Fresh Chat

Yesterday it was reported that one of Lonely Planet guide book authors, Thomas Khonstamm did not travel to one of the countries that he wrote about.  The scandal is sure to be felt at Lonely Planet as it has always been seen as a trusted travel source.

News Ltd reported that Kohnstamm said “They didn’t pay me enough to go to Columbia”.

In this age of ‘transparency’ the scandal has hit the media very quickly with various newspapers around the world picking up the story.

In addition, local Australian travel blogger OzTraveller also highlighted the scandal and said “In a new book entitled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? Kohnstamm admits to having plagerised and invented information. He claims he didn’t even visit Colombia to write the LP guide ‘because they didn’t pay me enough’; instead, ‘I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian consulate’.

Interestingly, the story has also appeared in the Lonely Planet forum called Thorn Tree.  Forumites comments included:

•  ’they should pay their authors more’
• ‘hilarous’
• ‘So Kohnstamm’s defence is the same as all lowlifes… “they made me do it”.

One of the more interesting posts said “I can’t see this thread lasting long before the censors move in”.

As with all crisis management issues embracing feedback is critical.  Lonely Planet now have an opportunity to try to rectify the situation as much as possible. Censoring this thread in their forum would be incredibly bad form and would reinforce Lonely Planet as untrustworthy.

In this Internet age word travels fast and companies need to be monitoring the online media and responding to it. Now Lonely Planet have a choice to make.

Update: Today Lonely Planet rejected the above claims - read their prompt release here:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j3rtUd_mHnEgIRhar1C7jYAc1hBgD901DCR80

The picketing of premises is part of any well-run large company’s risk management scenarios.  But in this new media environment companies can no longer ignore the power of the blog, the forum or the virtual world.

IBM is certainly no stranger to the virtual world of Second Life. They have a major presence there.

Still I wonder whether their corporate communications people were prepared for a virtual world picket, in this case by the Union that represents disgruntled Italian employees. 

Do those of you who represent large companies with presence in Second Life have an avatar ready for such a scenario?  If so, would you have that ’spokesavatar’ issue statements ‘in world’, take questions and answers or would they simply redirect the media to the appropriate official channels for comment? [Read more →]

The fuse is really lit under the Australian PR industry. Does it really understand – or care about – digital communication?

Network PR is one of the few PR agencies in Australia to be actually doing Digital or Online PR (we’ve got four people working in this area) . We recently helped increase the heat when our Online Research Manager Jenni Beattie made some comments lamenting the lack of PR’s at the conference. This was then picked up and commented on by Lee Hopkins.

Jenni and Lee Hopkins got it right.

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On the weekend I was lamenting with a fellow dog lover about how our local park had been infested with nasty rangers lately (eyeing off our friendly hounds). Due to this our before-work morning ‘dog play-group’ was no more.

We had now all gone our separate ways and simply walked our hounds rather than getting together at a set location. This was a major change for us –a group of 10 that regularly swapped dog tips but also information on life. We reveled in one of our groups much wanted pregnancy, discussed bosses, criticised and praised local restaurants and of course politics often came into the discussion.

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I do love using internet forums. The amount of things I have learned while browsing them is amazing, and at the same time, the amount of useless things I have learned is embarrassing - thankfully a recent post at a popular forum that I frequent filled me with glee. Cheers Futureshock!

Normally I wouldn’t use such a word, but I feel that I have to. One of the regular posters popped up with some great pieces of free software that is available for people to use. I decided to grab some of it and try it on my machine and now I have become a freeware addict!

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The last Sunday in April marks Worldwide Pinhole Camera day… and I must say when the measure of your tech cred is by megapixels or mm to your lens, it strikes me as refreshing that there is a time to remember the sheer joy of photography as it was in a bygone age.

There are a couple events coming up in Melbourne from early March onwards, so the calendar is worth checking.

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Had to laugh today when reading the post here.

Marketing Profs discussed how this ‘authenticity’ marketing is getting out of hand. The post discusses what an ‘authentic’ day could look like:

“Downstairs, Brenda cooks up some scrambled Egg Beaters (”99% real egg whites”) while Eddie pours a bowl of Post Blueberry Morning cereal (”with Real, Wild Blueberries”). They drink Simply Orange Grove Made orange juice (”made with bits of real orange”) while the Gloria Jean’s coffee (”Authentic Mocha Java”) brews”.

While you might agree all this ‘keeping it real’ is getting over the top none of us would dispute that if Brenda found coffee ‘unauthentic’ she might not think twice about saying so online. That is why keeping it ‘real’ just can’t be faked and why the truth will always shine through.

Keeping ourselves and our generation’s children safe online is one of the challenges for our era. Today is “Safer Internet Day”: an opportunity to highlight the various security and safety risks associated with the internet and how to deal with them.

Network PR acknowledges the importance of education in helping the new generation get the most out of this important technology without being subjected to harassment or feeling unsafe. In all our dealings across the web we are committed to a high level of honesty and transparency, so that those we converse with always know who we are.

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On the weekend I was at a bbq in Erskineville talking to a musician that I had seen and loved in the 80’s. He still plays around town predominantly in Sydney to middle age (40s) audience.

I mentioned interest in the next time he was playing and he asked me for my email – his main point of contact with fans. He mentioned putting time into building his email lists more than concentrating on social media.

We talked about his marketing efforts and his use of social media. He mentioned using MySpace but had not invested any time or effort to use the Facebook application.

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I was reading a blog post by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research who raised the issue of how social media marketing will fare in the face of a recession.

The upshot was that it will continue to thrive because it is still one of the more effective and particularly cost-effective types of marketing.

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