Full disclosure: we recently Googled a friend from long ago to see what he/she had been up to in recent years and found ourselves confronted by an entire images page filled with mugshots. Is there a point to this sad story? There is! Yesterday our sister site Social Times (follow them on Twitter!) posted an interview on a topic that should be of interest to anyone in PR: the art of online reputation management. The primary lesson stressed by Mike Zammuto, president of rep management firm Reputation Changer, is “fight negative content with more (positive) content.”

What does that mean?

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Social media has recently taught us that restaurant receipts, when posted and shared online, can provide brands with a lot of press that can be either very good or very bad. This week The Consumerist asks: are some restaurants now attempting to hijack that trend by posting complementary receipts online themselves in the hope of earning some great PR? Here’s the Reddit photo that prompted the question:

Notice that every item has been comped. According to the user’s story, he was out for dinner at Olive Garden when his three-year-old daughter responded to the restaurant manager’s “how is everything” query by telling him that her grandparents’ house had just burned down. The manager then effectively gave the party a free meal. Sounds like great customer service, right? Maybe not.

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“Showrooming” is a relatively new phenomenon in the retail world, but it appears to be growing. It’s basically the act of visiting a physical store, checking out the prices on the items you want, then buying them online for less. (We assume celebrities hire people to do this sort of thing, but what do we know.)

So customers walk around stores armed with their smartphones, checking to make sure they can get that TV or iPad a little cheaper on Amazon. It’s a big deal for retailers because, of course, their ultimate goal to encourage browsers to actually buy stuff. And they’re dealing with it in different ways.

Best Buy, for example, rolled out a promo campaign to combat “showrooming” by promising consumers that it would match or beat the price offered by local and online retailers for every product in stock. Bold move, but this week Reddit users found an Australian specialty foods retailer with an even more brazen approach: charging customers $5 just to browse.

Frankly, we don’t think this approach will work. It implies that the retailer simply doesn’t trust the public — which is a terrible PR move. If it were a high-end store then charging visitors $5 to look around might make sense. But don’t most people visit the Gucci store just to browse anyway? It’s not like anyone can actually afford that stuff.

It’s been nearly ten years since Dove introduced “Real Beauty“, one of the 2000′s best rebranding campaigns. Its focus on “real-looking” models helped distinguish Dove in the crowded beauty category–and the company’s Canadian division just used a crafty PR stunt to try and extend that winning streak.

First Dove posted a download on Reddit that supposedly offered users a free tool to help retouch photographs by “enhanc[ing] skin tone” and “hiding all the imperfections”–in other words, all the things that Dove’s campaign opposed. But when users pressed the button, this “tool” reversed all the modifications to the image in question. (They could then “undo” the reversal, but the point had been made.)

This “hack” was a sneaky attempt to once again push the claim that Dove keeps things real in an industry dominated by digital tummy tucks, facelifts and tone-ups. In the video below, the company directly calls out “art directors, graphic designers and photo retouchers” for using Photoshop and other tools to promote unrealistic ideals  (never mind the fact that Dove has been accused of doing the very same thing).

Oh, and this is all part of a larger campaign which includes the hashtag #DovePositiveChange and a Facebook “Ad makeover” app which purportedly lets users revise ad spots designed to play on insecurities by promising to help women improve their appearance.

So is this another branding win for Dove, or do they need to stop pushing the same old concept?

Most viral restaurant stories concern customers, bosses and co-workers behaving very badly–but today Reddit has finally provided us with something to laugh about: a Washington State eatery gave one family a special discount for “well-behaved kids.”

As young, childless urbanites, we always assumed that the whole “terribly behaved kids who spill food everywhere, run around the dining area and refuse to shut the hell up” phenomenon was a modern-day big city phenomenon (or a Portlandia sketch that we haven’t seen yet). Color us corrected: young kids everywhere apparently have trouble being quiet and respectful in public settings!

The family involved in this story (with kids aged 2, 3 and 8) had eaten at Seattle-area Italian wine bar/ristorante Sogno di Vino “a handful of times”–but at the end of their most recent meal a server made a point of telling them that most of the staff “didn’t even notice the kids since they were so well-behaved” before giving them all a free bowl of ice cream and deducting $4 from their total. Here’s the receipt:

Now the mom behind the meme has responded to all the hype…

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Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant should be able to relate to this viral story: Last week a pastor at a St. Louis-area church took her congregation to dinner at Applebee’s after the service. Apparently unaware that 18% gratuities are standard practice for parties of six or more at every restaurant ever, the pastor refused to pay the total.

Even worse, she scrawled a note on the receipt explaining her decision. It read: “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18″. The understandably pissed server took a picture and a second waitress shared it on Reddit under the headline “My mistake sir, I’m sure Jesus will pay for my rent and groceries”.

Then things got a little crazy.

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Promoting a Hollywood blockbuster is a massive project, especially when you’re working with a very well-established franchise. Sometimes it’s tough to break through the media onslaught and let your core fan base know how much they mean to the property.

Today Hollywood fantasy man JJ Abrams, whose Star Trek Into Darkness will undoubtedly be one of 2013′s biggest sequels, scored a bit of great PR that almost—almost—makes us forgive him for all the hours we lost to Lost.

Star Trek is one of the most resilient entertainment franchises around, due in large part to the oft-mocked intensity of its biggest fans. Right around Christmas, one of those fans posted a heart-breaking request to the Reddit Star Trek subgroup on behalf of a friend whose wife describes him as an “amazingly healthy film buff” who recently received a devastating diagnosis: a severe vascular tumor that leaves him with “weeks to live.”

The man had a very specific wish for his remaining days: to see Star Trek Into Darkness before its official release in May. The post made its way around the Internet after Christmas, and today brought news that Abrams had seen the request and responded. According to the sick man’s wife, he already attended a private screening of the film nearly six months before its official release date. We are very impressed by Abrams’s response–and by the Star Trek web community’s ability to rally around one of its own.

This is kind of a no-brainer, guys. The move doesn’t just make JJ Abrams look like a nice guy; it makes him look like a director who understands and values the passion of his biggest fans. That’s enough to make us smile and leave us looking forward to the film’s May debut. Well played.

Today in Random Day Before the Election News: This clever study in personal dedication broke a couple of weeks ago, and it’s already made its way around a good portion of the Internet. Still, we’d like to come back to it on a day characterized by irritation and anxiety for so many Americans–the day before an election that we’ve all heard WAY too much about for at least two years. Need proof? Think back to the time when Michelle Bachman and Donald Trump led the pack in certain polls. Yes, that did indeed happen.

Anyway, Maneesh Sethi is a San Francisco-based blogger who recently decided that his social media habits were affecting his productivity in a bad way. He knew that he spent far too much of his time scrolling through his Facebook feed, descending into the bottomless cavern that is Reddit or doing something even more useless like, say, reading about politics. He wanted to change his ways.

Of course, millions of people find themselves in Sethi’s position every day–but he chose a more creative way of addressing it than most. His unique approach makes sense considering the fact that his blog, Hack the System, is all about using “unconventional techniques to improve your productivity and your life“. So he placed an ad on Craigslist and hired an assistant to sit beside him while he worked and quite literally slap him in the face every time he clicked on Facebook.

Well, that wasn’t too dramatic, was it?

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Today in You Guys Are Really Bumming Us Out News: At first we didn’t think Dr. Pepper was looking for a fight when planning their “Evolution of Flavor” Facebook promo spot, but then we remembered that this is America and they should have known better.

The mildly amusing ad, which casts the peculiar soda as the “missing link” in the evolutionary chain between beast and man, has accumulated 25,000 likes and 3,500 comments in less than 24 hours. What are people saying about it? Oh, the usual: Evolution is a myth and I’m offended, God is fake and you’re all idiots, spelling is overrated—the list goes on. Quite a few individuals have even announced their plans to “boycott” Dr. Pepper products without realizing that, by bringing attention to the brand, they’re playing right into the hands of the sugar-water heathens…

And, of course, the whole mini-controversy also inspired an extended thread on Reddit. This is the world in which we live.

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In case you hadn’t heard, President Obama is currently participating in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit. Some things we might ask him:

• What’s your favorite brand of coffee? (Please don’t say Starbucks.)
• We noticed that you have worn a bow tie in the past. Why would you do that? (We hope you had no choice.)
• Which Star Wars movie was worse, “The Phantom Menace” or “Return of the Jedi?”
• Do you enjoy playing Monopoly with friends and family, or do you tend to get bored after an hour like we do?

Feel free to pose some more hard-hitting questions–or just visit the site and post them yourself.