biggest binge-drinking problem in the South-East and the highest death rates from liver disease should be treated with caution, health chiefs and pub landlords according to the Oxford Mail.

North West Public Health Observatory use of statistics need a health check and so too should all surveys used in PR. T

According to National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, NWPHO provides a resource for Public Health information and intelligence in the North West of England.

I expect the reputation of both organisation is what they deserve. One for rigging results and the other for endorsing quacks.

Email abuse

For Immediate Release and BL Ochman have both highlighted the Radio Shack abuse of people ans email.

Radio Shack sacked 400 employees by email at its Texas headquarters last week. The company apparerently didn't think taking the rug out from under employees, many of whom had been with the company for years, was worth any investment of executive face time.

As PR practice this is as abd as it gets.

Pump and Dump

The BBC reports that spammers hoping to manipulate the stock market have begun approaching firms, offering to raise their share price in exchange for a percentage fee.

They are Farrington Fodder "The badly spelt and poorly punctuated e-mail in fact offers two services in one go: "boosting" the company's own share price, and offering "information" about other prospective share price rises."