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?

From editing client websites to writing blog posts and formatting html newsletters, web design is now a part of PR. Rather than having a digital team to deal with the online stuff, all PRO’s should have a good understanding of web design. PRO’s clearly don’t need to be equipped with the same level of skills as web designers but I think a basic knowledge of web design languages like CSS and HTML would certainly be a good idea.

Another thing I noticed when I updated this site was how quickly it had got out of date. Richard Millington reckons bloggers should update blogrolls weekly and site designs monthly. I agree, udating your blogroll and having a tinker with your site’s design is a great way to keep your blog looking fresh. It’s only been two or three months since I last updated my blog, but in that time Jed Hallam started working at Wolfstar PR, Stephen Davies started 3WPR, and I contributed to an eBook about Digital PR. All of which made parts of my blog and website out of date.

Today this brought up a great website called Who Calls Me. The site lets users report suspect phone numbers belonging to scam artists, telemarketers and other unsolicited callers. Great news for people working in offices where sales calls are a daily annoyance.

For the particular number that rang me there were more than one hundred comments in the last six weeks reporting it as a scam. The site advises to not answer the call or ring back as you could be charged as much as €13 per minute.

Do not answer or reply to calls from this number: +88 213 300 300.

That was in June. Two months passed and for many of us there was no sign of the relief pack. Not good news for blogger’s stress levels, or the nice people at Berocca who must have been quite concerned by posts like this declaring the exercise a PR fail. Since commenting on that post, I received a relief pack in just a matter of days. Coincidence?

To avoid this Berocca should have carried out a weekly send out of relief packs so that bloggers weren’t waiting too long to receive their goody bag. And, when they did send out the relief packs they should have taken a little time to address the nice letter inside with my name. Dear blogger doesn’t exactly build up a personal relationship with the brand. That said I’m very impressed by the campaign. It’s very brave for a non-techy brand to experiment with blogger outreach and I commend that. Also, it’s especially important to try relationship building exercises like this during a recession when premium brands like Berocca are in danger of being abandoned by consumers in favour of cheaper supermarket versions.

Well done Berocca, this blogger is now full of vitamin goodness and will stay that way.

Firstly, I have started using Twitter. I think it’s ace. It’s perfect for all those little updates and questions that are too big to be my status on facebook and too small to be blog posts. Plus further networking opportunities to boot.

Secondly, I’ve used Blogger to modify the rest of my website. The pages are all now in blog format so I can update them anywhere and people can comment and subscribe to individual pages. Plus I have a feeling that it might boost my ranking on Google. Search engines love pages like that.

Check out my site and let me know what you think of the new design, and if you get the chance check out Tom Harle’s superb marketing and graphic design blog, Aspire To Enquire. It’s a really good read!

Let me know if you think anything needs changing.

For those of you that don’t know, the Opus Project is an iniative by the University of Huddersfield to promote creative works and designs by current and former students.

I’ve also discovered Skiddle, which is a great website that allows you to sell tickets to your own events online. The only hitch it that they charge the customer a 10% booking fee, but that’s not uncommon.

Have you experience any website’s like Skiddle or better? I’d love to hear.