Marketing Metrics, Messaging, and Madness

All You Need to Do is Mention 'Twitter' in a Press Release

To prove that the media will run any story that mentions Twitter, regardless of the value or information in the story:

I just ran across a story on Salon.com:

Study: CEOs Not Doing Enough On Social Networks

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new study says top CEOs should do a better job managing their presence online, on social sites like Twitter and Facebook and even Wikipedia.

Sharon Barclay, who runs executive PR firm Blue Trumpet Group and the blog UberCEO, took Fortune's 2009 list of the top 100 CEOs and found what she calls a "miserable level of engagement" when it comes to social networks.

Barclay only found two CEOs with Twitter accounts, and only 13 had profiles on LinkedIn, the social network for professionals.

Though Barclay did not poll the CEOs themselves, she says the results question whether these executives are managing their online reputation

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Personally I think I'd prefer my CEO manage his reputation by staying off Twitter to keep him from saying something that he shouldn't. But that is besides the point...she managed to get me to read a completely worthless release that basically just gets her company's name online. Personally, I wouldn't have done it until after I had a website for my company that people could visit after reading my release, but that's just me. 

Is there no such thing as bad PR?

Working with a laser system, we often have customers joke about giving themselves a tatoo.  I usually laugh and say if they can hold their arm still long enough through the pain, we'll talk.  Last week, someone actually did. They posted a video of the laser engraving on their hand and the story was picked up by several blogs, all mentioning the name of our company. Good? Bad? Indifferent?

We certainly would never want anyone to engrave on their body. There is just too much danger in laser exposure, not to mention the customer must break our safety interlock system to fire the laser with the door open. The conversation on the blogs has been remarkably responsible. They have castigated the person for his stupidity, which is a good response, but we have had customers call to complain that there are videos like this on the web. I explained that we don't have any recourse because the customer can choose to hack into the system to engrave with an open cabinet - we just have to make it as difficult as possible to try and use their stupidity creatively. 

So, we're in the position of wondering if it really is bad PR if we get expanded exposure because of the post? What do you think?