On a planet divided by violent political, sectarian, and international rifts, it’s nice to know that sworn enemies can share a deep admiration for one historical figure who was so much more than a man. Years ago, this misunderstood prophet dared to buck the tide and bring humanity together in the name of an all-encompassing love—the love of crispy, delicious fried chicken.

That man, of course, was KFC founder Colonel Harland David Sanders, and this week the trusty fourth estate brings us multiple stories about residents of Palestine’s volatile Gaza Strip region going above and beyond for a little taste of his special sauce.

Finger lickin’ good PR? Yeah…no.

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The factory collapse that killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh this April is by no means the first tragedy to strike the garment industry in recent years—but it does look like the culmination of an ongoing PR challenge that could reshape the way major clothing brands market their products. The earliest evidence of this change comes on social media, where companies that had operations in the factory have already begun responding to the demands of consumers and labor activists.

The New York Times reports that many businesses and industry groups now plan to follow the food industry’s example by offering the public more detailed information about how and where their clothes are made. H&M and Zara have agreed to sign a new “factory safety accord,” and major names like Disney, Nike, and Walmart may follow with campaigns designed to appropriate the “green,” “organic,” and “fair trade” themes favored by food and household goods marketers in recent years. The purpose of this material, of course, will be to highlight the brands’ corporate social responsibility efforts and distance them from horrific accidents like the one in Bangladesh.

It’s nothing new for fashion: upstarts like American Apparel began using their own “fair trade” practices as key selling points some time ago. Yet, despite AA’s success, retailers like Maggie’s Organics and Everlane (tagline “Luxury Basics. Radical Transparency.”) remain few and far between.

Not for long.

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Every brand on Earth is chomping at the bit to place official ads on the rapidly growing Instagram, but parent company Facebook continues to proceed with extreme caution.

While Mark Zuckerberg says he is very encouraged by the expansion of the image-sharing network, he clearly does not plan to open the commercial floodgates until he’s good and ready. In his own words, Instagram must first focus on “build[ing] community” before determining how best to use its considerable potential as an ad/marketing forum. We can see why Zuckerberg prefers to take low-risk baby steps, no matter how impatient advertisers may be.

In the meantime, brands and their social media teams should be quite happy to learn that they do have more promotional options on Instagram thanks to the newly introduced function “photos of you,” which allows users to tag any other existing account—be it a friend, a celebrity, a local business, or a big-name brand—in their own pics. Amateur lensmen and brand managers alike will receive notifications when others tag them, and they can then choose whether to display these images on their own public feeds.

Can you say “pre-approved user generated content?”

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This post was co-written by the author and his wife, Stephanie Coffee. 

Horrific events that shock and captivate entire nations, superseding all other news—tragedies like the Newtown shooting and last week’s Boston Marathon terror attack—are thankfully rare. And yet, as we all know, social media and the 24/7 cable news cycle have intensified the public’s focus on these national crises and their aftermaths.

Now that the Boston case has been resolved with amazing speed by state and local authorities, we can examine the media response to last week’s events from a PR perspective.

As communications professionals, we know that the public doesn’t just demand (accurate) news as it breaks in times of crisis. They also value reassurances and statements of support from sources they follow on social media—sources that include their favorite brands.

At least one brand has already demonstrated the dangers of an inept response. So what should public entities and the people who manage their accounts do?

What NOT to do: 

• Don’t tie the event into a promotion: Epicurious (which is usually a very good food site) gave us a perfect case study on Monday with its tone-deaf promotional tweet encouraging followers to buy specific Boston-themed products. We won’t go into why it was a terrible idea because that should be painfully obvious. As another example, who can forget Kenneth Cole’s infamous Egypt uprising PR Fail?

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As a sort of farewell (for now!) to our readers, I’d like to draw upon my experience editing this site over the past nine months to leave you with a list of tips for pitching to bloggers like me. I write “bloggers” because that’s the field I know, and there are some differences between pitching to a site like PRNewser and a paper like The Wall Street Journal, even though the basics are the same. Anyway, here goes:

1. Do Some Research: I don’t mean that you have to read everything the blog in question has published over the past six months. You can probably just scan the content to get a general sense of what sorts of stories interest the blog’s editors, the tone they like to use in covering them, and the sort of audience they serve. You’d be surprised how many pitches I’ve received from people who have very obviously never read PRNewser. I don’t hold that against them, but it certainly makes me less likely to consider their stuff.

2. Get Your Contacts’ Names Right: I know you’re busy and that you’re not really too concerned when an editor leaves or joins a blog. But I’ve been here nine months, and a majority of the pitches I get are still addressed to my predecessor, Tonya. That’s not all: to this day I receive an embarrassing number of emails directed to Joe and Jason, the guys who started the blog — and it’s been almost three years since either of them worked in this office. That’s bad form, guys.

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If you ever find yourself responsible for promoting a client whose hook is just too dumb to pitch, we’d like you to know that it can’t true. Don’t believe us? Consider the recent media coverage of SexCereal and Bacon Condoms, two products clearly designed to inspire headlines (and little else).

Neither of these products were April Fools’ jokes, but they both managed to win mentions in mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, Slate, Fox News, Good Morning America, LIVE with Kelly and Michael and even WebMD. How? They had hooks so dumb that folks just had to click. And we all know that producers are just dying to fill airtime with news about stunt products like a condom that helps “make your meat look like meat” and provides “the utmost safety for when you’re makin’ Bacon” or the “world’s first and only gender-based whole food cereal”, which promises to promote “good nerve function, healthy hormone levels, and an unobstructed blood flow to the pelvic area.”

PR wins all around. And yes, there’s a stupid video after the jump: Read more

This blogger’s anonymous tip box is something like the “leave a penny, take a penny” jar in that it can be both used and abused. Now, I have received a couple of good story ideas via “the box.” But more than anything I’ll miss opening my email account each morning to find little nuggets of wisdom like the following list of my favorite anonymous PRNewser tips, reprinted verbatim for your amusement:

“good”

Glad you think so!

“stupid, stupid, ignorant, sophomoric, get a pizza pie in the face you”

Say hi to your mother for me!

“for dry skin ini winter, add 4 to 5 drops of lemon juice in 4 table spoon of cream mix it well and apply it on your face. now rub it gently and after 10 mins wash your face with warm water. your skin will become soft.”

Thanks! Now my skin is super soft!

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We have to tip our hats to Reebok today for taking the hint and dropping rapper/fake gangster/failed sneaker spokesman Rick Ross from its celebrity roster. In case you missed it, the company found itself in a PR bind when someone noticed that the lyrics to Ross’s latest single seemed to tell a tale of date rape via champagne spiked with ecstasy. Yesterday Reebok announced that, while they do not feel that Mr. Ross’s verse actually condoned sexual assault, the brand “holds [its] partners to a high standard” and believes that the rapper “has yet to display an understanding of the seriousness of this issue or an appropriate level of remorse” despite some desperate attempts at a last-minute apology.

This was a no-brainer for Reebok. Of course, the proactive individuals at UltraViolet who created the anti-Ross petition probably had a bit more to do with the decision than this humble blog, and we’re not the sort of people to take credit for others’ work, but we’d like to think of ourselves as members of the chorus.

On a final note, if Reebok or any other brand wants to hire a spokesperson with “street cred” in the future, they might want to refrain from choosing a guy whose entire backstory is a product of his own imagination. Just sayin’.

The biggest “must read” story making its way around the web this week is New York Magazine’s profile of BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and his enviably successful approach to paid content.

To sum things up, Peretti, who also helped launch The Huffington Post, was a math student at MIT who grew fascinated with the concept of viral memes and later created BuzzFeed as a tool to identify and facilitate the spread of said memes via algorithm. His goal was to truly capture the magic behind “word of mouth” buzz (the cat GIFs and political reporting came later). Most of the Internet and quite a few of the biggest brands in the world agree that Peretti has uncovered a secret formula for creating native advertising that might just go viral. Here are some revelations from the profile:

• BuzzFeed editors work directly with marketing specialists from partner brands to create content in a “newsroom”-style environment.
• The vast majority of traffic for both BuzzFeed originals and paid posts comes from social sharing.
• The site’s most popular posts don’t go viral after a single big-name personality shares them — they’re simply picked up by several isolated individuals who share them in small groups (average nine Facebook friends) that spawn small “share” groups of their own.
• There’s a science to this. Peretti has literally devised a formula.

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