razorkitty

Get to the point

Those of us who make our living through the written word, sweating over the precise content of a press release and fretting about the old "who, where, what, when, why, how" schtick, might want to take a quick look at this picture.

Says it all, really.

 

Public Relations and Bernard Matthews

Writing in today's Times City Diary under the headline 'PR firm must be as sick as a parrot', Martin Waller draws our attention to the Bernard Matthews fiasco and Hill & Knowlton's part within this as 'crisis PR specialists'.  Read it for yourselves and make your own mind up, but a PR firm that doesn't return telephone calls?  Tut tut.

Flogging a Dead Horse?

Fake bloggers are to be exposed, according to Hannah Marriott writing the lead story for this week's PR Week.  'Flogging' (fake blogging) has been a worrisome issue for some time (remember Edelman and Wal-Mart?) and it seems that it is a practice likely to be made illegal when the EU's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive is made law at the end of 2007.  'Flogging' is certainly unethical and indeed will soon be illegal, but how on earth it is supposed to be properly policed is anyone's guess. 

More on Wikipedia

I am indebted to Gregory Kohs who posted this in response to my post Wikipedia Warns PR Agencies They Face Ban

"That's how Jimbo rolls, Razorkitty. The self-editing of Larry Sanger out of the picture is just the tip of the iceberg. What about the many violations of the "External Links" policy, where Wikipedia gladly fosters over 3700 outbound links to Wikia.com -- which is owned by, guess who? Also, note that Jimbo's Wikia.com partner, Angela Beesley, often edits "her" article about Wikia within Wikipedia. No conflict of interest there?"

Very interesting Gregory.  And thanks for the link to http://www.centiare.com/.  Well worth a look in my opinion.

Wikipedia Warns PR Agencies They Face Ban

Last week's rather disturbing story on the front page of PR Week [paywalled] has created something of a furore amongst us PR folk.  Apparently, Wikipedia's founder Jim Wales is threatening to ban PR agencies from contributing to the esteemed site.  Wales insists:

"There's a huge conflict of interest.  Contributors cannot be paid for what they are doing."

It appears Wales spokeout after it emerged US firm MyWikiBiz had been banned from editing client entries in 2006, and also that Microsoft had been paying a blogger to amend its entries.

All essential PR bloggers have had pertinent comments to make on the subject (I personally cannot see what is wrong with PR people editing Wikipedia entries - after all, that is rather the raison d'etre of the whole thing and as long as one adheres to the guidelines, a PR person editing is no different to Joe Schmo editing) but there is one very interesting point to make that is actually listed in Wikipedia itself, under the Jim Wales entry:

"In late 2005, Wales was criticised for editing his own biography page on Wikipedia in a way some characterized as "revisionist history."In particular, Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that Mr. Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia". 

Interested parties can read the entire entry on Jim Wales themselves.  One rule for one, one rule for everyone else?

PRide Awards

Forgive me for the plug, but I must say I'm delighted to report that Cicada Public Relations won Silver at this week's PRide Awards in Leeds for our National Insect Week campaign.  Well done to Di, Liz and Amy for such a brilliant result!

I may not be on the PRide Awards judging panel (shome mishtake, shurely?) but in my opinion, Simon Collister should have won the category Young Communicator of the Year. I can't remember how old Simon is, but if he's still eligible next year then I tip him to win!