Posts Tagged ‘blog’

It’s nearly Christmas, the snow lies heavy on much of Britain in astonishingly traditional fashion, causing less astonishing but no less traditional mayhem, chaos and panic. But, given the last year, one can almost understand why there is panic. The weather may hark back to the past but the world moves on into the future at an astonishing rate.

This has, without doubt, been an extraordinary, tumultuous year, a year in which the cliché of the water cooler moment has been reinvented time and time again by a clamouring horde of news stories, each more consuming and captivating than the last. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a lot of debate about the relevance of PR council to the stars since the Twitter revolution. Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Ross Brydon all do a pretty good job of managing to reach out to their fans. With these examples, and others, in mind, stars like Kanye West may wonder why they need to spend money on a PR when they have the DIY tools at their fingertips. But Kanye is proof positive that some slebs need sound and serious PR advice before they attempt to engage their fans over the net.

West has been letting rip on Twitter with unrelenting detail about himself. He has picked a fight with a journalist from the LA Times music blog who had the temerity to accidentally miss out a word from the title of his album but the incident that generated the most ire was his use of a robot to pump out 300 tweets in a few minutes containing lyrics and some nasty invective.
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In the greater scheme of things, does it really matter who William Hague shares a room with? I’m sure his wife, Ffion, would think it does, especially as she’s the one who’s been thrown unceremoniously to the wolves in the name of promoting her husband’s heterosexuality, in the wake of the rumour-mongering hoo-ha over his supposed relationship with special adviser Christopher Myers. I feel for Ffion, caught in a clutches of desperate PR ploy. Promoting a happy marriage is a recipe for disaster if the marriage is not actually happy.

The story floated in the Telegraph last week that a allegations about to be printed by Sunday tabloids would be met with strident legal action potentially alerted the wider audience that to a breaking scandal. This was rash and perhaps too clever. Read the rest of this entry »

The confidence and utter belief in the State of Israel the Israeli government have displayed, as they justify their violent attack on the ships attempting to bring aid to Gaza, is breathtaking. Both factions in any war tend towards insanity of some sort, but Israel organise theirs with terrifying rigour.

They have an enormous number of silent supporters waging their PR war for them, and some not-so-silent ones. Take the NeoCon pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz, for example. After the Gulf War, he advised American Jewish leaders to incorporate mention of Iraq into every mention made of Israel because “Saddam will remain a powerful symbol of terror to Americans for a long time to come. A pro-Israeli expression of solidarity with the American people in their successful effort to remove Saddam will be appreciated.”

Israel has a global network of people helping them ride any PR storm. There is always a PR storm and they always seem to ride it. After Gaza residents, in the wake of the Haiti disaster, started a well-documented campaign to send money to Haiti because they were ‘in the same state’, a number of bloggers reporting this were attacked and, in some cases, silenced. Read the rest of this entry »

Given the current debate surrounding PR, PR spam and how to further the better practices of PR in the 21st Century, the news that 3am has fallen out with Peter Andre’s management, CAN Associates because CAN wanted to control every aspect of a minor story about Andre teaming up with a coffee emporium can’t have come at a worse time. 3am’s account makes for riveting reading. Click here to find out more.

PR is living in interesting times at the moment. As traditional marketing and advertising suffers a confidence slump, the best people in PR are carefully repositioning themselves and the PR industry into a lead practice that can take on all aspects of the modern, digitally savvy rapid-change media. But for every good and forward-thinking PR firm, there’s always one who wallows in the clichés of the industry, as CAN’s attempts to out-Kingsley Pat Kingsley have proved. Read the rest of this entry »

Is PR spam the new chlamydia? Certainly it’s being fulminated about an awful lot as the latest social disease that may have infected us all, although we’re too often too ashamed to check out the symptoms.
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