Today is the first day of February, which means Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. The public views Valentine’s Day as a symbol of everything that is both right and wrong with our society. Love deserves a day of celebration, but no one should have to choose between buying a bunch of overpriced nicknacks and sleeping on the couch.

Nevertheless, the commercialization of Valentine’s Day is an unstoppable beast, so we all must comes to terms with it on a personal level. There will always be people who embrace holidays with a fervor and passion that requires decorating the banister, dressing the dog in a ridiculously-themed holiday outfit and wearing a gaudy sweater that commemorates the occasion as only an uncle with a steel plate in his head can.

So we can’t blame Verizon for wanting to cash in on the Valentine’s Day bonanza. There will be plenty of people eager to buy the brand’s hot pink Valentine’s Day edition Motorola Droid RAZR M, which comes with a holiday discount for $50. So if hot pink is your thing (or your significant other’s thing), then this is the phone for you this Valentine’s Day.

But is this a step too far?

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This week we asked ourselves the World’s Most Important Question: Why do these 12/21 End of the World Nibiru cataclysm folks get so much attention? How did they score such a massive PR coup? (Oh, a quick note because you asked: The reason that the world will supposedly end tonight instead of tomorrow night is that it all begins in New Zealand, which is a day ahead of us. Or something like that.)

Well, all this nonsense pretty much comes down to one woman who is—get ready for a shocker—slightly insane.

The whole “Mayans predicted the end” deal isn’t new, but the idea that an “interplanetary object” known as Nibiru (which might be a star or a planet) will bring about the end by crashing into the Earth came to us in 1995 courtesy of a nice lady named Nancy Lieder, who claims to communicate with aliens and started an awesome site called ZetaTalk to let everyone know that the end was near.

She initially predicted  that the date of judgment would come in 2003, but she quickly revised her calculations after that didn’t happen, claiming that the “government” conspired to conceal the real date so it could implement martial law, trapping citizens in cities and ensuring their slow, painful deaths. Believable!

But the most annoying thing about this lady isn’t that she is a nut or that her theories have spread, like a viral video, around the End of Times community since the mid-90’s.

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Since we feel like covering the indulgent lifestyles of pop stars today, we’d like to offer a postmortem assessment of Rihanna’s recent PR disaster disguised as a whirlwind international tour.

See, the very concept behind this extended promo event demanded the “stunt” label: The pop star planned to play seven countries in seven days, and she invited approximately 150 music journalists to join her on her Boeing 777 mega-jet (we don’t really get the “7” theme).

Anyway, chaos quickly descended upon the unfortunate entourage. These journalists relayed news of on-plane streaking, hunger, sleep deprivation, lack of bathroom access and general anxiety while receiving very little attention from an apparently disinterested Rihanna. The star’s heart just didn’t seem to be in it: She received boos from fans in Berlin after forgetting the lyrics to her own songs and denied all interview requests during the trip as some journalists began to wonder whether she was on the plane at all.

On first glance, this all looks to be something of a PR disaster. On second glance, it looks even worse.

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We’d never heard of the Pine Brothers “softish” throat lozenge company before today, but they definitely have some…unconventional promo ideas.

Companies usually contact PR firms before designing a strategy, but Pine Brothers’ CEO Victoria Knight-McDowell (best known for creating the popular Airborne “immune support supplements”) decided to completely skip the usual way of doing things… by turning the whole deal into a contest.

The “PR Bounty” stunt works like this: any individual (professional or otherwise) who manages to place a feature story on Pine Brothers in one of its CEO’s preferred publications will get paid—after the story runs. It’s not just print media, either: anyone savvy enough to score a full segment on Anderson, Dr. Phil or The View or other talk shows will earn a cool $25,000!

This isn’t the first unusual stunt from Pine Brothers, by the way: they recently offered free lozenges to professional opera singers. We were curious to learn more about their latest plan, so we communicated via email with Rider McDowell,  company chairman and husband of Victoria.

Keep reading–it’s worth it:

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Many media outlets have labeled Greg Smith’s investment banking expose Why I Left Goldman Sachs disappointing; some in the financial industry have gone so far as to call him a classic “con man”. That doesn’t mean Goldman’s top PR guy Jake Siewert can rest easy.

A veteran of the Clinton administration and former adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Siewert signed with Sachs earlier this year to help the firm’s principals “put the mistakes of the financial crisis behind them” and improve their company’s public image.

Mere days after Siewert’s hiring announcement, The New York Times published Greg Smith’s defamatory op-ed decrying the Goldman Sachs culture of greed as “toxic and destructive”—so you might say he hit the ground running.

Most of Siewert’s damage control efforts over the past six months have amounted to “off the record” conversations defending the firm’s reputation, but yesterday he sat down with New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose to discuss the politics and challenges of reputation management.

We won’t reprint the entire interview, but here’s an interesting tidbit on why Goldman chose to shoot the messenger:

“Why not just issue a generic statement saying, ‘Goldman Sachs is committed to serving its clients’ needs’ and leave it at that?

That hasn’t worked out so well in the past. And frankly, we didn’t know what was in the book.”

Siewert is predictably guarded, but it’s still worth a read.

PR pros: How big is the challenge facing Siewert? Was Goldman right to attack Smith?

We guess we should applaud Chanel for being bold enough to choose a male face for its iconic No. 5 perfume, though we will venture that Brad Pitt was hardly the riskiest choice. We always imagined his favorite scent to be some enticing combination of stale cigarettes and marijuana, but who are we to say?

On watching Mr. Jolie’s first spot for Chanel, we share a common response: What the hell is he talking about? And how will this string of cosmic nonsense inspire more people to buy Chanel?

Well, that was…pretentious. We can only assume that the “it” he mentions is life, the universe and everything. Double rainbow, man. Unfortunately, the second spot released today is no better: Read more

Former French President-to-be Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK for short) has been playing the damage control game for a couple of years now—with very mixed results. Despite the fact that he hasn’t been convicted of any crime per se, he has suffered one of the world’s most visible PR collapses.

After watching his political fortunes fizzle and his domestic life fall apart, Strauss-Kahn is still fighting charges that tie him to a French prostitution ring while simultaneously hyping his new consulting company and his return to the international lecture circuit. It’s all part of another valiant attempt to reclaim what he clearly believes to be his rightful place on the world stage. We might almost pity him at this point, were he not such a demonstrably skeevy old man. His newest line of defense seems to be “I am a man! Of course I love women! Is that a crime?” (Note: statement must be read in a ridiculously cartoonish French accent.)

So DSK decided to follow Schwarzenegger’s lead on his “no apologies” apology tour by acknowledging that what he did was wrong while simultaneously throwing his hands up and daring the free world not to be taken in by his charms. Of course he is a horny old bastard who enjoys “secret soirees… that start with a fine meal and end with naked guests and public sex with multiple partners.” Who doesn’t?

We’re still fascinated by the man’s story for some reason.

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When you try to think of the most groundbreaking “devices and services” company in the world today, the first name that comes to mind is…Microsoft, right?

No? Well, CEO Steve Ballmer wants to change all that, and he’s got a brilliant, semi-secret plan to do it—by making the company “cool” again. See those air quotes? Oh yeah, we’re totally (not) feeling it.

Ballmer’s recent letter to shareholders promises to deliver more products like the Xbox (which is actually pretty cool) and the Surface (which is an iPad with a kickstand) as well as the brand new MS Office and Windows 8, opening on PC screens near you later this month. Ballmer also plans to focus more on omnipresent cloud services, which will be key to any electronics company looking to compete in the market of the future—or the present, come to think of it.

By referring to “a new era”, Ballmer all but concedes that his company has fallen behind a certain fruit-themed competitor—a theory reinforced by Kurt Eichenwald’s Vanity Fair article about Microsoft’s “lost decade” which notes that the iPhone currently “brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft”. The article focuses on bureaucracy inhibiting innovation—and, you know, we haven’t heard about too many ground-breaking products emerging from Microsoft in recent years. Have you?

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Public relations experts specialize in reality–particularly difficult realities. We know that the “fight or flight” response resides deep within human DNA and the DNA of the brands the we humans create. During challenging times, many chose to ignore the truth, to cover it up, or to slip into total denial. But the truth always prevails in the end, simply because it never goes away.

When mistakes are made, brands shouldn’t be afraid to appear human. The public, after all, is comprised of individuals, and each of us has our own moments of weakness, disappointment and poor judgment. For those people and brands willing to face the hard truths in life, the public—especially the American public—can be surprisingly forgiving. We love a comeback.

So when Toyota announces yet another recall, this time involving a whopping 7.43 million problem vehicles, the general public feels a little conflicted. We’re happy the brand accepted responsibility for its mistake, but we also want to know why this happened, and keeps happening. Events like these lead PR professionals to ask: Just what is the public relations toll of a recall? Read more

It’s that time of year again — pumpkin-flavored everything lines the shelves at grocery stores and adorns the menus of coffee shops and bakeries alike, perpetuating that festive fall feeling. But what happens when businesses deprive loyal customers of their pumpkin-licious treats? If the business in question happens to be Starbucks, and the treat happens to be the uber-popular and highly-marketed Pumpkin Spice Latte, the answer is “sheer pandemonium.”

Since the seasonal $4 favorite made its fall debut in September, through-the-roof demand has created a challenge for stores that can’t seem to keep the magic ingredient (pumpkin flavored sauce) in stock. It’s even prompted some baristas to make pilgrimages to other branches of the java giant, seeking extra bottles of what can only be described as the holy grail of the pumpkin flavored world.

And when infrequent deliveries of the syrup (and the failure of the wandering baristas to secure back-up doses) requires customers to go without their fall fix, the resulting rage, despondency, and madness might take even seasoned baristas by surprise.

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