The blogosphere and twittersphere is rife with journalists, PROs and members of the public identifying and publicising errors of judgement made by companies and PROs. It’s argued that by drawing attention to ‘PR fails’ we can as an industry learn from these mistakes and collectively raise our game.
One website that serves to draw attention to bad PR practices is PRfail.tumblr.com. The site was setup nearly a year ago by Jonathan Hopkins to aggregate examples of bad PR highlighted on websites such as Twitter, which sees many users attach the #PRfail hashtag to their tweets.
The site now features plenty of PROs who have pointed our mistakes made by their peers or by the companies they represent, but is this wise?
If I were to criticise a company’s mistake on my blog or on Twitter, Google would automatically connect my name and the name of the company I work for to the name of the company I badmouthed. So if I or the company I work for were to then pitch for a PR brief by that company it would only take a quick search of those names, for example Nike and Speed Communications, to bring up my blog post or my tweets in the first few results. I’m pretty sure that digging up old mistakes that a potential client would rather forget, is probably not the best way to make a good impression.
That said, identifying a ‘PR fail’ and offering a solution as to how the company might have dealt with that crisis more effectively could demonstrate expertise. Though I’m not sure how much expertise you can demonstrate when you’ve already used up 7 characters of your 140 character tweet with a #PRfail hashtag!
My mind’s not totally made up on this. Do you think we should be more careful about what we say online or use our freedom of speech to highlight bad PR in an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff?
Hi Matt. Nice post. Have you checked out prfail.com? I also think that there’s potential for some more wins to come out of fails and when I get some free time and planning on getting people;s opinion on what could be on the site. There’s also a link there as to my rationale behind setting up the PRFail site in the first place. THough these days, it;s grown a life of its own and the PRFail concept lives as a #tag people find through Twitter, not via the Tumblr site.
Also . . . PR people really shouldn’t be making half the sort of PRFails that are *STILL* being flagged by people around the world. It’s embarrassing . .
Blimey – just re-read my comment. Next time I might make more sense and punctuate it properly . . . it’s late. Anyway, check out PRFail.com – be good to know what you think should end up there. Cheers!
I think that by examining the work of others it allows one to see where you can make improvements for the future. Perhaps pointing these mistakes out to them is verging on the harsh side but for people to learn they must be shown where they are failing. As a competitor though I think it would make more sense not to highlight where they are going wrong as it can only allow them improve in the future whereas by by not showing them you will continue to be superior. I guess that’s a pretty selfish view but sometimes you’ve got to be.