Strumpette, A PR Party Pooper
Lifehacker, Awakening Your Inner TreeHugger
Copyblogger, Gramatically Stupid
Blog Maverick, GooTube Sans Viacom
The Long Tail, C-I-Doh!

Ever wonder what happens when a bunch of PR flacks get together to discuss whether or not they have a duty to tell the truth?

Wonder no more. Turns out, that a majority felt that said duty does not apply to themt; and, that their duty to the client trumps all.

A slippery slope? Or, just plain slippery?

Hat-tip: Martin Stabe

JetBlue Ceo David Neeleman offers his latest mea culpa by way of the tube ... as in, the YouTube. In and of itself - the clip, which was posted yesterday, offers some valuable lessons for corporate honchos - not just in crisis management communications but also in the value of putting forward a real, sincere (not so neatly packaged) face to the consumers.

To read the comments streaming in from the 33,000+ people who have already watched the clip, click here.

For more punditry on the matter, click here, here, here, and here.

Gotta love the intersection of politics and public relations - especially when sprinkled with an ever so subtle hint of desperation. Yesterday, former New York Governor George Pataki lobbed this Hail Mary in an attempt to further his quest for the White House:

Governor Pataki, breaking ranks with President Bush and the front-runners for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, says he opposes the president's plan to send more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq.

Two things I found amusing about Edelman's newly released "Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere" report:

1. That the report is only available in pdf and some other hard to link, non-web-searchable version. Honestly, I wanted to shoot myself reading it.

2. This quote: "We are convinced that by engaging the blogosphere in a transparent manner, companies can have their viewpoints heard."

I don't know ... visions of Walmarting Across America come to mind?!?!?!?!

So, last week we looked at some of the top PR firms, to see how much mindshare they each generated online. Coincidentally, Strumpette just published the Alexa rankings of some top PR sites - a ranking we thought we'd amp up a bit.

Our mindshare calculation includes Alexa, but also includes Technorati and Google Page Rank (which, many would argue, provide even more reliable measurement of relevancy online).

The results have been superimposed on last week's rankings - and the new line-up follows:

Talk about a meaningful turn of events.

In the summer of 2005, Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine began the now famous Dell Hell thread; where he relentlessly (tho deservingly) attacked Dell for its then abominable approach to customer service.

Cut.

A year-and-a-half later, on its Direct 2 Dell blog - Dell offered these words to their customers:

We are making efforts to be more forthcoming. We entered the blogosphere in part to take on negative issues. Will we make more mistakes along the way? Sure, but we are listening and learning as we go. In fact, the blog is all about those conversations, and it's why I'm recognizing this debate that goes on about and around us.

...Not to hire this PR firm.

I kid you not - here's their take on how bloggers should have handled the Edelman/Microsoft Vista laptop-gate:

Bloggers: Be professional and human, don’t crucify a company for deeming you worthy of free products to review and own! You might want to mention professional reviews of technology are "loaned" products like MP3 players, TV's and electronics. They don’t get to keep them... they essentially are "on a tour" following the tech press circuit, like a rock-star. Honestly, if you’re a Blogger and you get to keep a product like that, the human thing to do is say thank you.

David Henderson of Making News expresses this concern in response to the same question I asked him and her: that when a major PR firm decides their client is better off flogging - er, fake blogging - chances are, the state of the firm's media relations is verging on piss poor (my words, not his).

His exact words follow:

I think we need to be cautious of turning meaningful marketing terms, like Mindshare, into the latest PR pop-hype.

...So says Kami Watson Huyse of Commmunications Overtones. She also recently cracked on Edelman and Microsoft for their handling of laptop-gate, concluding: I wonder if there will be as visible coverage of the Vista operating system as there was about the evaluation computers?

So, I decided to pose the same question to her: how do you think Edelman's PR stunt with Microsoft affected the quality of Edelman's mindshare online? And here's what she had to say:

Your question and some comments on my post about the Microsoft gift, got me to wondering how media companies, whose business it is to review items, handle this situation. I turned to the guidelines set forth by C|Net, one of the best-known tech review companies.