Mark's history of the Hollywood publicists - how the Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry.
Fixing the Polls
September 4th, 2009 | 
Author: Bearing in mind what I wrote in yesterday’s post about transparency and trust, it doesn’t really help that there are still PR firms out there who will go to any lengths to be popular.
Seventy Seven PR recently put up an adhoc poll to find out which PR firm people admire the most. A nice little NB on their blog site calls for honesty – “if you can AVOID voting for your own agency, it might make it a bit more interesting. We can’t police it, of course, but go on, give it a go…”. Sadly, iit seems that this has been ignored in some quarters.
If you can’t even trust some people to vote for companies other than their own, then what’s the point of the poll? It’s going to be a difficult world to live in, from anyone’s point of view, if it’s not even possible to tell what’s real and what’s merely a bit of desperate spin.
To see the poll, or even take part in it (honestly, of course) click here.
Posted in Mark My Words | 
Tags: honesty, poll, popularity, PR, seventy seven, spin, transparency, trust, voting
Thanks Mark …
It is indeed worse than Afghanistan for ballot fixing. Tho in a brief moment of fairness, I have a sense that wearesocial and FRANK (possibly even Cake as Mike is a man with a network) might have got to where they are because they’re socially connected and because they’ve got people who like them out there voting.
WAS have got a 19,000 Twitter network and all my logs say that they’re picking up a lot of links-in (and I assume votes) from the social community.
So even if this doesn’t show which agencies are the most honest, it does go some way to showing who are the influential ones on t’interweb. Which is something I guess.
And I suspect that as a result of this your share of the vote might rise gently.
So I guess that not all agencies are dishonest, it’s just that some are better-connected than others (tho there are also a bunch of cheeky vote-riggers out there).
Hey Mark – I hope you’re not implying that We Are Social is being dishonest in anyway or that we are trying to fix the polls?
I can assure you our current standing is solely the result of a few tweets from our main @wearesocial twitter account and some of our team’s personal ones, and of course, people that voted for us organically anyway (we were in third place before any tweets were sent).