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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Today we bring you a guest post courtesy of Cara Kleinhaut, founder of award-winning event creative, production and design agency Caravents. In the last few weeks alone, Caravents has organized and promoted events ranging from the Essence Black Women of Hollywood pre-Oscar week luncheon to InStyle‘s annual Golden Globes beauty lounge, the Playboy Superbowl party in New Orleans and a D.C. inauguration event sponsored by Target.

Here Cara presents 5 best practices and two case studies in effective social media event promotion and “activation.”

5 Best Practices for Social Media Activation at Big Events

• Create a short, easy event hashtag. Be fun, relevant and clever when coming up with the hashtag. (Example: #MLKDay2013)
• Showcase @handles and #hashtags prominently throughout the event on all printed materials, signage, screens, etc. This will make it easy for people to talk about your event on social media.

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The press, which happens to consist of a bunch of nerds, gave President Obama a bit of flack today for supposedly confusing the Star Wars “Jedi Mind Trick” with the Star Trek “Vulcan Mind Meld”, thereby creating the “Jedi Mind Meld” meme during a speech on some extremely important topic that we’d rather not think about right now. But the White House communications team was more than ready:

We must bring balance to the Force. #Sequester #JediMindMeld twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…

— The White House (@whitehouse) March 1, 2013

Hey Oreo, looks like the folks in government know a thing or two about “real-time marketing”. And yes, the “mind meld” URL does link to a page detailing the President’s deficit reduction plan. The team may not have been as quick on the draw as Han Solo or the cookie guys, but they did paint their sci-fi critics as “a bunch of stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking Nerf herders.”

Have you been following the latest, dumbest political media scandal? We hope you answered “no”, because this one is a real doozy. It’s a classic case of “hack” vs. “flack” that will feel very familiar to anyone who has spent some time in PR or journalism.

To summarize: Bob Woodward, the veteran reporter who was one-half of the team that exposed the Watergate scandal leading to Richard Nixon’s resignation, had a mildly testy exchange with a White House rep over the pending “sequester” drama. Essentially, if the two parties can’t agree on a mix of new revenue and spending cuts, a big rash of cuts that they set up last year precisely to avoid this sort of showdown will go into effect. It’s basically President Obama versus the House of Representatives, so…politics as usual.

Alright, now what’s the “controversy”–and how does it relate to PR? Glad you asked!

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Don’t you just hate it when people (especially anonymous people) spread false claims about yourself or your clients? Everybody does! This week’s journalistic hackery scandal isn’t really our stock in trade, but it is certainly an interesting one for anyone concerned with promoting stories and earning media mentions for clients.

Here’s the summary: in January President Obama nominated Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator, for the Secretary of Defense position. Unfriendly media outlets soon began running stories about Hagel’s supposed ties to anti-Israel advocacy organizations, eventually dropping the ominous name “Friends of Hamas.”

Whatever Hagel’s politics may be, there is no such group–but that fact didn’t stop the story from spreading.

Today a reporter for the New York Daily News published a column identifying himself as the (unintentional) source of the smear. Dan Friedman called a source within the U.S. Senate two weeks ago to ask whether there might be any truth to rumors, floated by Hagel opponents, that accused him of making paid appearances before anti-Israel groups. Friedman jokingly suggested the names “Friends of Hamas” and “Junior League of Hezbollah.”

Things only went downhill from there.

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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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Indisputable fact: Americans love football. Pretty much every member of every key demographic watches the Super Bowl, even if we’re more concerned with the commercials. But anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with the sport also knows that American football has a big PR problem best summed up in three words: traumatic brain injury.

Is this an old story? Yes–but it’s not going away anytime soon, and eventually the NFL will have to address it to the satisfaction of the public.

The family of former star Junior Seau, who committed suicide in May 2012, filed a wrongful death suit against the league last week. The suit cites Seau’s post-mortem TBI diagnosis and blames the NFL for a perceived lack of oversight in warning players about the negative long-term effects of all those concussions (they’re also suing the company that makes players’ helmets). This is not an isolated case: over the past few years more than 3,800 former players have sued the league in more than 175 independent cases. Is the NFL really to blame for their injuries? We can’t say–but it’s a classic PR conundrum.

Perhaps most importantly, President Obama brought the story back to the nation’s attention right before the Big Game in a recent interview with the rebranded New Republic magazine, saying:

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We recently wondered about some of the NRA‘s throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks PR strategies, from the ad focusing on President Obama‘s daughters to the extremely misguided decision to release a video game for kids right after blaming video games for gun violence that resulted in the deaths of 20 young children.

This weekend brought a New York Times report on the organization’s ongoing efforts to promote “recreational shooting” to younger audiences via assorted PR initatives and partnerships. While most would assume that the Times and the NRA are not exactly best buds, this report was less a hit piece than a PR strategy review.

In short, the NRA needs to ensure the continued growth of its membership, and in order to do that the organization works to find ways to make gun culture more appealing to young people in the interest of “recruiting and retaining” teen hunters and target shooters. Makes sense, right? Here’s the challenge: “introducing minors to activities that involve products they cannot legally buy and that require a high level of maturity.”

We know how tough it can be to make products appealing when members of your target audience can’t legally own them…

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There’s little doubt that inaugurations rank right up there with State of the Union addresses when it comes to PR and branding opportunities for newly elected presidents. In fact, we’d say inaugurations are the bigger of the two PR blowouts, because very few see the State of the Union as an excuse to party (and no, silly drinking games that we all regret in the morning do not count).

Despite being smaller than Obama’s first inauguration in every way, this year’s event predictably prompted a “social media explosion” that managed to knock the mighty Twitter out of service for a moment or two. The fact that so many more people got “social” this year than in 2009 despite the lower turnout confirms something we already knew–that social media has become an ever more integral part of public and private life over the past four years.

The White House tweeted everything from its official account and the administration’s media team created an @obamainaugural profile strictly dedicated to the event. Even the usually restrained First Lady joined the fray last week. This clip was the public’s favorite reminder of our hyper-connected society:

Now that the ceremonies are over, we thought we’d take the opportunity to quickly analyze other experts’ analysis of the themes President Obama chose to publicize during his second inauguration ceremony–and to see how they performed on the various social media channels.

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We know that a PR professional’s job often includes telling powerful people what to say–and when to say it. Today we feel fairly safe offering this little nugget of wisdom to every client: Unless you’re a left-wing Eastern European politician, never use the words “fascist” or “fascism” to describe your opponents, no matter who they may be. It’s never appropriate, and it always makes you look like an ass. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey recently learned that lesson.

Mackey stepped into the national health care debate back in 2009, when he penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that President Obama‘s signature health care overhaul was a form of “socialism” that would ultimately lead to complete government control over our nation’s health care system.

Now he’s hitting the various media outlets to promote his book Conscious Capitalism, which apparently details the ways in which certain businesses (his own included, of course) make the world a better place without the interference of the big, bad government. While visiting NPR‘s “Morning Edition“, he turned his previous criticism on its head, arguing that:

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