Why, for the love of all that is decent, human, and empathetic, haven’t brands figured out that it is never okay to exploit a tragedy that irreversibly altered and ended human lives?

In the hot seat for today’s installment of who the hell let this company near a Twitter feed, is food website Epicurious. In the wake of the horrific events at Monday’s Boston Marathon, the company tweeted this to its 385,000 followers:

As a lifetime Massachusetts resident, I was particularly appalled and offended by this gross, clumsy, and unfathomably insensitive attempt at self-promotion. The suggestion that a recipe for cranberry scones or a bowl of cereal could somehow alleviate the sense of fear and loss that swept Boston, Massachusetts, and the country after the explosions would be laughable if it weren’t so terrible.

And then, instead of making real, human apologies or taking any meaningful steps to backtrack or make up for their offense, Epicurious chose to simply tweet the same cookie-cutter mea culpa over and over again: Read more

Today in No, You’re Not a Company Spokesperson news: last week some gamer blogs let their readers know that the new Microsoft Xbox, scheduled for a reveal in May, will require users to maintain “an active internet connection” at all times. Now get ready for a shocker: some people who own Xboxes do not have access to an “always on” connection — and the geeks voiced their disapproval online.

Now for the PR Fail: This outrage irritated creative director Adam Orth, who took to his personal Twitter feed to let the world know it. This message started a conversation in which Orth told the concerned parties that they were just out of luck:Orth made a couple of mistakes here: first, he commented on a story that his employer had yet to announce publicly. More importantly, he effectively told members of his own fanbase to stop complaining.

Microsoft didn’t care for that one bit, and we’ll let Brad Pitt tell you why:

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There is no greater evidence that a public relations debacle has become part of the cultural consciousness than making Saturday Night Live — so today we offer our very bittersweet congratulations to Rutgers University for finding its way into the zeitgeist via a big old PR fail.

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OK, this isn’t funny anymore. Yesterday the Carnival Triumph — the very same cruise ship that tempted many journalists to turn the phrase “poop deck” into a horrible pun — broke loose from a dock near Mobile, Alabama, and knocked two people into the Mobile River. One of the men is still missing. Thankfully, no passengers were aboard and all staffers have been accounted for.

The ship drifted for several hours before being returned to its dock position and surrounded by tugboats for good measure. The cause of this incident was “hurricane-force winds” in the gulf that had nothing to do with Carnival — but of course that doesn’t matter a whole lot to the public.

We honestly don’t know what Carnival can do to combat the cascade of bad news beyond what it’s already done: issuing sincere public apologies, offering refunds to everyone involved and getting ready to defend itself from a class-action lawsuit. Last month New York Senator Chuck Schumer proposed a “bill of rights” for cruise passengers that would give them more power in the case of such technical failures and require every ship to have both a backup power source and a team trained in emergency response.

We have a strong suspicion that the cruise industry doesn’t like Schumer’s proposal. But it’s not like they have any other options at this point.

Everyone is created equally and everyone should be treated equally. We all know this. These very ideas are the foundation for our deep beliefs in justice and equality.

So what about Samoa Air‘s decision to charge passengers by the pound — yes, the sum total of the weight of their bags and bodies — to fly? Nothing could be more fair than that, right?

At the local store we all pay the same amount for a pound of hamburger meat, or a box of tissues or a pair of jeans. Fair is fair. So why is Samoa Air’s decision to charge the public the same rate per pound to fly so controversial? Answer: because this is the worst public relations decision a brand can make. It may sound good in theory, but in practice it’s a PR disaster because it’s discriminatory, cruel and ignorant.

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The public doesn’t appreciate brands that cross invisible but well-established lines in our culture, particularly in the name of greed. For example, don’t break out your storefront Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving Day. Oh, and don’t sell lingerie to girls who are still convinced they’re going to marry Justin Bieber under a rainbow.

By selling lingerie to the “tween” demographic, Victoria’s Secret has broken all sorts of unspoken public relations rules, most importantly “don’t piss off parents”. (We had a feeling this wasn’t going to go over well.) Brands attempting to court the tween demographic should remember one fact: these girls are too young to legally hold jobs, so their primary source of income (and purchasing decisions) is their parents.

Apparently Victoria’s Secret forgot this, didn’t think parents were paying attention, or honestly didn’t believe there was anything inappropriate about a tween girl and her divorced father’s new girlfriend going shopping together for something hot and spicy at the local VS.

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Every neighborhood in America has one: that creepy guy who slowly drives around our streets in that weird car during the middle of day, downloading information as our kids play stick ball in the cul-de-sac.

What’s the name of that guy, again? Oh, yeah: Google.

Google has agreed to pay $7 million in a suit filed by 38 states and Washington, D.C., accusing the “Do No Evil” brand of cruising through local neighborhoods in its Street View cars and downloading information from unprotected wireless networks. Yikes. That’s bad.

As industry experts we constantly beat the PR drum on personal privacy, that one aspect of daily life that the public absolutely refuses to trifle with. In short, if you threaten the public’s personal privacy then you’d better be prepared to assemble your crisis communications team at 3am, because you’re asking for trouble. Considering its extensive reach into our lives, Google has maintained a safe distance—or at least the appearance of a safe distance—from achieving a degree of power that would allow it to ruin our lives by pressing a few keys on the keyboard.

But that image is fading.

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No matter what E.L. James tells you, the professional world still values the ability to write well–and that invaluable skill includes the nearly forgotten art of copy editing. We mention this fact because sometimes tiny little errors can be both costly and embarrassing.

In case you don’t live in New York City (congratulations), the Metropolitan Transportation Authority just earned the ill will of all eight million of us city folk by raising the price of a single subway fare from $2.25 to $2.50. The MTA’s communications team, however, does not appear to have received the message: the organization printed out thousands of updated maps that still listed the minimum price of a pay-per-ride subway card at $4.50 (it’s now $5).

Of course, all those thousands of maps are now useless. The price to correct this incredibly simple mistake? A quarter of a million dollars. That may not be a lot for an organization that serves so many people every day, but it does give us a great opportunity to make a point: your voice matters. Whether writing materials for yourself, your firm or your client, make sure you edit everything twice. Misspellings on your own Facebook page are fine–but awful as grammar and punctuation on the social network may be, those errors never cost anybody so much for so little.

If there’s one trend we’d like to kill deader than the Harlem Shake, it’s “Keep Calm and Carry On”. Now comes news that will hopefully mark the end of this meme: Amazon is in a big pot of extra-hot PR water after briefly carrying a series of T-shirts bearing charming slogans like “Keep Calm and Hit Her”, “Keep Calm and Knife Her” and the winner, “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot.”

We think we speak for everyone when we say “Yikes.”

Here’s the dish: over the weekend, said shirts appeared on the site via a super classy Australian third-party retailer known as Solid Gold Bomb which has partnered with Amazon in the past. A public uproar quickly followed, with Britain’s shadow culture secretary calling on Amazon to make an immediate and “substantial” donation to a refuge for abused women. Amazon quickly removed the pages, but as you can see from the image above, screenshots live forever..

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Today in Did They Really Think This Would Work news, the “baby-naming website” Belly Ballot just admitted that its “let the Internet name your baby and win free money” promotional stunt, which managed to get a lot of media attention last week, wasn’t even remotely true.

Thanks to a tipster with a guilty conscience and some investigative journalism on behalf of The Today Show‘s Moms blog, we now know that the woman named as the winner of the $5,000 contest is a professional actress–and she’s not even pregnant.

A “struggling single mom” named Natasha Hill supposedly won after submitting an essay about why she should be the one to let the wi-fi equipped public name her baby and claim the $5,000 prize. If the name turned out to be something lame like Aiden or Facebook? “There’s always a nickname.”

But there was no contest. There were no contestants. There was no baby.

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