OK, this is interesting… I know many of us moan about the over-softness of the world today, that the PC-liberal types but calling a new toy Spastic is a bit of a stretch to fair in the other direction – and it’s terrible marketing…
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Thanks to Allan Barr for tweeting me a heads-up on this before I had checked my mail – the post yesterday about not everyone wanting to be digital was featured in PR Daily (which everyone should be a subscriber to – and thanks to Beth Carroll for putting it up there).

So if you’ve come here via PR Daily, I hope you’ll stick around. The blog provides a bit of Scottish cynicism and attitude to social media (but also praises it when it can – after all it’s the lifeblood of what we do here) and I hope you’ll find it of use and interest. And from time to time we also host The Scottish Social Media Dinners.

Anyway some of the blog’s greatest hits are:
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Jackie Daly posed this cracker for the Friday Social Media/PR fun following on from the Star Trek PR Problem and Godzilla destroying London:

Parents across the country are up in arms after The Bogey Man was found volunteering at a soup kitchen. “I just wanted to give something back to the community,” he commented earlier today.

“How on earth am I going to scare my children into bed now?” one angry parent asked outside a local primary school this afternoon.

The Bogey man’s reputation is in tatters – can you save him?

As always with these types of posts, it’s quite long – about 1500 words.
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So, as part of a plan to lighten things up around here, I asked for submissions for fictional PR problems (inspired by my Star Trek social media and PR post) and got some really good replies (at least if no-one gives me a new one next week, there’s plenty here to play with). Thanks everyone for the entries, the winner for this week was from the wonderful Barry Dewar:

A giant Japanese monster descends on the UK. The police are quickly overwhelmed while people and property is being destroyed. The press discover that it’s all being stage-managed by an evil criminal mastermind with a self-image problem. The world teeters on the edge of distaster….Save us Social Media!

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Perhaps I’ve been watching too much Burn Notice and reading too many books about PR black ops but consider this… in those 90,000 documents that have been released, what if there’s deliberately false information planted to set up something – something post-Afghanistan?

After all, look at what The Guardian observed:
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A lot of my American friends see the story as undemocratic, but I think the Wikileaks publishing of 90,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan (background here, TL;DR version of documents here) shows a few things: 1) the power of digital communications to help inform people, 2) the death of traditional media yet also 3) the usefulness traditional media still has?

Thoughts? I suppose I better explain myself first…

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The row over the Apple iPhone 4 reception signal goes on (with many not convinced about Apple’s response); there were grumblings over iPhone 4 availability, some moaned about pricing, there’s the ongoing unhapiness over how Apps are picked/dropped from the store – and now, potentially the worst thing that can happen: reports are coming in that their iTunes store accounts have been hacked and they’ve bought stuff they never ordered, specifically copright-breaking scans of a manga.

Can Apple’s PR stick to the usual head-in-the-sand tactic for this one?

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Think about it. Many of the senior people in marketing (who are male, which is still the case more often than not) at the moment are all going “we want blogs, we want Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, podcasts, Foursquare, blogs, Flickr stream, everyone will love us if we have all of this – and we want it now, if not yesterday, because in an hour there will be something else we need to sign up to.”

And, when you think about it, that’s how many men see having two penises as well. They think that it would be great, people would love them for it, it would get them all the hot buzz that they crave.

And in both cases they would be wrong.
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Interesting couple of days in the old Scottish Social Media Scene (I’m actually starting to think that the balloon’s about to burst but that’s a post for another day – or a sign I need to get out more) but there were a few things that popped up – one on Twyberbullying and one on digital terrorism*

Now they may have the right sentiment, but also make me want to turn round and say fuck right off and don’t even kid on that a disagreement online is the same as the torment and pain that comes with real bullying and terrorism.

Now that we’ve set the tone, shall we continue?

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Look at the Stuart Maclennan saga of today. He’s certainly a loser in it, the chattering classes and social media pundits (like myself) have come out a winner, but do you know who the biggest winner was? The Scottish Sun and traditional media.

Why? Because Maclennan has been tweeting for months and nothing said digitally ever cost him his job. Within 14 hours of The Scottish Sun being printed, he was out on his ear. That’s impact and result.

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