As the footy season is nearly upon us, it might seem prudent to point out a couple of good pieces on football and social media (one of them written by a guy who did a book on football) that give pointers on how clubs of all sizes could increase interaction with their fans:

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Glad this wasn’t touted as a PR/Social Media Friday Fun Challenge: it’s a robot that mimics births. Complete with Japanese robot voice.

Many thanks, if thanks is the word to the never-dull Warren Ellis for that one.

Quick client announcement: if you are a journalist or blogger in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Festival(s) and fancy eating free somewhere, then Illegal Jacks on Lothian Road will happily feed you for free in return for a review.

Full press release after the link. And yes, the offer is open to Edinburgh bloggers and press too.

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Lost. A show with an ending that certainly divided people (I know I spoke about it at length on The Thumbcast site and podcasts) and then it was revealed that there would be an extra 12-minute coda to the series in the final box set.

Review copies just went out. And as expected, it’s everywhere online. And you know what? I think it’s deliberate for a few reasons…
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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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… Except for viewers in Scotland. That old phrase used to strike terror into people watching the TV in seventies and eighties (normally on BBC 1) as you would get a description of a great live football game, film or TV show and they you would hear “except for viewers in Scotland” and you’d get Gaelic or something.

And watching the recent video put online (and below) by Simply Zesty, an Ireland-based online PR and social media firm I’m wondering if all this does is show the digital divide up more than anything. More after the video.

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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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Interesting article on Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg over on Scobleizer (is that even grammatically correct?) and it posts a decent question: is the problem with Facebook not the privacy and so on but the fact that the boss of the company is rubbish at being put in front of people?

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