Issues management: Louis Vuitton and Nadia Plesner

Nadia Plesner, a Danish artist, started a campaign in October last year to “raise awareness of the ongoing genocide in Darfur”. Her now-famous illustration of an impoverished Darfur child holding a chihuahua and a Louis Vuitton (LV) bag lookalike was meant to highlight the disparate treatment by the media towards a certain hotel heiress and the situation in Darfur.

The luxury goods giant asked Plesner to cease sales of her designs immediately. She resisted and LV, obviously none too happy about it, brought a lawsuit against Plesner, claiming an incredulously amount of over $20,000 for each day of her Simple Living campaign.

I thought this was a classic David and Goliath story. And indeed, it is. Google for the story and you are likely to find media and blog articles on the issue. Even Jeremiah Owyang (one of my favourite bloggers on the social media scene) devoted an entry on the ongoing suit.

Without going much into the nitty stuff (you can read that yourself), I am wondering what in the world does LV intend to achieve by suing the socks off of a struggling artist, who in her best of intentions, simply took the monogrammed LV bag as an inspiration. LV would have been better off fighting intellectual piracy of its famous bags from the likes of the notorious Ladies Market in HongKong, choc-a-bloc full of LV imitations.

I have no doubt that Plesner will garner much support (she probably already has an army of supporters). There is even a FaceBook group in support of Plesner and her campaign. If LV treads wrongly and insists on going down the libel road, it may find itself in more of a fix than it bargained for.

Will this fiasco hurt LV in the long run? Maybe not. With annual sales of billions, and growing, LV’s main target audience are the mostly the well-heeled with cash to burn. It’s not a mass-market brand. Still, would this hurt LV’s brand reputation and how it is perceived? We can only wait and see how will LV react to the current situation. Their PR agency has their work cut out for them, and in this age of social media, they better have a good online strategy in their pockets too.

PR and reputation management

While in the process of completing an assignment, I came across a recent article by washingtonpost.com highlighting how Google is being used to manage our online reputation. Because of the simple fact that Google indexes millions of pages a day, information previously only accessible via hardcopy records are now freely available over the internet. If there is an online identity, there is online reputation vis a vis social networks, blogs and community oriented sites like YouTube.

The article mentioned a new company called Reputation Defender. I visited their website and found that, unsurprisingly, most of the founders and management team are actually non-communications professionals with prior expertise in areas like technology, law, software application and business development. The magic behind online reputation management is actually search-engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Theoretically, anyone who knows their way around the internet and who are tech-savvy can employ SEO techniques in the same way Reputation Defender does.

I feel that the problem with such “reputation specialists”, is that without the benefit of  formal training in public relations, how would they see the bigger picture because the truth is you cannot separate online reputation from the ‘offline’ reputation because one affects the other. These should be managed synergistically. Reputation management therefore is best left to PR professionals. In the same vein, PR and communication agencies must learn to harness this technology because reputation management, whether online or offline, will be an important element in the communication mix of the wired generation. As PR continues to evolve, online reputation management will become an important aspect in the overall communication strategy.

Paid blogging (and how it may affect the PR pitch)

Recently I got to know of a friend who worked at a company that had just launched a new service. The company engaged the service of the controversial pay-to-blog company PayPerPost (PPP). How it works: You pay a pre-determined amount of money for XX number of blog posts. Bloggers in the PPP network blog about your product or service and received a percentage cut of the fee.

Because bloggers were not required to disclose the real nature of the sponsored post, it raised a storm of controversy and ethical concerns because article integrity were being compromised. For all you know, the next door teen queen/soccer mom/tech geek who raved about a certain product on their blog did so because they were paid to do so. PPP subsequently relented and later required bloggers to state upfront that they are paid to blog about a particular product or service. Still, it doesn’t take away the fact that it IS a paid review. You don’t have to be a marketing guru to know that most of the time, the review is skewed in favour of the product/service.

My friend had reservations about associating with such a controversial company but the boss adamantly pressed on with it. That aside, another problem is Google. One of the factors that affect a website’s Google page rank is the number of links to it. If there are alot of websites/blogs linking to your website/blog, you can be sure your website’s page rank will improve. The paid blog posts usually link to the website of the product/service reviewed. Google has a major issue with that, because it screws up the “real” ranking or organic search result of websites. Google is constantly fine-tuning their search algorithms to sniff out paid links; and sites that utilises paid links may end up getting *horrors* blacklisted on Google.

You are now probably asking “How does this affect pitching to bloggers?”. For one, if bloggers can be motivated by monetary incentive to blog about something (or anything), why in the world would they want to listen to your pitch? And companies, without the proper understanding of public relations and media impact, would have no problems bypassing the PR folks and going straight to PPP or the bloggers themselves.

Personally, I think it’s a bad idea. It just beats me why any self-respecting company or blogger would want to associate themselves with a controversial outfit like PPP.

Kit Chan joins Hill & Knowlton

The one and only Kit Chan has joined Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s five largest public relations firms. The established singer starts her new career as a campaign strategist in September. Are high visibility and influence good substitutes for relevant PR training and experience?

“One reason is that in this profession, you can get away without formal PR training and professional accreditation. Employers hire PR personnel based on the candidate’s writing skills, media experience and event management. Hence, it is easy for anyone who has these abilities, to claim to be a PR professional. Such flexible entry requirements have long been a subject for debate in the industry.”
(Quick Guide to Public Relations, IPRS)

I wonder if this means that from here on out, we’re gonna see a posse of celebrities crossing over to join the PR industry? I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Diana Ser also joined/started a PR consultancy not too long ago. Well it’ll be interesting to note how this will work out for Kit.

PR and Web 2.0

Here is an excellent article on PR and social media.