Another Corporate “Flogging” Revelation: PR Pros Continue to Struggle with Social Media

Add McDonald’s to the list of corporate PR departments that have been exposed recently for using supposed consumer blogs as shills. The latest incident, described by Tom Siebert in today’s Online Media Daily, so soon on the heels of the Edelman/Walmart fiasco, further underlines the risks that PR pros take when they try to co-opt the blogging movement. Hiring professional journalists to ghostwrite supposedly amateur blogs, posting professionally produced (but made to look amateur) videos to YouTube - have all become standard practice in the “new PR”. Before investing in more bright ideas like these, it might just be a good idea for marketers to ask their friends at Walmart and McDonald’s, “How did that blog strategy work out for you?” No matter how cynical and jaded these marketing hacks may be, it’s hard to see how the exposure of these practices could have positively influenced the already-damaged public esteem and credibility of these huge consumer brands.

With every new technology or new idea that achieves popularity, there will always be people who will believe that the changes are so revolutionary that the old rules no longer apply. (Sort of like the investment community during the dot.com bubble years, when supposedly respectable analysts pumped up companies that they couldn’t understand and that had slim prospects of ever returning a profit.) If marketers mistake the rise of social media as an excuse to ignore the basic rules of journalistic integrity and transparency, such mistakes will not be forgotten or forgiven quickly. To coin a phrase, the public may be gullible, but they are not stupid.