Just over a year ago, in one of my very first posts, I talked about the newly public sport of bunny bashing. This is not a case of animal cruelty but rather the new found fashion for bloggers and blogging journalists to let rip when they felt that they had encountered yet another example of poor public relation skills in action. I’m fairly sure that as long as there has been both hacks and flacks, that hacks have complained about incompetent PRs, it’s just that now it happens far more publicly. At the time I noted that such attacks were cyclical in nature and I’m rather disheartened to be proved right as another Twitter storm developed at the end of last week over an inept voicemail left for Sally Whittle by a PR.

I should make it clear that I am not defending the actions of those who spam bloggers and journalists with poor targeted, mail merged, generic emails. Nor am I to excuse calling a freelancers one month after an article appears to castigate them for not mentioning a client. Rather I am here to ask what is the point in naming and shaming the hapless transgressor, which Sally to her credit has refused to do, and is the very same point I made last time round.

I know that the PR profession has become sloppy because when you upset a print or broadcast journalist, they worst they could do is swear at you or complain to your boss.  The former wasn’t that frequent and the latter hardly happened either.  Now of course irate bloggers get to name and shame.  Which is great, they get to vent their frustration and it ensures that the PR in question will do a better job next time.

Oh right it doesn’t.

I also explained why I’m against the PR Fail and PR Win blogs that collate the good, bad and ugly of the PR world. They are still going strong, though amazingly there is far more content on PRFail than PRWIN, even though much of what has been tagged as fail, often has little to do with a companies PR function.

So what can we do as profession to stop annoying those that we rely on in symbiotic/parasitic  nature? Stop employing idiots is the call from one commentator on Sally’s original post, which is a great idea but again who actually sets out to hire an idiot? More training, more guidance from the industry bodies like the PRCA or CIPR? Or am  I wrong and would the threat of your incompetence going public be just the thing to make PR people consider their actions a little more thoroughly?

The other day a fellow student at the fine institute that is Birkbeck, was heard to complain about the content of their  Saturday class. Unfortunately I don’t know exactly what the class was meant to be on, but apparently the lecturer spent the entire six hour session spouting conspiracy theories. Such as the government uses your Oyster card to track your movements. Which to be frank is almost complete bollocks, almost complete because if you a person of interest to them, then I’m sure that they do use this info. However for the average Joe Blow in the street? It just doesn’t have enough resources or indeed the technical capabilities at this point in time. This is the reason why ID cards are going to take a long time to happen, it’s pretty much impossible for one Govt dept to share its information with another due to legacy IT issues.

So stop worrying about the Government, instead I think you should worry about Google.

Like many of you, Google is my home page, I have gmail address, and not one of those Johnnie Comelately googlemail ones, I have a YouTube account, I used to use Blogger, I’m increasingly using Google docs. And I search a lot, and I mean a lot. For many of my friends and family, the G in GUI, stands for Gaffney not graphic, and really who can blame them as my google-fu is about 4th dan level*.

I digress, but you get the picture, strip Google out of my life and I’d have a gaping void, Admittedly one that could easily be filled by a variety of other providers but that’s the beauty of Google, it does almost everything and it does it well. I need only remember one password, one email address and I can access all my online treasure houses without resorting to a system of post-it notes. Just exactly how much I rely up it and just how much it knows about me I didn’t quite realise until TechCrunch told me about Google Dashboard which shows you in one handy place everything that you have told Google about  yourself.

In short it keeps track of:

Account & profile
Web-history
Gmail
Docs
Calendar
YouTube
Blogger
iGoogle
Latitude
Reader
Talk
Health
Orkut
Picasa
Shopping List
Voice
Contacts
Alerts
Finance
Friend Connect
Tasks
Custom search engines
Mobile Sync

Which is a fair bit of info, and on checking my own dashboard I discovered things that I’d long forgotten, like old abandoned blogs, that my last book search was obviously a vanity one.

Of course all this information is private, well private to me and Google, and I have no idea what it plans to do with that information, well apart from use it for increasingly accurate advertising (natch) and that is what scares me.

*5th Dan means I can google with a walking stick, sweet

I’ll stop on the spam kick soon, I promise. It’s just that this one is previously unseen tactic and it amused me.

Well more it made me grin wryly and then wonder what is about this joke that made the spammer internet marketing guru decide that it was the most appropriate for a viagra ad.

Spam comes in all sorts of flavours, the pornographic, the pharmaceutical, the long, long lists of links, the foreign and the vaguely threatening. Most recently my eye has been caught by this most useful piece of advice about where to find decent criminal attorneys on Long Island. I admit that I’m confused as to how they found Niff, Naff while looking for lawyers, though as the most popular search term that brings people here is pornfree perhaps they were running two totally different searches concurrently. I particularly like the way they repeat the address, as if the comment were an answering machine and they were worried about the listener not getting the number down right first time, considerate,

Anyway, I’m sure that every reader is a law-abiding citizen but you never know when you might need a lawyer.

…to keep yourself from getting too bored on a winter’s weekend.

So on the 5th December

I’ll mainly be doing this —->

Which basically consists of doing this…

It’s more fun than you think it looks, prolly.

In conclusion, are you happy now Sean?

Unlike the vast majority of my posts, this one will be short and to the point. It will also contain hitherto unknown quantities of ego.

For I have, dear readers, been nominated for a BIMA Best Blog award and I am dead chuffed, to say the least.

Let us not ask how the hell that happened, when the rate of posting has been only slightly higher than the speed of the actual postal system for the past few months. Let us also ignore the fact that, when I have bothered to put pinkies to plastic the topics have been as inspiring as Grace Jones snotting on stage, why I think white goods should remain stupid and why people in general are stupid*. Let us also ignore that there are other blogs who are far more stimulating, entertaining and frequently updated, such as the rather excellent Broadstuff blog. Instead just accept that this is possible the greatest blog you’ve ever read and take a moment for this momentous news to sink in.

Suggestion, while you are taking that moment, why not just pop over to the award page and vote for me.

See that didn’t take long and the dirty feeling goes away after a while, honest. If it doesn’t then return and vote for someone equally deserving such as Broadstuff or Boing Boing.**

*Except you, you are of course not stupid, your very presence here proves this, btw you hair looks great.

**Obviously for every vote cast that is not for this blog, a fairy dies

For the first time ever my Twitter Avatar is decorated by a twibbon, this particular one is in support of the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal. Although only another 9,000 fellow twitter’s are doing the exactly same as I type, there are over 500,000 twibboned profiles of some sort, either in support of their favourite charity, their coffee, sports team or gadget.

The act of betwibboning my avatar, along with a post from Alan Patrick over at Broadstuff on freedom of speech and the 24 hour outrage mobs that were spawned in response to the very recent Trafigura Guardian gagging and the Daily Mail piece of the death of Stephen Gately, made me consider yet again the actual impact of online actions compared to offline. Which was then neatly echoed, in one of those weird coincidences of timing, in a retweet by Chris Brennan. All of which combined to remind that despite the supposed success of the online world beating back tyranny in real life, we shouldn’t overestimate the difference in impact between doing something online and offline.

Putting the pixel poppy on my picture took all of two seconds,  it helped to remind me that I needed to buy one in real life but in the grand scheme of things for the Royal Legion it did bugger all. I doubt anyone who has seen my profile has been driven to add a poppy to their own, or that they jumped up and ran out to find their nearest poppy vendor that very instant. Or if not at that very moment, then later when they saw them being sold at the tube that one specific person’s twitter avatar, or indeed any, came to mind as they handed over their cash.

This is pretty much the reason why I haven’t previously added one, nor have I blacked out my avatar or made it a delightful shade of green, not because I don’t agree with the various causes that have suggested these moves but because it’s almost too easy to do and then forget that it has actually achieved diddly. From a marketer’s point of view, it’s also too difficult to measure. Yes, you can pop over to Twibbon and see the current numbers, but what about from previous campaigns? There’s also no way of measuring how many people did black out their avatars for New Zealand or Ireland, which makes it fairly ineffective as a campaigning tool.

I am sure the naysayers here will point to the record number of complaints to the PCC over the Jan Moir piece, to demonstrate that mass online (re)action does matter. Except there is nothing to say that Stephen Gatley’s family, or anyone else directly mentioned in the piece, would not have complained anyway. Yes, the PPC made them aware of the article off the back of the twitterstorm but if those directly involved don’t decide to complain, then all the PCC will write a letter to the Daily Mail before considering further action – not exactly a long lasting impact on a paper that saw it’s hit rate rise by around 20 percent off the back of that one article and no doubt will be slipping Jan Moir a nice Christmas bonus for driving that traffic.

I’m not actually having a go at just Twibbons here, well I am, but it is a neat symbolisation of the inactive activism that salves our busy modern life souls into thinking that we’ve done something meaningful when we haven’t.  One could almost level the same criticism at those who buy charity ribbons and wrist bands, their saving grace is that the charity does actually get some cash in return, with a click on line they get nowt.

The sentiment of this entire post is much more eloquently and succinctly expressed in the following Tim Minchin video, one can only assume that he didn’t say I’ll give you a click to take away my guilt as it didn’t scan as well as the actual words.

Is that people are stupid.

This was going to be a post around social media policies and how perhaps we shouldn’thave them. The Microsoft policy, apparently, can be summed up as ‘Don’t be stupid’. Which is to be frank, rather stupid in itself. It is rare that a person does something knowing that it is indeed a stupid thing to do. Even if they say, this might be a stupid thing to do, clearly they don’t really believe that or they wouldn’t actually go ahead and do it. They may believe that other people might think what they are about to do is stupid. However they secretly they believe that they are being very clever and their apparently stupid action will be proven to be as cunning as ‘a fox what used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University but has moved on, and is now working for the UN at the High Commission of International Cunning Planning’.

The bones of this post has been kicking around for a while, fueled by the occasionally visit to LameBook, from which I’m sure you’ve seen examples, such as the one to right, floating around various blogs and even more mainstream sites. Then Brian Sollis offered some advice for businesses and employees in his latest post on how to protect yourself online, concluding:

Perhaps the best advice is to not rely on common sense at all. You, and only you, are responsible for creating and defining your destiny. Instead of giving companies reasons why they should block important social networks and ultimately new opportunities, show them what they’re missing through your actions, research, and words.

Which resonates deeply with my belief that you can’t make a policy that stops people being stupid and that all the wonderful web has done has made it easier to be stupid in different and far more public way than ever before.

To illustrate my point about human stupidity I thoght I’d pull up some stats around how many people are injured in the UK by seemingly benign objects. Except what I discovered is it now possible to play a bastard child version of Cludeo (or Clue for any passing Americans) and Googlewhacking. All you need to do is pop along to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) website and select one option each from the eight categories (where, type of accident, type of injury, body part, victim’s age, object involved, gender and activity) and see if someone has indeed been injured in that manner. Or you can just pick one or two varaiables, such as item and gender,  to make it easier and find out that men seemed to be very careless with chopsticks in 2000 and 2002 but escaped any oriential eating implement injuries in 2001. Give it a go, it’s a fascincating waste of time and can lead to some interesting discussions, for example how did 144 people get injured by blood 2002? Blood as a result of injury seems more likely than it being the cause.

More sensible post on social media policies will follow, prolly.

Most spam comments I find amusing, this one I find ever so vaguely threatening – I think it is the assurance of the final three words.

Even the non-egg chasers among you are probably aware of the current controversy rocking my favourite sport of Rugby. For those of you that aren’t the overview is simple. In the Harlequin v Leinster quarter-final of the 2009 Heineken Cup, Rugby’s top flight European competition, a Harlequin’ wing faked a blood injury which enabled a player who had already been tactically substituted to return to the field. The hope was that the returning first choice kicker, Nick Evans, could change the out come of the match, which stood in the balance at 5- 6 with only five minutes remaining. Fortunately Evans missed his attempted drop goal, Quins were knocked out and Leinster went on to win the final.

Sitting at home, mainly watching through my fingers, I, like many, thought that  the wink the injured player gave the bench as he came off, looked a bit weird but not quite as weird as the colour and quantity of blood pouring from his mouth. I’d like to think I thought that there would be something made of it but it’s quite possible that it’s wishful hindsight. Initially it seemed that nothing was going to happen, then there was a report that the ERC was investigating, that there would be a hearing and since then the media storm has just got bigger and bigger. I doubt Rugby has had quite so many column inches devoted to it between world cups and definitely not in the off-season.

As with many crisis, the initial incident has now been overshadowed by the way that the club responded to it, and it this which is at the centre of the contuinuing media maelstrom. The club initially tried to bluff it out, denying anything untoward happened. Amazingly this didn’t work, and as the story is pulled apart piece by piece, new revelations continue to appear and the calls for even greater sanctions to be imposed are getting louder.

That how you handle a crisis is of more importance than the actual reason for the crisis is something  we’ve seen repeatedly and seems to be of more importance now that any action or inaction can be scrutinised. Think of recent, and not so recent, cases, Motrin Moms, Spinvox and Kryptonite, it was the lack of response that really irked people. Compare these to Jet Blue and Dominos’ booger both companies came out of their crisis fairly unscathed as not only did they take immediate action, they made it very visible what action they were taking

In times of crisis, do something and be seen to be doing it.