Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
CTV.ca reports that Toyota Canada is abandoning plans to name one of its most popular models of sports cars, the “Celica Tsunami.” Doesn’t seem like a brilliant brand name even without the recent disaster in Asia.
The car will now be called the Celica Sports Package. Link via Researcher.
The RSS feed of Spinwatch has been hacked. The title of the feed shown in Bloglines has been replaced by “Hacked by …” and the individual posts are not accessible via the feed. Hope they straighten things out soon. In fact, I remember seeing a note at the bottom of Spinwatch’s site a few weeks back that claimed it had been hacked, so obviously someone is keen to obstruct their news distribution.
Spinwatch is a web site researching “the PR industry, corporate PR and lobbying, front groups, government spin, propaganda and other tactics used by powerful groups to manipulate media, public policy debate and public opinion”.
UPDATE: The problem has been solved and the RSS feed is working properly again. The four most recent posts are accessible, but older posts have not been restored.
While Swedish media just recently learned about blogging and now podcasting, US media are already exploring vlogging, or video blogging. Here’s the story of an 11-year old, supposedly the world’s youngest video blogger, who even got on ABC World News Tonight.
A new word has started popping up everywhere on blogs; folksonomy – a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags. Flickr and del.icio.us are popular examples of this practice. Adam Mathes, Louis Rosenfeld and Corante are discussing the concept in great detail. And I’ve mentioned Ideant’s “A del.icio.us study” before.
PR Watch has produced a list of “people and players responsible for polluting our information environment”. At the summit of the “Falsies Awards” we find PR practitioner turned fake TV journalist Karen Ryan. The list also includes some guerilla marketing techniques and astroturfing.
About guerilla marketing, Shawn Prez of the marketing agency Power Moves is attributed with meaning that stealth techniques are especially effective with teens. “By the time the message gets out, they don’t even know they’ve been hit; they don’t know that they’ve been marketed to. All they know is that their interest has been piqued,” Prez said. Umm, I thought that teens were the most critical consumers and the hardest to fool. Ever thought about honesty and transparency in PR?
Angry consumers empowered with new technology that allows them to be mini-publishers of their own, causes a severe threat to brands and companies’ reputation. PR agencies and research companies like BuzzMetrics are studying these “determined detractors” to advice clients on how to respond and avoid a serious PR crisis.
“The technology puts the power of the press into the hands of the everyman,” says Paul Rand, managing director at Ketchum Midwest.
But the increased interest in negative online buzz should not just be seen as a means for corporates to nip consumer response in the bud. “If it’s just to better their product or avoid a P.R. disaster, the bottom line is that that benefits the customer,” according to artist and filmmaker Casey Neistat.
New York Times has the story (reg. required). Link via PR Watch.