We all work in social media, so this may strike some as an odd question, but we’ll ask it anyway: don’t you just hate promoted tweets?

If you answered “No, I love them; they provide essential information on goods and services that I may or may not purchase,” then you must work in marketing. If you answered, “They are kind of annoying, aren’t they,” then you’re…everybody else.

Twitter has obviously become a key promotional platform in the past couple of years, but it wasn’t always this way—and some longtime users aren’t too happy about it. In fact, as The Wall Street Journal puts it, these young ruffians are all about “subvert[ing] the corporate vibe.” Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser called it “the eternal battle people have over hipsterdom.”

Really?

We never joined the “weird Twitter” club (sue us), which for the most part is all about making strange jokes rather than assaulting brands. But we do know that some comedy professionals use promo tweets as a platform for jokes, because duh:

Shut up nerd. RT @Staples: Back to school season is right around the corner!

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) August 4, 2013

Read more

The latest chapter in Discovery Channel‘s scaly salt-water empire Shark Week, breaking ratings records with a mixture of legitimate science and horror since 1987, raised some eyebrows back on land.

Seems that the “documentary” Megaladon: The Monster Shark That Lives played fast and loose with the facts while producers hoped no one would notice.

In case you were never a 12-year-old boy, the megaladon was a prehistoric creature with teeth the size of a human hand which, as you may surmise from the special’s title, may still be alive and terrorizing the world’s oceans today.

Fans of accuracy in media will be disappointed to know that this is not even remotely true. The big deal, really, is Discovery’s failure to include a “none of this is real, BTW” disclaimer beyond a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it notice aired during the last minutes of the show calling it a “film” based on “legend.” Quite a few people fell for this nonsense, too: if you believe the channel’s super official megaladon poll, only 21% of viewers think the shark is definitely extinct. (We wonder how they feel about Bat Boy.)

Read more

Last week our sister site AllTwitter reported on a story that serves as a great example of a well-meaning social media marketing campaign that got a little too aggressive. Harping on the fact that it supposedly uses only “antibiotic-free” meat in its food, the Panera Bread chain’s team created a campaign pushing the message that only lazy farmers use antibiotics on their animals. This included a micro-site, a Facebook tab, and the satirical @EZChicken Twitter feed (which was more than a little over the top despite some pretty cool art direction).

We get where they were going with this project and the tagline “The Road to Delicious Is Antibiotic-Free”, but it’s hard not to conclude that any farmers who use antibiotics in any circumstance are not very good at their jobs—and that implication extends to nearly every farmer in this country. Now who supplies Panera with the meat for its sandwiches?

The response from the animal husbandry community wasn’t so positive:

Read more

Last week, online retail behemoth Amazon received the kind of PR boost that any brand outside the Republican Party would kill for: President Obama visited its massive Chattanooga warehouse and used his media megaphone to promote the company for creating jobs fit for every politician’s favorite fallback character: the “middle class” American.

This is all well and good, but Amazon’s recent reputation management challenges are far more complicated…and less complimentary.

The real purpose of the President’s visit was to propose a bargain between the two political parties in which he would trade a cut in corporate tax rates for increased government investment in “education, training, and public works projects” designed to facilitate the creation of those precious middle class jobs. The event unsurprisingly attracted critiques of both the company and the President that highlight their unique PR struggles.

It’s true that Amazon’s planned hiring wave will create as many as 7,000 American jobs, but Obama’s visit raised several questions that the company would rather not address:

• Are these jobs truly “middle class?”
• Is Amazon the sort of company that will help strengthen the American economy at large?
• Will this PR stunt facilitate any truly meaningful political activity?

That’s easy: no, no, and…no.

Read more

We’re not prone to bragging about our accomplishments (cough cough), but today brings official word that MWW Group has hired Jason Chupick, the founding editor of this very website, as vice president of editorial operations.

Jason previously worked as VP of PR at Harper’s Magazine. His experience spans the worlds of journalism, public relations and digital media: In addition to time spent in the publishing industry, he worked at several boutique agencies in the New York City area, and he frequently speaks at industry events and conferences like last month’s Mediabistro webcast on increasing the visibility of your press releases.

MWW plans to use his “ability to combine editorial content technology and editorial expertise” to implement media production and placement strategies for clients.

Read more

Yesterday we shared some of the many third-party predictions and analyses of the Publicis/Omnicom merger and what it will mean to the future of the advertising and marketing industries. To recap: On the financial front, industry revenue totals will probably stay steady—but the organization of the game will undoubtedly change.

The next question: what role will PR firms and professionals play in this new arrangement?

Richard Edelman believes that PR will act as “part of the supporting cast” in this ongoing soap opera in order to back up the newest and biggest players, Digital and Data. In other words (via The New York Times), it’s all about the mega-agencies chasing Google to reach more targeted users via Big Data number crunching.

Yet, despite this hyper-focus on math nerds, Edelman writes that individual “thought leader” voices within the PR industry will grow even more valuable as they bring crucial “small data” research and insights to the table that no Google analytics study can provide. Jack Marshall of Digiday even argues that the role of Big Data has been overstated because the numbers ultimately belong to clients, not agencies (and that the whole thing is really an accounting issue).

Back to our main query: how dramatic will the change be for PR?

Read more

The chattering classes were all abuzz yesterday about a sponsored post on everyone’s favorite site to visit for kitty pic listicles and condescending literary rants. (Wait, what?)

Here’s the story: In an amusingly blatant attempt to push its talking points to those young folks who will determine the future of politics in this country, conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation illustrated its distaste for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, with BuzzFeed‘s trademark combination of one-liners and GIFs.

OMG CUTE LOL! But will it work?

We say meh. :-/

Read more

We’ve all heard enough about this weekend’s Publicis/Omnicom merger to know that it’s too big for our limited minds to even fathom, much less evaluate.

So many questions followed: will it lead to mass layoffs or protracted battles over antitrust laws? Will it doom boutique agencies that don’t get picked up by major “holding company” conglomerates? Will it change our jobs in profound and permanent ways?

These are all valid, fascinating issues that must be considered—and for now we’ll let other people do the thinking for us, starting with those smartasses at The Onion.

Surprisingly accurate! That headline stings a bit, though we finally understand why they didn’t hire us for the grad school internship we wanted so badly (should’ve learned to code in high school, dammit). On a more serious note, Richard Edelman is skeptical of this supposed sea change, writing:

Bigger does not mean better. My 84-year-old mother’s first reaction yesterday was that this reminds her of AOL’s* merger with Time Warner. “They were all screwed up for years,” she said.

In other words, don’t freak out…at least not yet. But there will be blood.

Read more

“You keep it boring, String. You keep it dead f*cking boring.” – Joseph “Prop Joe” Stewart

Gangster’s motto or PR strategy? It’s both: the quote succinctly explains how drug kingpin Stringer Bell avoids attracting too much attention from the cops and how Bill Belichick, coach of football’s incredibly successful New England Patriots, manages to keep his team in the media’s good graces despite several recent run-ins with the Bad News Bears.

In an article titled “Nobody outworks Belichick in the game of media control,” former Patriot and current Sporting News analyst Ross Tucker explains the man’s secret: keep things nice and dull.

Sounds too simple, doesn’t it? For most pigskin squads, news of a top receiver’s indictment for murder and the arrival of Tim “Jesus Is My Homeboy” Tebow would attract more bad press than a Kardashian wedding. Yet the Patriots have so far managed to avoid the fallout from the Aaron Hernandez and Tebow sideshows. According to Tucker, it’s because the team is “uniquely suited to handle the media scrutiny,” and it all comes back to the man in charge and his diligent approach to PR.

Read more

Are you an ambitious, street-smart young scribe eager to expose L.A.’s seedy underbelly to the world at large? Do you decry the decline of quality reporting and live to shame the lamestream media? Most importantly, do you know your current thetan count? If you answered yes, duh, and “praise overlord Xenu!” to these questions, then The Church of Scientology wants you…to write for its in-house magazine, Freedom.

Freedom promotes “investigative reporting in the public interest,” with “the public” meaning Tom Cruise, David Miscavige, and whoever else runs the world’s most secretive tax-exempt organization. In what can only be the most incredible coincidence in history, every single article in said magazine amounts to a little piece of the church’s never-ending damage control campaign.

The most common subject is the fact that church apostates are all a bunch of fat, stupid-head liars who like to tell lies just because they are mean and evil for no reason at all except that every one of them is addicted to drugs and doesn’t get enough vitamins. For what it’s worth, the website does make good use of some strange pop-up animation.

Read more