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Bob LeDrew at Flacklife posts about a fake campaign carried out by Hunter College on behalf of Coach. I’ll let you read the specifics here and here.

Social media tools are powerful. They can help create dialogue and conversation with your customers and they can help humanize an organization through transparency and authenticity. Of course, they can also create buzz, better your search engine results and reach new audiences in new ways- which are the nice tangibles for many clients, and, too often, the “short cuts” for social media use and can lack the strategic focus necessary.

Unfortunately, they can also be extremely opaque and obscure the true identity, motives and money at work. It’s unfortunate that the students at Hunter College learned how to use social media in this way, rather than in an authentic way.

What I think is AS disappointing is that, while there are plenty of smart people like Bob calling Hunter College and Coach and the International Anti-Counterfeit Coalition out on this shady curriculum, I’ve watched several PRos on a listserv I belong to approve of this technique and rationalize it away.

Bob interviewed Stuart Ewen via email (reposted here) and he had some terrific insights (of course). Here’s my favorite bit:

8. Does the social media aspect of this (the use of blogs, videos, etc) add new wrinkles or increase the potential for negative outcomes?

All media have the potential for abuse and/or enlightenment. They can promote and/or be used to quash public discussion. The internet adds new capabilities, and was used to facilitate a lie in defense of the luxury goods industry’s trademarks. The real issue is one of responsible communications, whatever medium is employed. Here, responsibility was sacrificed at the altar of expediency. Insofar as universities participate in media, public relations and business
education, ethical practices must be front and central.

I hope that my students and young PRos (and veterans) who read this blog approach their work with more ethicality, transparency and authenticity than the Coach and IACC did help the organizations with which they work open up and participate in the conversation rather than try to manipulate it.

UPDATE: Robert French at Auburn has some good updates to this campaign. Go here.
UPDATE2: Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu at Clemson has more good insight. Go here.

Thanks, Scott at Media Orchard for this great tip.

A tag cloud is a visualization of the popular words found say, oh, on a Web site, in a blog, or part of a del.icio.us page. Tag clouds show you what is important in that content – the bigger the word, the more times that “tag” can be found. Typically a tag cloud consists of the key words the author or site manager has identified as such (but that’s not a hard and fast rule).

Tag Crowd is a cool service where you can upload a document, or copy and paste content to determine the important words in that content – intentional or not. So, Scott at Media Orchard suggests taking the top three results from a Google search for your organization’s name and pasting it into Tag Crowd. What you get is a visual representation of the important themes.

Okay, example. My name: “Kelli Matthews,” came back with this:

So my “brand,” so to speak, as an individual is fairly PR and social media focused. That’s largely because the bulk of the content was from my blog, the first result for my name. The second result – my blogger profile and the third the “about” page for my agency. In fact, of the top 20 links, 18 are about me and they are all accurate (things I’ve put online at some point). Some are old, but still intentional.

Eugene, Oregon – my fair city, had this result:

I was actually pleasantly surprised at the result: arts, downtown, center, events, university and track. That’s pretty accurate (and pretty positive).

What about you? And your organization? What’s the brand cloud snapshot you get?