Online bullying of PR professionals

I should really take this with good humour. I should brag about being nominated for an award, giggle the it's for 'the biggest PR fuck up' in the tech PR industry, buy myself a ticket and encourage everyone I know to attend.

That's how my first post about this went, but it just not how I feel. Honestly, this latest stunt from TWL has gotten me seriously frustrated. So frustrated that I've had this post saved whist I went to the gym.

Some history

For blog newcomers, here's some history. Back in February I wrote a post which included a sentence suggesting PR had been eroded by a recent influx of femininity. It was a stupid, poorly-worded, ill-thought, sentence in which I came off as sexist. TWL rightly called me out on it, and I learnt a valuable lesson blogging.

People make mistakes, and learn from them. I can live with that.

Then it went too far

After attacking me in another two posts, it went too far. TWL ran a photo competition about me. Readers were invited to send in their funny captions (two of which bizarrely went to my e-mail address, they joined three previous items of hate mail based upon TWL's attacks). The winner won with "I can see right up her skirt".

Online bullying against young PR professionals

Now, TWL has rather maliciously attacked young PR professionals on more than one occasion. Often just for being inexperienced, is that a problem?

My problem is that the more I look at it, it's just starting to strike me as anonymous online bullying. Don't get me wrong, TWL does often put out some great insightful posts, and is one of the few that calls people up on their mistakes - which is great. But that element of encouraging your readers to attack a young PR professional just strikes me of online bullying.

Even since this i've exchanged an e-mail or two with TWL, and things have seemed relatively ok.

Am I the Biggest Tech PR Fuck-up?

So today I learn from Alex that i've been nominated for 'biggest PR fuck up' at the Flackenhack awards, these are the awards TWL and Fullrun have set up for fun to cover the great moments of the UK Tech PR/Media industry. I take this nomination as a malicious, rather than comical, attack for 3 reasons.

1) My entry is the longest of all 24 nominees.

2) This nomination is based upon the sentence I wrote in February? Is this 'fuck-up' in the top 3 against the daily writings on TWL's blog?

3) My personal favourite. The one that gives an indication how personal some of these attacks from TWL's tech PR blog and tech PR awards have been.

I've never worked in Tech PR (and if this is the sort of people that most industry types encourage and leaders like Edelman are happy to endorse, I never will do).

Where to draw the line with unwilling participants of PR stunts?

BBC News reports mysterious stone heads keep turning up in the "dead of night" around Yorkshire villages. On the back of each head reads a note: "twinkle twinkle like a star does love blaze less from afar?"

As one village correctly guesses, it's a PR stunt. At what stage does doing something exciting to generate interest become a nuisance to villages? Are these villages the target for this PR campaign? Or rather are they an easy route to scoring hits with mainstream media?

There is no 'opt-out' opportunity for these villages. If those that receive the heads don't talk about it does the village receive more heads, or less? If this PR campaigns turns out to be entirely irrelevant to these villages, how will residents react?

So far the story has only been picked up by BBC News and the Daily Mail - but I suspect more will follow.


Best not to get spotted dropping off stone heads on CCTV