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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Kent State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication earned a bit of bad PR today for pulling what we call “a dick move“: choosing not to renew the contract of a non-tenure instructor who helped create its groundbreaking online PR masters program.

The summary: Kent State hired Gene Sasso, a longtime PR pro, to help create a program that has “generated $6M in revenue” over two years and then told him that it would not consider his review and that he would not be returning as a lecturer.

It would appear that the school let Sasso go in order to save a little money (after he created the highly successful program for which they hired him in the first place). While non-tenured professors get a performance/renewal review every year, tenured faculty only have to do it every three years–and after passing their first review they receive additional “union employment protection.”

Students and faculty registered their dissent, submitting letters to university administrators urging them to reconsider,  chastising them for deciding to terminate a popular lecturer without consulting faculty ahead of time and questioning whether the school followed union collective bargaining practices.

One question: We understand the financial concerns at work here, but how did the administration, with their communications know-how, not recognize this move as a major PR fail?

Twitter hacking is the big thing this week! After hackers turned Burger King into McDonald’s yesterday (and did their best to promote rappers T-Shyne and Chief Keef), the same team hijacked Jeep this morning and turned it into another joke-fest with tweets like this one, which we can only present to you in RT form:

RT @jeep: You’ll never catch @50cent ridin in a Dirty Ass @jeep !!!! #ForDaLuLz #FreeJeep

— PRNewser (@PRNewser) February 19, 2013

This afternoon, reports and tweets named MTV and BET as the latest victims of the hacker wave. One problem, though: they were faking it.

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Thanks to our friends at Arment Dietrich‘s Spin Sucks blog (follow them on Twitter!) and Andy Crestodina‘s book Content Chemistry for bringing us this story of terrible PR practices. In summary: A PR firm did the worst thing it possibly could have done in terms of Internet publicity, getting its own client’s website blacklisted from Google‘s search results by copying and pasting content from the client’s page into a press release and sending it out to thousands through online newswires.

The problem? Google’s search algorithm really hates duplicate content and looks to punish those who distribute it (for good reason) because, while providing your own spin on someone else’s content is acceptable, passing their work off as your own is not. So Google marked the company’s homepage as spam and removed it from all relevant search results. This story ended well only because the client’s web firm was able to file a request with Google explaining the PR team’s mistake.

The lesson here? Use SEO guidelines and write your own damn content! Don’t fall into this unnamed firm’s “do as little work as possible” stereotype!

Paypal co-founder/insanely rich guy Elon Musk isn’t afraid to defend his far-out ideas, be they successfully marketing an electric automobile or convincing rich people to move to his future colony on Mars.

But can he fight back against what CNBC calls “Tesla’s PR #EpicFail“? His auto company’s latest electric car, the Model S, won Motor Trend‘s car of the year award among a wave of very positive reviews, but The New York Times auto critic John M. Broder‘s test drive didn’t go so well.

Despite being a “technical wonder”, the car ran out of juice in cold weather when its battery died and the writer, having no access to one of the company’s remote “Supercharger” stations, had to call a towing company. The Tesla brand’s stock took a hit, inspiring Musk to lash out on Twitter. The funniest part of this four-wheel drama? Not only did Musk pitch the story to the Times in the first place, he apparently called the critic to apologize for the experience and offer him a second test drive before calling him a liar in public.

NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn’t actually charge to max & took a long detour.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 11, 2013

This is a strange damage control strategy, no?

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