PR Disasters has quite a few crackingly good posts

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My good Scottish mate and Melbournite (for which we pity and forgive him) Gerry McCusker has written some crackingly good posts about PR disasters recently.

He is a great read and if you don’t follow him, might I suggest you do from now on?

Here’s a selection for you:

PR firms’ revelatory Wikipedia entries
the sad state of PR firms’ Wikipedia entries should also be a lesson to potential clients — don’t believe the hype from agencies that pretend they’ve mastered this new world.

Is ‘people placement’ the new PR
a look at allegations claiming a Pentecostal Church has been influencing the outcomes of a pop talent show in Australia to gain better PR credibility for modern Christianity.

Footy’s Facebook PR disaster; draw your own conclusions
the episode shows how easy it is for a PR disaster to befall any organisation that fails to understand the new rules of reputation management.

Cry-Blaby Tories get conservative about blog views
They used a picture sourced at a personal homepage site, and rather than downloading and hosting the image file lazily linked it. Apparently, the owner noticed, and didn’t appreciate the Conservatives sucking on his bandwidth. He decided to pump their Blogger page with a different image

Character acts as real determinant of reputation
I’ve just joined the business blogging roster at Melbourne’s daily broadsheet The Age. My latest post takes a real life look at what happens when ad ‘extras’ turn a TV campaign into a media-wide PR disaster. Love to hear your views. In Australia, a couple of TV ads have created PR disasters for the clients placing them and, I’ll guess, little PR headaches for the Comms agencies that commissioned them. But in an increasingly transparent media environment, the embarrassing truth is out there, and it’s getting much easier to find, too.

Some people think that PR and reputation management is just for celebs, corporations and governments. But in the increasingly transparent Web era it’s fast becoming a personal imperative, too. For instance, recent revelations show that two of the three ‘thug’ actors appearing in the pro-Workchoices TV advert actually have actual criminal ‘form’. While the ‘boss’ in a previous pro-Workchoice reform ad was found to have been an abusive employer in real life. (He’s just been fined $7000 for his personal business affairs)

Great stuff!

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Tagged as: PR