In case you didn’t realize it, today is “World Water Day“, an event first created by the United Nations in 1993 to bring attention to the chronic lack of sanitary drinking water that affects one billion people in the developing world. charity: water, a New York nonprofit founded in 2006 to more directly address that very problem, has displayed its mastery of social media on several fronts today, and we’d like to review them briefly.

• Public events: the organization created a “Waterwalk” event in Times Square and other locations around the world in order to highlight the fact that many poor individuals have to walk several miles a day carrying heavy “jerry cans” to secure water that might not even be safe to drink. The org set these cans on the sidewalk to encourage the public to “walk in their shoes”, then posted photos of related events from Paris to midtown Manhattan on its Instagram page.

• The “Pledge Your Birthday” project: Here charity: water created a nice viral promo campaign by encouraging fans to promise that, when their next birthday comes around, they will create their own social “fundraising page” with the charity’s help and encourage all their friends to make donations. Tens of thousands of people have already done it, and the average user raises several hundred dollars for the cause. That’s a nice chunk of change.

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Seems like everyone is copying the work of others these days–even noted wordsmith Chuck Norris has been caught red-handed. The two men at the center of this hot topic are very different personalities—and both the charges leveled against them and the public’s reaction to their respective PR crises have been very different as well. Fareed Zakaria is a respected journalist and TV news personality while Jonah Lehrer is (or, more accurately, was) a rising writer, speaker, and acknowledged expert in the realms of neurology and human behavior.

What, exactly, did they do?

Zakaria copied a paragraph of a Time article on gun control from an earlier New Yorker piece by historian Jill Lepore. CNN also found that one of his blog posts for CNN.com “contained similar unattributed quotes.” When accused of other acts of sloppy journalism, he lashed out at critics before backing down.

Lehrer’s first crime was plagiarizing himself—observers discovered that he often repeated passages that had appeared in previous columns or books. While this was bad news for Lehrer, it wasn’t necessarily the end of the world. Unfortunately, further investigations uncovered a disturbing history of similar behavior during his time at Wired and other publications. And that wasn’t the worst of it: The final, damning revelation was the fact that Lehrer had straight-up invented nonexistent Bob Dylan quotes for his bestselling book “Imagine”—and when pressed on his offense, he denied it and made more false claims before breaking down and confessing to his own dishonesty.

The saddest part about these stories is that both writers remain very talented, very busy men who obviously bit off more than they could chew. What conclusions can we, as PR and media professionals, draw from their cases?

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We had to post 2010 PR predictions from David Moye, media relations manager at San Diego agency Alternative Strategies after he wrote in and said, “Not only am I in PR, but I have worked as a psychic in the past – doing readings for celebrities like Chuck Norris and Bret Michaels.”

Moye’s thoughts business prospects for 2010:

I am seeing folks who spent 2009 trying to secure their base and now want to expand their business. I am already getting interest from potential new clients and I believe that business owners are realizing they have to do something to stick out from the competition.

The biggest PR story of 2010 will be…

More and more businesses specializing in crisis management will adopt a pay-by-performance model in order to show the true value of their services. The impetus will come after Tiger Woods fires his PR folks for their mishandling of his scandal.

RELATED: 2010 PR Predictions: A New Player Will Emerge To Challenge Facebook Supremacy

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