Everyone agrees that CSR efforts are extremely important for big-name corporate clients, right?

No, seriously: we don’t know the answer to that question, and it all comes back to the biggest challenge in the industry: drawing a solid line between point A and point $.

First: The results from data king Nielsen’s latest Global Survey on Corporate Social Responsibility have already inspired headlines about CSR cementing its place as a crucial element of the big name PR equation.

Its basic finding: 50% of consumers surveyed in 58 countries say they’re willing to pay more for goods and services from companies that have “implemented programs to give back to society.” That number increased in ¾ of the countries surveyed, rising 5% in total since 2011. And the “yes” votes were highest in the crucial under-30 demo.

No surprises there. The only finding that we didn’t expect is the 12-point increase in pro-CSR sentiment among the 40-45 demo. Seems like CSR’s value has become clearer to all parties, no?

Maybe.

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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.

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Asiana Airlines is considering a lawsuit against the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) after it confirmed the phony and racially-charged names that were reported on Oakland news station KTVU. The airline says it might just sue the station as well.

Both organizations apologized for the error after it aired on Friday. The NTSB says the names were confirmed by a summer intern who spoke in error. But that might not be enough for the airline. Ki Won Suh, a PR rep for Asiana, said the error “seriously damaged the reputation of the four pilots and the company,” reports NBC News. The names were used as part of a report on the July 6 plane crash.

Three girls have died (one was struck by a fire truck on the ground, but it’s unclear if that’s what killed her) and 181 of 307 passengers and crew were injured when Flight 214 hit a seawall then burst into flames. Six people are still being treated in the hospital.

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Under pressure to take action to improve the safety conditions at Bangladeshi factories that make their goods, 17 American retailers including Walmart, Target, and Gap have signed on to the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. However, the plan is already coming under fire from labor and human rights groups who say that the failure to include a third party monitoring system or any labor representation makes the plan, essentially, a “sham.”

The discussion over factory safety continues months after the Rana Plaza building collapse in April that killed more than 1,100 people in Dhaka. A fire in another factory in Bangladesh killed 112 people in November. In both cases, workers were making garments intended for sale by some of the biggest retail companies in the world. Walmart and Sears claim they didn’t know their goods were being made at Rana Plaza. Read more

When a company’s primary audience is under the age of 12, will the public expect that company to promote only products and behaviors deemed “healthy” by third-party standards or trust it to develop its own?

To put it another way: does Cookie Monster really need to eat vegetables?

Senators and advocacy groups pushing to limit snack food ads on kids’ programs celebrated last year when The Walt Disney Company, partnering with Michelle Obama‘s “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign, promised to stop running spots for foods that don’t meet suggested federal nutrition standards by 2015. Disney’s chairman said the decision was “about smart business.”

Despite pressure to follow suit, Nickelodeon has chosen to continue using its own internal benchmarks—which earned praise from the same senators and advocacy groups—when deciding which food ads to run.

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In many ways, New York’s Citi Bike bicycle sharing program has been a success. In the weeks that the program has been in place, the Department of Transportation says more than a quarter of a million rides have been taken. There’s no doubt that, just looking around the city and seeing people pedaling about on their blue bikes, the program has been largely embraced.

Quibbles about bike stands and parking aside, there have been other issues with the bike program that are now being aired publicly. And ultimately, there’s the question of whether the program will ultimately be the PR positive that Citigroup certainly wanted when they signed up.

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The breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen has yet to recover from the PR disaster that was its 2012 decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood. Though the resulting controversy and backlash inspired the organization to quickly reverse its decision, Komen is still reeling from dramatically decreased donations and event participation.

The foundation announced last week that it would be cancelling seven of its three-day walks in 2014 — half of its annual multi-day events. Though the organization attributes the cancellations to economic uncertainty and competition from other charities, the sugar-coated explanation is a euphemism for plummeting support.

In light of the troubled year the foundation has faced, the public hadn’t exactly expected Nancy Brinker — who is still Komen’s CEO despite announcements made ten months ago that she would be stepping down from her post — to receive a raise in 2012. However, the organization’s latest IRS filing shows that Brinker made $684,717 in fiscal 2012, a 64 percent jump from her $417,000 salary from April 2010 to March 2011.

If that didn’t look bad enough, the filing also says Brinker devoted 55 hours to the cause each week, which translates to an hourly rate of $239.40, roughly twice the salary of Komen’s chief financial officer Mark Nadolny or former president Liz Thompson, who left Komen as a result of the Planned Parenthood controversy.

Though the organization maintains that the pay raise was set in motion back in 2010, well before the trouble started, that fact has done little to assuage the already-incensed public.

There was a day when the public feared technology because we felt it would enable the government to spy on us and grant corporations access to our private lives. But thanks to Domino’s Pizza’s latest marketing gimmick, the Big Brother the public fears may actually turn out to be, well, us.

Domino’s has installed a live webcam feed in a Salt Lake City, Utah, store so that online customers can watch their pies being made live from scratch in real time. As PR professionals, we are constantly clamoring about the importance of transparency and the inevitable perils that result from a lack of it. Transparency builds trust, brand loyalty and is the foundation of solid brand-consumer relationships. But is this taking transparency too far? Read more

PETA is the crazy aunt Esther of public relations. You never know what she is going to say or do, and in a way you kind of love her for it. In many regards PETA is synonymous with public relations, because much of the public associates the brand with one of its many controversial campaigns.

From leveraging the power of human sexuality to animal cruelty, PETA has always managed to gain the public’s attention. This time, however, PETA is focusing its efforts on a more select audience: the stockholders at SeaWorld. PETA paid $2,273.70 for 80 shares of SeaWorld stock, which went public on April 19. With money comes access, and that amount is just enough to provide PETA access to SeaWorld’s annual meetings where it can promote its agenda and ask for policy changes.

SeaWorld, unsurprisingly, is not happy. PETA vehemently disapproves of SeaWorld’s very existence, claiming the park enslaves wildlife such as orca whales and profits from the imprisoning and display of animals. The treatment of animals is an emotional issue that resonates with the public, no matter where they stand on the issue. This makes the confrontation compelling for anyone in our industry. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.

Both PETA and SeaWorld claim that education is critical to winning over the public. PETA wants the public to understand SeaWorld’s true practices and motivations; SeaWorld wants the public to understand PETA’s true practices and motivations. Both believe they own the higher moral ground.

PETA has clearly been very successful at creating controversy, and by creating this controversy it can claim PR success the same way modern art—no matter how untalented and confusing—can achieve legitimacy by compelling people to talk about art. But industry experts know that emotions come and go.

To win the public the facts must prevail.

As bloggers covering the PR industry, we have to say we’re a little tired of hearing about campaigns characterizing companies and brands as “socially responsible” when we know they’re anything but. The public, however, remains receptive — so you’d better start working to paint all your clients in a “greener” light.

How do we know this? Because the CSR marketing specialists at Good Must Grow released a study. The primary conclusion drawn from interviews with more than 1000 Americans is that “purpose driven consumers” plan to spend an even greater share of their money on socially responsible companies and products in the years to come.

A full 30% of respondents said they want to spend more money on responsible companies’ products in 2013 than they did in 2012. Most importantly, the number of people who said “yes” to that question nearly doubled in a single year. Other numbers: 25% of respondents avoided buying products from companies they believed were not socially responsible — and considerable majorities called reducing consumption levels and contributing to like-minded nonprofits “important” actions.

The study provides some interesting PR guidelines — and the company’s website also features some PDFs with useful tips for brands looking to stand out in the increasingly crowded “green” space.