Take the Bait, Pay the PRice

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On this day when America honors its war heroes, we're awakened to news of an "Israeli attack" on six vessels carrying "humanitarian aid" to the terrorist-controlled Gaza Strip. Presumably the decision by Israel's cognoscenti to militarily confront this Security Council member-sponsored flotilla, was not made lightly...or was it?



The Israelis no doubt weighed the PR consequences of such a unilateral action. I just wonder whether the Jewish state would find itself in such hot water had it adequately trumpeted its military intentions and POV before any actual blood was spilled.

This morning's report of ten (or more) deaths at the hands of armed Israeli soldiers will set back the state of Israel's (perpetual) mission to generate public empathy for the safety, security and sovereignty of its own citizens.

Truth be told: the Israelis were set up and they took the bait. They were entrapped by an insidious Palestinian (and Turkish) PR ploy. From Globes:

"The crisis is still at its height but this is still the time to wonder how Israel managed to walk into such an obvious and painful propaganda trap that took the lives of some young Turks."

It mattered little that those "activists" had attacked first (with "knives and clubs") or if they were even Hamas suicide pawns intending to die all along. The headlines the action produced were damning.

So what could Prime Minister Netanyahu have done differently to avert the global crisis he now faces?

• Did anyone really know that both the Israeli and Egyptian governments had offered to ensure that this aid reached the Gazans or that Israel has a massive humanitarian aid program already in place?

• Could Israel have publicized its intentions to board the ship to pre-empt the negative splash of global headlines?
  

• Maybe a real-time feed (via Twitter or UStream) reporting Israeli advance prep, the actual boarding and the eventual confrontation could have helped mitigate today's crisis? (To its credit, a video was released after the fact.)

The Israelis, now faced with global condemnation and more, must do some serious back-peddling to explain its three-year-old blockade of Gaza and its "surprise" military action in international waters using guns against clubs.

Good luck with that. Once again, the Palestinians beat the Israelis at the PRopaganda game. As Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic writes "on the Disappearance of Jewish Wisdom, Far Out at Sea:"

"I had breakfast this very unhappy morning in Jerusalem with Daniel Gordis, the author of many wise books, including one I just began reading, "Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End." Gordis opens the first chapter with a quote from the Babylonian Talmud: "Who is wise? The one who can foresee consequences."

Now let's keep an eye on the copycat a**hole behind @IsraelGlobalPR.

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Vide Views features the suddenly ever-present Mark Zuckerberg, a tutorial on how to use the new FB privacy settings, a wacko PR guy, and a TV commercial from a white show ad agency that's virally in tune with the YouTube age.

The Mark Zuckerberg Show

To start, it seems Facebook's PR consiglieres instructed Mark Zuckerberg to get out there in the mediasphere this week to re-set his own reputation. Here's the interview the ubiquitous Mr. Zuckerberg gave to CNBC's Julia Boorstin, along with Rob Cox, Reuters Breakingviews U.S. editor. Did the strategy work? Other than The Business Insider's Nich Carlson's tweet: "Mark Zuckerberg is getting much, much better at TV interviews," I'd say the jury is still out.

Taking Back Your Facebook Life

Within a day of Facebook retrenching on its privacy settings, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released this video tutorial to help FB aficionados get their arms (and lives) around it:




How Not to Win Friends and Influence People

My old friend Jeremy Pepper brings our attention to perhaps one of the most annoying (and unprofessional) PR persons I've ever seen in action. The video speaks for itself.




"My diaper is full of chic."

And, if the wayward PR person didn't test your sensibilities, here's a video to take into the Memorial Day weekend that just may. If the goal of advertising is to get consumers all abuzz about the creative, this particular spot from JWT has some 85,000+ view on YouTube in the few days since it's been posted. In fact, more and more marketers are producing spots either to debut or reside exclusively on YouTube. (I suppose Gillette's video tutorial on how to shave one's genital area wasn't ready for prime time.) This week, Nike's epic 3-minute "Write the Future" soccer spot set a viral record on the dominant video sharing site. (Via NYMag.com)




Enjoy the weekend, everyone!

LinkedIn's Coming of Age

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Five or six years ago, I remember inviting my former boss to connect with me on LinkedIn. The invitation was ignored. Thinking back, I reckon he hadn't heard of LinkedIn or simply didn't want to be bothered by such (an unproven) distraction.

I didn't take his rebuff personally. In fact, if I took to heart all the ignored invitations I've dispatched via Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare and Twitter, I'd certainly find myself in Bellevue today.

The now seven-year-old social channel, while resourceful as a cloud-based address book for business acquaintances, always seemed to lag behind my other social networks in terms of user functionality. That's finally changing.

In November, LinkedIn hooked up with Twitter. The LinkedIn blog posted at the time:

"When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool."

That relationship has since expanded further, and yesterday morphed into "full-fledged client status" as TechCrunch's Leena Rao reports:

"And this year the network added the ability to “follow” companies, taking a page from both Twitter and Facebook. Today, LinkedIn is furthering its Twitter integration by allowing members to easily find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter and more, essentially becoming a full-fledged client."

Not everyone thinks the tie-in between these two disparate networks is necessarily beneficial to one's online reputation or his/her fortunes. Scarletta's Blog correctly asks:

"So here is my plea to the avid LinkedIn Twitterer, before you connect your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile ask yourself this question, do my connections really want to see my tweets?"

As for newer LinkedIn enhancements, Viral Blog, reports that the social biz net has:

"...updated its advertising tool to allow individuals/companies to buy 'Direct Ads'. This simple tool is also a rich source of information about registered users."

Hmmm. If you've thought about Facebook's privacy issues (who hasn't?), including an "evil" software app that ferrets out FB users' phone numbers, think about the data you've listed in your LinkedIn profile. Let's just hope that Reid Hoffman doesn't sell you down the river in pursuit of the almighty advertising dollar (versus reliance on premium membership revenue).


LinkedIn stats and graphic courtesy of Vincenzo Cosenza.

Twitter's PR Poseurs

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In 2008, when Twitter began its true ascent toward mass market penetration, I repped a very large financial services company that was under extreme media duress. This client had zero social media engagement (nor did its business model seem to require it).

Sure, this company had the obligatory early morning internal email feed, comprised exclusively of wire copy and biz pub stories on the company -- delivered as PDF attachments. Geesh.

Then one day, my client called to say that someone was squatting on his CEO's name on Twitter. (I wonder how they even knew?) The squatter used the nom-de-twume to tweet all sorts of unsavory things about the company.

My client begged for help. I visited Twitter's terms-of-service page where the protocol to address such matters resided. How long would it take? I wondered. More on that below...

Many of us know about @FakeSteveJobs, with its 45,000 followers and last tweet from August 2007. More recently, we stumbled across @lucasvpraag, a (still-active) Twitter handle, that pays homage to the Goldman Sachs crisis. The owner pseudonymously tweets under the name (and photo) of the company's senior communications executive Lucas Van Praag.

Last week, @BPGlobalPR ratched itself into the public consciousness, complete with company logo. It now has nearly 10,000 followers, twice the number of followers of the real Twing @BP_America, and a "bio" that reads:

This page exists to get BP's message and mission statement out into the twitterverse!

In fact, the fake site is so official-looking that Vanity Fair reported on the confusion it has created for some of its followers.

@BPGlobalPR: Jesus walked on water and soon you can too! (Please pray for BP, we're losing a lot of oil).

@Follower: I think it's disgusting that @BPGlobalPR is making flippant jokes about the destruction of our wetlands...

So what's a company to do? I suppose given everything else with which BP now contends, a fake Twitter feed must be the least of its problems. Right? Wrong. It's admirable to have installed a live video feed of oil gushing into the Gulf, but without a clear channel for communicating (real time) progress (or lack thereof), the real BP PR is disadvantaged.

Coming back to my predicament from 2008. As it turns out, this was a time before Verified Twitter accounts, and when @ev and @biz actually worked customer service. I appealed to them via email about the fake Twitter feed. Both replied and within two days, the feed was dismantled. Today, the protocols for dealing with impersonation are spelled out here.

Keep in mind, however, that Twitter does allow self-expression. And the distinction between "impersonation" (to "confuse" or"deceive") and "parody, commentary or fan" accounts (to express oneself) can be a bit blurry.

My advice: submit a ticket request, since Twitter's founders most likely have moved on from customer service.

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of "Video Views" features some hype for TechCrunch Disrupt, Marc Andreessen, Mashable's Ben Parr and Jim Lehrer.

"TechCrunch Disrupt" Debuts Next Week

TechCrunch NY-based co-editor Erick Schonfeld promotes TechCrunch Disrupt (May 24-26), which will present established and emerging players who are "disrupting" the media and technology landscape. The confab is what's left of the TechCrunch 50, which disintegrated following a split between its founders and boosters Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington. (via Beet.TV)




Al Jazeera and Facebook Privacy

We all expect Mashable's Ben Parr to avail himself to MSM to talk about the Facebook privacy controversy, but on Al Jazeera?

Jim Lehrer on Journalism

Jim Lehrer of PBS NewsHour talks journalism (via @politico)

Marc Andreessen Pontificates

Serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen offers the Stanford audience a rare opportunity to pose open questions. Topics addressed include everything from the state of VC and the stock market, to Facebook's market dominance, to the rebirth of consumer electronics. In addition, Andreessen offers ground rules for the start-up, including tips on attracting top talent.

Razing Arizona

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We all know what happened in Arizona recently. The tea baggers drugged the Governor's tea and all hell ensued. The state's now grappling with a very public (and profane) affront to its reputation that's having very real economic consequences.

From the state's leading newspaper, The Arizona Republic, here are some of the more notable slogans from late-night TV-land:

• "It's a dry fascism." ("Saturday Night Live")

• "The meth lab of democracy." ("The Daily Show with Jon Stewart")

• "It's Cinco de Mayo, or as they call it in Arizona, May 5th." (Jimmy Fallon)

The AZCentral piece outlined how the Governor and her disciples plan to quell the criticism, which includes the establishment a "tourism task force" -- not to be confused with the astroturfed tourism ad campaign now playing in the Gulf regions of Florida, Alabama and Mississippi paid for by a certain oil company).

The gov't effort also entails a promise to delete any negative comments posted to the state's Facebook site. In fact, Facebook is a hotbed of activity around the controversial new law:

"On Facebook, the melee is fierce: There's a "Buycott Arizona" page, a "Don't Boycott AZ Tourism" page, even "Boycott San Francisco for Boycotting Arizona." Facebookers also can join a page boycotting such celebrities as Shakira who are speaking out against the immigration law, and 426 people like this."

Not to be left out, the newspaper decided to do its civic duty by asking the local ad and PR communities to come up with their own campaign slogans. (Were Jon Stewart's writers available?)

Many firms politely declined the opportunity refusing to associate with such a political quagmire, while others jumped into the fray. From a sidebar story titled "Spin doctors new slogans for AZ":

• "Arizona - drop in, drop out, drop house," and "On the border of unbelievable." Rose & Allyn Public Relations Scottsdale)

• "We seek AZ. We seek to be a part of it. We seek to be able to go there, etc." (Crosby/Wright, Scottsdale)

• "Arizona. We've got sol." (MMPR Marketing PR, Phoenix)

• "Arizona is hot," (i.e., cool) (Seesaw Designs, a Scottsdale branding, design and letterpress company)

• "Live la vida" (Arvizu Advertising and Promotions, Phoenix)

And finally, here's one from Flatiron Communications LLC, New York, that could actually end the unwanted criticism:

• "Hey, Governor, repeal the law!"

A Tale of Two BPs

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Three weeks ago today, I penned a post on how to recognize a crisis...before it mushrooms into a full blown corporate meltdown. The news hook for the post involved a seemingly isolated explosion on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers, but had yet to assume the catastrophic environmental and reputation-ruining proportions that it has today.

Did you see 60 Minutes' double segment Sunday in which one of the surviving workers on the rig recounted those harrowing moments? This man was forced to jump ten stories into the fuel and fire-laden waters below after the lifeboats abandoned him.

Furthermore, he used his CBS News appearance to painstakingly and very credibly outline the corporate malfeasance that likely led to the systemic failures aboard that oil rig and the environmental disaster they wrought. (I'm still not sure why relatively few mainstream media picked up on his allegations.)

On Monday, I posed the following question to a fellow PR blogger: would the tenor of the CBS segment have changed much if BP had agreed to avail its CEO Tony Hayward (pictured above) for an on-camera interview? Could BP's relatively youthful CEO have withstood the acerbic probes of CBS News' Scott Pelley (and his producer) or would he have morphed before our very eyes into the Jack Nicholson character from "A Few Good Men?"

In my opinion, not even the most charismatic, cogent and convincing executive could have countered the poignant and measured "testimony" from that senior oil rig worker. Hence, it seems BP and its PR consiglieres did the right thing by not subjecting the company's CEO to public denigration, let alone the possibility of exacerbating countless legal challenges.

Watching this segment and the sudden disintegration of BP's carefully and expensively honed reputation made me a bit melancholy. I had played a supporting role in the earliest days of the company's often case-studied brand transformation. It was 1997, and I took a call from an agency counterpart in the UK. My British colleague's client was about to make a big announcement. Hmmm.

Apparently, British Petroleum's then CEO Sir John Browne (at left) intended to announce that global warming was a problem, and could I help get the word out in the U.S. media?

My first thought was like, duh, this is not news. Who doesn't know that global warming poses a problem? My colleague quickly explained that Browne would be the first and only major oil company executive to publicly (and I came to believe) earnestly acknowledge it.

This was not spin or an attempt to mask over the company's environmental transgressions. Browne would not only break with the entire industry, but he put some money behind his talk by investing in a solar plant in northern CA. Al Gore joined him at a news conference to make that latter announcement, which we also supported.

So armed with this germ of a story idea, I picked up the phone and called Bill Stevens, The New York Times's environmental reporter and resident expert on the subject. Stevens was sufficiently intrigued. He agree to a meet-up with Browne at an industry conference both had planned to attend in a few weeks time. Shortly thereafter, the first substantive piece broke (above the fold) anointing British Petroleum and its Stanford-educated chairman as leading a sea change in an industry steadfastly resistant to such change. Stevens wrote on August 5, 1997:

In what may be the most telling change, British Petroleum, the world's third-largest oil company, broke ranks with other fossil fuel producers recently and announced that it believes that there is now enough scientific evidence to warrant concern about whether human activity -- primarily the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas -- is changing Earth's climate.

The time to contemplate action ''is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively proven, but when the possibility cannot be discounted and is taken seriously,'' John Browne, the company's chairman, said in a recent speech. British Petroleum, he said, ''has reached that point.''

Many today have tagged BP as an environmental pariah, but I can honestly say that this wasn't always the case. Ten years after setting BP on an admirable path, Lord Browne resigned abruptly. Since then, I believe the company has lost its way down the road Browne had paved.

This saddens me. Who ever would have imagined back then that the sea change Browne put into motion would literally end up as a ten-mile long and five-mile-wide plume of oil?

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views features some eye-opening social media adoption stats, Scoble's 15 Israel start-ups, Calacanis on FB privacy, words of wisdom from the PSFK Conference, and "Coco" at the Googleplex.

This first video asks (then answers): Is social media a fad? Or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? The growth of social media (via @mashable)




The Scobleizer (Robert Scoble) recently returned from a visit to the tech forward State of Israel where he anointed 15 start-up companies as ones to watch. Here's the first - a company called 6rounds, which is what happens when you mate Chatroulette (20 million unique visitors a month) with Zynga (popular casual game producer). Look to companies like these to find new ways to addict millions of people to both video and gaming.



Clips featuring all 15 Israeli start-up are linked here (courtesy of @businessinsider, @rackspace)


Who missed the PR troubles faced by Facebook with its new, and some say, big brotherish approach to its users' privacy. I posted on it last week pegged to Peter Rojas's brave decision to de-activate his FB account. This was followed by the aforementioned Robert Scoble's open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, which suggested the FB founder split his network in two, among other things. And finally, we have this message from digital influencer Jason Calacanis to Mr. Zuckerberg, which presciently pre-dated them both.




Anthropologist Grant McCracken discussed the thinking behind his latest book, Chief Culture Officer, a clarion call for the integration of culture into corporate strategy. From the recently concluded 2010 PSFK Conference in NYC.




Finally, fresh off his broadcast re-emergence on CBS News "60 Minutes," Conan O'Brien visited Google at the Googleplex. Here's the 48-minute exchange between Google's VP, Engineering Vic Gundrota and the carrot-topped comedian (aka "Coco").

The Hype on Hyperlocal

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There was some trepidation among a few of us on the board of the Publicity Club of New York. Would a session on the very vogue and increasingly significant (to PR peeps) "Local/Hyperlocal Media" market be a draw?

Yesterday we learned the answer. Nearly 100 PR pros turned out on an unusually cool, misty May day in New York City to hear a panel of five senior news executives and one influential industry reporter share a useful and eye-opening overview of this trend that's sweeping both established media companies and small start-ups. The panelists, pictured above, included (left to right):

• Jim Schachter, Editor, Digital Initiatives, The New York Times/NYTimes.com

• Brian Farnham, Editor-in-Chief, AOL Patch

• Meredith McGinn, Director of News and Content, NBC Local Media New York

• Susan Sullivan, Vice President, News, NBC Local Media New York

• Jake Dobkin, Publisher/Co-founder, Gothamist

• Steve Safran, Editor, Lost Remote

Some notable quotables:

Mr. Safran, who posted his thoughts on PR peeps and the luncheon, shared his definition of "local," "hyperlocal" and "niche" media:

In a nutshell..."hyperlocal" is a term that is very much flavor of the month, but that doesn't mean it's a bad term...I do think the term gets misused. Here's how we define it editorially: "hyperlocal" is a neighborhood site. It's as simple as that. It doesn't matter if that neighborhood has 3,000, 30,000 or 300,000 people in it. It's of interest specifically to the people in that neighborhood... and it is generally written by the people who live in that neighborhood...who know it best...who are embedded in that neighborhood. If you start a Soho site, that's hyperlocal. If you start a Manhattan site, that's local.

"Local" is what we tend to think of when we think of local news. It's covering the city or a substantial portion of the city. This is local news. It's fairly traditional rote stuff."

"Niche" goes this way: we are going to cover bicycling in New York. We're going to have a great cyclist blog. I'm singularly stunned that there haven't been more of these attempts.

From my perspective, the PR engagement of editorial gatekeepers at hyperlocal, and to a lesser extent local sites may not scale as readily as engaging those at more mass audience outlets, yet the opportunities are aplenty for those with strong locally relevant hooks.

AOL Patch's EIC Brian Farnham (at left), for example, told us that each Patch site has but one full-time local editor responsible for the day-to-day construct of the site's daily content. Hence, there is room for third-party submissions and even DIY consumer-generated content, but again, only if it's pertinent to the local interests of the community, and it's not overly commercial.

There is no single model for content creation at the local or hyperlocal level. Rather we're seeing a mash-up of sorts that includes original reporting, local government data, third-party aggregated stories, consumer-generated or crowd-sourced submissions, and even experiments involving college students.

For the latter, Jim Schachter of The New York Times (at right) reports that The Local's newest site covering NYC's East Village is a collaboration with Jay Rosen's students at NYU, and may make its debut in August.

We didn't get into too much detail on the business models that will sustain local or hyperlocal media, suffice to say that one panelist recalled reading Patch's business plan, which targeted those old-school community daily and weeklies. You know, those papers on which the "mat services" have prospered from the PR industry all these years.

As for ad revenue, I had my client PaperG in the audience, which has locally focused technology that automates the creation, sales and management of custom display advertising enabling local online publishers to (finally) capture those elusive small businesses in their communities.

You can hear an audio file of the full 75-minute panel discussion here. I will also post it to the section of the PCNY website that houses audio from the club's previous panels.

Where PR is Headed

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Sounds like a Brian Solis post, doesn't it? Actually, on Friday afternoon, I had a chance to preside over one of the last panels of the two-day PRSA Digital Impact Conference (#prsa_di) in NYC.

We gathered a fab group of industry practitioners and prognosticators who convened under a session titled "PR 3.0." (Please forgive.)

In an advance prep call with our presenters, Kami Huyse (@kamichat) smartly suggested that we take a more forward-looking perspective on the industry given that conference attendees, at this late hour, would be totally Twittered and FourSquared out. She was right.

I thus asked the panelists who included Ms. Huyse, Jonathan Kopp (@jonathankopp), lead digital communications strategist for Ketchum, and Clay Hebert (@clayhebert), founder and Chief Engagement Officer of Tribes Win (and a Seth Godin disciple), to top-line the major trends they see affecting our space in the coming years.

Kami set up a shared wiki page to which the four of us posted our thoughts, bios and some useful links. In addition, Eric Schwartzman who, along with Elizabeth Albrycht, helped program the conference's many panels and keynotes, video-captured our session and posted it: here (RT approx 58 minutes). (Eric infiorms me the link died.)

Here are the more salient points I culled from Friday's conversation on the trends potentially impacting the conduct of public relations:

• Facebook's Open Graph and the propagation (and eventual ubiquity) of the social network's "Like" button for accelerating the spread of "trusted" news and info.

• The eventual democratization of the communications function within (and outside) an enterprise, and the cultural shift required across all departments for this to occur, i.e., "conductor versus producer."
  

• The growth of mobile and location-based channels and services as the dominant e-commerce platform and sales driver, respectively.

• The importance and value to our clients of visual (and creative) story-telling, e.g., less text, more multimedia, to engage audiences.
  

• The realignment of media relations wherein individuals, versus organizations, have the ability to create a viral story meme.
  

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views features Robert Gibbs, Chris Brogan, Pete Cashmore, Google Chrome and some very high Boston social media flyers.


White House press poobah Robert Gibbs banters on what defines a "press conference (aka "presser") (via @prnewser via @mediaite):




Here's a series showing 22 minutes of social media wisdom from Chris Brogan (w/ SAS's Deb Orton):




Brogan: on Making Social Media Happen in Your Company:



And the final two videos in the series -- SM for marketers and SM measurement -- can be found here.


This is a video that achieved some virality among the geek crowd this week. It's Google's attempt to show how fast its Chrome browser loads, literally and figuratively, e.g., "faster than a speeding potato."




Mashable founder Pete Cashmore took to Bloomberg TV to explain the significance of the "open web," pegged naturally to Facebook's much-ballyhooed Open Graph initiative:




Finally, my left coast buddy Eric Schwartzman shared this video clip showing he and some of his Beantown-based social media pals on a "Marine Week" aerial tour of Boston aboard Boeing's V22 Osprey helicopter. Included in the fly-over were David Meerman Scott, C.C. Chapman, Steve Garfield, Todd Van Hoosear and Doug Haslam (via @spinfluencer aka Eric Schwartzman.
Here's Steve Garfield's video take.

FB: "Are We Perfect? Of Course Not."

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For an enterprise that's changing the world, or at least the way humans interact in it, hasn't Facebook suffered an unusual share of missteps and PR gaffes on its road to immortality? Do all start-ups endure this much public pain and suffering?

The latest gaffe, as described by Jenna Wortham on page A1 of today's New York Times, entailed a scant few hour window in which FB aficionados could see their friends' personal chats. The company quickly closed that privacy compromising hole, but it left another (indelible?) hole in confidence of its users (i.e., everyone).

To punish the perceived hubris of Facebook and to make a pugnacious point, a couple of big-time digital influencers (shockingly, to many) declared their dis-allegiance to the world's most popular social network. The original Gdgt guy Peter Rojas (@perterrojas) and biz blogger Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) publicly "deactivated" their Facebook accounts.*

Here are Mr. Rojas's real-time reasons for pulling the plug:

@peterrojas: Reasons why: 1. Tired of not having real control over what I'm sharing. 2. I prefer Twitter (and gdgt) for conversations. 3. I'm trendy.

@peterrojas: The issue is that users should have real control over what is shared, that's all. FB keeps taking that away.

@peterrojas My concern is that they're still growing so rapidly that they can afford to ignore these issues for a good long while.

Ahh. So this is not really a PR ploy on Peter's part. (Though if it were, it certainly succeeded.) All the usual pundits chimed in, but Jeff Jarvis, no stranger to ferreting out the root causes of corporate PR pain, said it most eloquently:

@jeffjarvis: It's about trust & it's bigger than FB knows

Facebook's public policy chief did go on the record, displaying both bravado and a hint of contrition:

“For a service that has grown as dramatically as we have grown, that now assists with more than 400 million people sharing billions of pieces of content with their friends and the institutions they care about, we think our track record for security and safety is unrivaled,” said Elliot Schrage, the company’s vice president for public policy. “Are we perfect? Of course not.”

Elliot, you might want to lose some of the bravado, but I'm encouraged to see you're taking questions via The NY Times.

* Please note that account deactivation is different than account deletion. Apparently, the former can be reactivated on a moment's notice. The latter can't.

Business as (Un)usual for Boeing

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In what may be a case study on the perils companies face in an age of media-empowered consumers, today we learn how business-as usual for Boeing led to a most combustible consumer-created crisis.

Small in comparison to what BP faces, the impact on the company's reputation still stings. It could have been much worse had Boeing not been listening.

Stephanie Clifford's post late yesterday titled "Boeing’s Social-Media Lesson" on The New York Times's Media Decoder blog outlined how a seemingly inconsequential company response can produce unintended unpleasantness. The incident revolved around an eight-year-old boy's crayon-drawing of a plane he sent in to Boeing with the hope they'd build it.

The company's legal department no doubt had a hand in crafting its response:

“Like many large companies,” it wrote Harry in a form letter, “we do not accept unsolicited ideas. Experience showed that most ideas had already been considered by our engineers and that there can be unintended consequences to simply accepting these ideas. The time, cost and risk involved in processing them, therefore, were not justified by the benefits gained.”

The boy's Dad, an ad executive who writes a blog and often uses crowd-sourcing to elicit creative ideas, shared the incident with his readers and tweeted about it. Fortunately, to its credit, Boeing recently factored Twitter in to the company's communications mix. Todd Blecher was the company's real-time point man:

"Though Boeing had traditionally been buttoned up and corporate, Mr. Blecher began using Twitter to respond to supporters of Harry. 'We’re expert at airplanes but novices in social media. We’re learning as we go,' he wrote in one message."

It was just a few years ago when a crowd could take command of one's brand and run away with it, for better or worse. And while brands continue to struggle with how best to harness the reputational reverb capacity of socially driven sites like Twitter and Facebook, Boeing's new listening and engagement strategy immediately proved its value as a first line action for mitigating a potential crisis.

As the boy's father noted:

“It was just so cool to see a company become kind of human.”