The Blog Watcher writes...

The blogosphere is where it's at you know. In every issue we recommend recent entries on PR-based blogs from around the world. This week the PR challenge of those MP expenses scandals and why car firms should do more PR.

From Matthew Watson’s PR to Eternity blog: Is PRFail a PR fail?

“The blogosphere and twittersphere is rife with journalists, PROs and members of the public identifying and publicising errors of judgement made by companies and PROs. It’s argued that by drawing attention to ‘PR fails’ we can as an industry learn from these mistakes and collectively raise our game.

One website that serves to draw attention to bad PR practices is PRfail.tumblr.com. The site was setup nearly a year ago by Jonathan Hopkins to aggregate examples of bad PR highlighted on websites such as Twitter, which sees many users attach the #PRfail hashtag to their tweets.

The site now features plenty of PROs who have pointed our mistakes made by their peers or by the companies they represent, but is this wise?

If I were to criticise a company’s mistake on my blog or on Twitter, Google would automatically connect my name and the name of the company I work for to the name of the company I badmouthed. So if I or the company I work for were to then pitch for a PR brief by that company it would only take a quick search of those names, for example Nike and Speed Communications, to bring up my blog post or my tweets in the first few results. I’m pretty sure that digging up old mistakes that a potential client would rather forget, is probably not the best way to make a good impression.

That said, identifying a ‘PR fail’ and offering a solution as to how the company might have dealt with that crisis more effectively could demonstrate expertise. Though I’m not sure how much expertise you can demonstrate when you’ve already used up 7 characters of your 140 character tweet with a #PRfail hashtag!

My mind’s not totally made up on this. Do you think we should be more careful about what we say online or use our freedom of speech to highlight bad PR in an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff?”

See what Matthew’s readers thought, and share you own opinions, on the actual blog post here

From StuartBruce.biz: Defending LabourList, knocking the smears about RedRag

“As a public relations and social media specialist I’ve had lots of people asking me to comment on the Red Rag blog and Damian McBride’s resignation. I’ve resisted the temptation to become a ‘rent-a-gob’ in the media and haven’t yet responded to those who’ve emailed me and direct messaged me on Twitter. I thought I’d wait until the dust had settled, but as it doesn’t appearing to be settling I might as well have my two pennarth now.

First up I’m not going to be an apologist for Damian McBride. He was totally and utterly wrong to send the emails he did. It was right for him to go, but wrong for him to have been given the opportunity to resign. If what he did wasn’t gross misconduct then the special adviser contracts need to be redrawn. He should have been sacked. That would have sent a far clearer signal from No 10 that this type of behaviour by a special adviser isn’t acceptable and wasn’t sanctioned by Gordon Brown.

However, it has all been blown up out of all proportion. What McBride did might have been odious, but it is in a long tradition of political smearing. Bernard Ingham as Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary did more than his fair share of smearing. The Tories under Cameron aren’t as squeaky clean as he’d like you to think. You’d have to be incredibly naive or stupid not to believe leaking sleaze isn’t part of Andy Coulson’s strategy.

So what should happen now? What shouldn’t happen is that Labour retreats bruised and battered from the blogosphere”.

Read Stuart’s recommendations for what Labour should do now in the full blog here.

Posted Friday May 1 2009