Yesterday’s Q&A concerned Teneshia Jackson-Warner‘s vision of a PR/marketing industry focused on “serving” rather than “selling”–or providing work that truly improves both the lives of a given brand’s customers and the communities in which they live.

It’s a tall order. Firms adopting Jackson-Warner’s model would move beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects that are–let’s be honest–almost always designed to improve public perceptions of a brand rather than the lives of people touched by that brand.

These considerations leave us very interested in the most recent study conducted by the Reputation Institute, which asks whether CSR efforts are worth the time and money required. The study’s conclusion: In most cases, they’re probably not. As the Institute’s recent Forbes guest post puts it, CSR isn’t necessarily dead–it’s just “mismanaged.”

Interesting. How so?

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Finally, thanks to Tide Pods, laundry-doers everywhere have been delivered from the painstaking multitude of steps required to open a bottle of laundry detergent, measure it out in the cap and pour it into the washing machine. Rejoice!

The convenient, colorful, pre-measured pouches have been advertized as the biggest laundry innovation in a generation, and the public seems to agree — Tide forecasts $500 million in earnings from Pods’ first year of sales. And this fact is even more remarkable given the parade of PR hiccups that the product has encountered since its release in February.

First: thanks to supply shortages, Pods came to market six months late lacking the retail promotions usually afforded new products. In fact, the supply shortage is still something of an issue–Tide keeps smaller packs in storage and excludes the product from all company coupons.

Tide’s biggest PR challenge, however, concerns repeated reports of children eating the small, brightly-colored Pods.

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Friday’s horrific violence in Newtown, Connecticut, understandably dominated every corner of the American media this weekend.

Many citizens (most prominently President Obama) spoke of taking every available step to prevent similar shootings in the future while others warned against politicizing the tragedy. Quite a few Americans also had energetic debates about gun control, both online and off. Even West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who built a campaign around disagreeing with his party’s leaders on gun rights, suggested that the nation must now have a “sensible” dialogue on gun control.

Nearly every business and organization in the country, from The National School Board to a group representing the families of Virginia Tech shooting victims, made some sort of official statement. Yet the nonprofit at the center of America’s relationship with guns was conspicuously silent: The National Rifle Association has not released an official statement or tweet since the tragedy, and its Facebook page is no longer visible today. While officials at both the NRA and Facebook have not responded to requests for comment, bloggers at TechCrunch speculated that the group took its page offline in order to “avoid hosting flame wars” between commentors on opposing sides of the gun control issue. Knowing the nature of online debates as well as we do, we think that was a very good idea.

We sympathize with the NRA’s position from a PR perspective:

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We’re usually more concerned with the acts of PR departments than Editorial departments, but today the always-classy New York Post reached a new low by publishing a photo of a man about to be crushed by a subway train.

Cue inevitable outrage.

In a terrible tragedy that involves one of New Yorkers’ top fears, a Queens-based businessman and father approached a panhandler who’d been harassing midtown commuters during rush hour traffic–and the man responded by pushing him onto the subway tracks, where he was crushed to death by an oncoming train. A freelance photographer standing in the station captured the scene but didn’t have time to help the man to safety before the train arrived. (If you want to see the full picture, you’ll need to click on the Gawker link—we’re not going to post it here.)

A few points:

• As far as we know, the New York Post has never been a reputable brand. Its editors can publish all the Charles Krauthammer they want but the public will still see their paper as a cheap tabloid.
• Of course the rag chose the photo because they knew it would be controversial.
• By posting on the “scandal”, we’re probably being a little hypocritical by driving more attention toward a mag and site that we don’t like.

All these things are true. And yet, we have to ask: At what point do tasteless stories like these become a burden for the Post? Does its public image even matter, or has it become the East Coast equivalent of TMZ–completely immune to criticism?

We recently reported on the NYPD‘s social media unit and the department’s new-found skill in using Facebook and Twitter to track down criminals. Turns out New York City cops and their spokespeople also know how to use social media to generate some positive PR.

Here’s the story: On November 14, a tourist wandering through Times Square happened upon an officer tending to a barefoot homeless man. According to Officer Lawrence DePrimo, “It was freezing out and you could see the blisters on the man’s feet”–so he decided to stop in a nearby store and buy the guy a new pair of boots. The tourist snapped this photo of DePrimo presenting the boots, shared it, and presto–it went viral, quickly accumulating 350,000 likes, 90,000 shares and 22,000 comments on the department’s Facebook page.

As the photo made its way around the Internet thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others, thousands voiced support for the NYPD–even those who “have a grudge against law enforcement everywhere”. In a follow-up interview with The New York Times, DePrimo said he keeps the receipt in his pocket “to remind me that sometimes people have it worse”. Some commenters wondered whether the picture had been staged, but it still looks like a big PR win to us.

We understand why the NYPD would be very cautious when it comes to social media, but they’re clearly learning: A quick glance at the department’s photo stream reveals pics of the Macy’s parade as well as visits to senior centers and schools for autistic children alongside the usual gun seizures and awards ceremonies.

What do we think? Was this pic a fluke, or is the NYPD learning how to use social media to improve its image with the public?

Over the years, retailers have begun opening earlier and earlier on Black Friday in order to make the most of the biggest shopping day of the year. This bottom line-driven phenomenon is not-so-lovingly known as “Black Friday creep,” conjuring images of something amorphous and sinister rolling slowly through the night to overtake Thanksgiving — and that’s not too far off, really.

Just ask Casey St. Clair, a Target employee whose recent petition to get the retail giant to stay closed on Thanksgiving night (rather than opening with Black Friday deals at 9:00 pm as scheduled) inspired a veritable revolt among retail employees and customers alike.

Her email via Change.org read, in part:

In the last week, over 230,000 people have signed my petition asking my employer, Target, to change its Black Friday shopping hours to let employees have Thanksgiving dinner with our families.

We have real momentum, and this Monday, I’ll be delivering my petition with over 230,000 signatures to Target Headquarters – click here to join us and add your name.

After I was on TV, my manager offered me Thanksgiving day off. But I declined. This isn’t about just me — it’s about respecting one of the few days retail workers have a year to spend time with loved ones.

While Target is certainly not alone in opening on Thanksgiving (Toys “R” Us, Walmart, Sears and KMart will be the first large retail chains to open with Black Friday sales at 8:00 pm), it has received the brunt of the public’s ire thanks to the petition.

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We love Ikea for its particleboard dorm-room tables, its interactive catalogs and its maze-like retail monoliths–masterpieces of psychological trickery designed to make it impossible for visitors to leave without walking past every single cupboard and toothbrush holder stocked in the company’s massive basement warehouses.

But this week we learned that Ikea hasn’t always been a group of good guys distributing meatballs and cheap full-length mirrors to Americans on a budget. While the company’s “official code of conduct” currently includes “zero tolerance for child and forced labor”, its European executives apparently didn’t feel any ethical qualms about utilizing prison labor in the 70’s and 80’s.

A recent report on Ikea’s past practices by auditor Ernst and Young–which the company requested after outside parties accused it of using slave labor–revealed that the workers who made some of the company’s signature furniture in its East German factories didn’t work by choice: they were prisoners who’d been sentenced to hard labor due to their political beliefs, which in most cases amounted to opposing the Soviet-backed Communist government after the post-war division of Germany. Seems like Ikea had a “don’t ask, don’t tell”-style arrangement with its Eastern partners.

Ikea can’t claim ignorance either; the Ernst and Young report found that company executives received tip-offs about the practice but did nothing to curb it.

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Muck Rack’s Gregory Galant begins his latest CNN piece on the state of the PR world with a few unsettling facts:

• US companies spend $150 billion annually on advertising and only $5 billion on public relations
• Advertising professionals make up to 75% more than their PR counterparts
• MBA courses in public relations are far rarer than courses in advertising
• When it comes to pop culture figures, advertising has Don Draper while PR has…Samantha on Sex and the City. Not a fair match, is it?

No matter what the public thinks of the public relations industry, we all know how important it is—and so do the people in power. Steve Jobs himself often served as Apple’s pitchman, calling The Wall Street Journal reporters at home to hype his company’s latest tech innovations.

OK, so why don’t the unwashed masses give us the respect we so obviously deserve? The reasons are clear enough:

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Yesterday, quite a few food fanatics shared The New York Times writer Pete Wells’s epic takedown of Guy Fieri’s new Times Square restaurant. Wells wrote the review as a series of scathing rhetorical questions for the chain’s founder. Examples include:

• “Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex?”
• “Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are?”
• “What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?”

He keeps going for two pages; it’s a little intense.

We really like Pete Wells. He’s a true “subject matter expert”, and nearly every major media outlet mentioned his review at some point over the past 48 hours.

Here’s the thing, though: his write-up (and the many other negative reviews sure to follow) probably won’t hurt the restaurant’s business or damage the multimillion dollar Fieri brand. The Guy isn’t known for the quality of his food; he’s known for being a regular Joe who shows up on TV all the time looking like a he just lost a dare involving a vat filled with Axe hair gel and bleach. The whole point of his show is that mediocre food is fun, and he’s very good at marketing and product placement.

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Apple may have a bit of a PR problem on its hands thanks to a former executive who doesn’t seem to mind voicing his very frank opinions of the company’s top brass to all interested parties.

David Sobotta spent nearly twenty years in sales at what is now the most valuable business in history. He started writing an Apple-centric blog after leaving the company in 2004, and last month he published “The Pomme Company“, an e-book offering readers a “look inside one of America’s most secretive companies” from someone who was there for the long haul.

Apple execs, however, are more concerned with an interview between the writer and Dan Lyons of Readwrite titled “What’s It Like to Work for Tim Cook“. Turns out Sobotta wasn’t a big fan!

Sobotta calls Cook “one of the three people directly responsible for saving Apple” and admires the chief’s chutzphah; he wasn’t surprised by the decision to cut two top execs loose last month in a management shake-up move. But he refers to the current CEO as a technological “lightweight” who has “no personal loyalty”. He doesn’t have anything good to say about Cook’s management style either, claiming that “The people I saw him hire were not good ones” and that “he is poor judge of character.”

His final proclamation? “It is going to get worse at Apple. It is not a sustainable business culture.”

Wow, that’s more than a little harsh, Dave. Tell us what you really think!

Will Sobotta prove to be a big problem for Cook and Apple, or this just more of the usual Silicon Valley infighting, best ignored by all but fanboys and tech bloggers?