PR snakeoil anyone?

Nutrionalist shyster + PR = wikipedia snakeoil. Read about it for yourself in the Guardian.

Fuel PR has obviously been to the Edelman school of online relations.

PR snakeoil Fuel PR

Spot the difference

One's the managing editor of Time, the other lives in Little Britain.

Hap tip to AM.








PR Walliams Stengel

Google investment going down the u-tube?

Further sign that Google might as well have flushed its cash down the toilet with news that Metacafe is the UK's 4th most popular search. Goodbye GooTube, hello Metacafe.

TOP 10 GOOGLE SEARCHES 2006
1. Bebo
2. MySpace
3. World Cup
4. Metacafe
5. Radioblog
6. Wikipedia
7. Video
8. Rebelde
9. Mininova
10. Wiki

PR Google Metacafe

Genius

Blogosphere is full of s**t

Nice to see that 'Arseblog' and 'clagnut' make Stephen Davies' top 100 most influential UK blogs.

Proper floaters in the memepool.

PR blognames

A big bag of monkey nuts...

...to Getting Ink for its concern over the furry funkmeister of PR's wellbeing.

Rest assured, normal service will resume shortly. More floaters in the memepool coming your way.

PR Nuts Floaters

Cohn & Wolfe staff blow out clients

According to the ad on the back of this week's PR Weak, 56% of Cohn & Wolfe staff would blow-out a hot date to deliver on a client project.

By inference, that means 44% would say "fck it, I'm going out to get shagged and I'll take the beastings from my client and my line manager like a man".

Nice to see they're such a committed bunch at C&W towers.

PR Cohn & Wolfe beasting

MySpace mishaps

If you're going abroad on a booze-fuelled mission, and plan to blog the juiciest details, probably best not to let your Dad get hold of your MySpace address, as The Times' Richard Morrison wryly points out:

My daughter is somewhere in Thailand. At least I think she is. She got back from uni one Sunday in early June, jammed the washing machine with a term’s accumulated laundry, raided my piggy bank to the tune of several hundred quid on the understanding that the money will be repaid from some unspecified holiday job undertaken at some uncertain date in the future, spent 36 hours in telephonic discussion with various like-minded free spirits on the ominous subject (I couldn’t help overhearing) of the rave scene in Bangkok and Koh Samui — and then hoosh! By Tuesday evening she was on a plane to the Far East, having acquired a suspiciously cheap ticket on an obscure Indian airline from a bucket-shop in Willesden.

Since then I have been able to follow her progress in one of two ways. It depends on whether I crave a false sense of reassurance, or feel strong enough to cope with the hideously unexpurgated truth. If it’s the former, I consult her intermittent e-mails to us, which are crafted with quite brilliant cunning (a career as a spin-doctor surely awaits) to suggest that her Thai sojourn is crammed with visits to old temples, detailed study of local flora, and discussions about the Buddhist path to enlightenment.

Unfortunately for her, my older son let slip the information that if I logged onto a website called MySpace.com and typed in my daughter’s name, I would be able to read her Thai “blog”. This gives a rather more colourful account of her trip:

June 10: “Woohoooo! went out on the razz last night — strange but wikid all the same!” June 12: “Got REALLY cool tattoo. My name in thai letters init. Paha!” June 16: “Keep getting really drunk at night, coming back to beach and going skiny dipping. Soooo much fun!” June 19: “Rented moped, soooo cool! Fell off coz i got confused! Proper blonde moment.” June 24: “Had bad accident on moped... cant walk properly but the show must go on...” June 28: “Lying on beach nursing hangover whilst eating rat on a stick. Let the good times roll... hahaha.” July 3: “Out on the town. It was MESSY. We were all trashed and ended up at this weird place...” July 13: “Best party ever! the most INSANE 24hrs of my life. Wooooo!”

PR MySpace

Statistics, lies and damned Rubel

The Rubloid has just written a post on the findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project (Reuters via Yahoo).

It's yet another great example of a blogger (with a particular Me2 axe to grind) blindly seizing on stats to substantiate a particular evangelical POV.

What Rubel fails to point out (which the Reuters article does - albeit burried at the bottom of the story), is that Pew surveyed "233 self-identified bloggers " by telephone. Hardly a representative sample size and a pretty crucial piece of information for readers to guide them on how to interpret the voracity of the findings.

Whether Rubel is correct or not in his analysis of the future of the blogosphere (his crystal balls would explain why he walks gingerly), it underscores the lack of 'depth' of most bloggers.

To use one of his favourite blog bullsh*t bingo buzzwords, as the social media landscape 'flattens', so the critical use of sources gets squeezed out at the edges.

It's left the PR Monkey scratching his hairy behind in ponder, wondering whether this form of evangelical 'the message is more important than the true representation of the facts' type posting only serves to undermine the value and credibility of the post and the blogger.

Rubel has had a considerable amount of flack about his verging-on-the-arrogant dismissal of Dell's new blog. So perhaps the halo of this self-styled champion of Me2 is starting to tarnish under the weight of critical scrutiny - something he perhaps lacks in his own postings.

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