I really enjoy the alternate history genre, from Philip K. Dick right through to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Reimagined history is a compelling source for fiction. Combine it with a professional interest in public relations, and Communicate Magazine’s Rewind section makes for a great read.

Speed sponsors the monthly section that asks questions like:
If you were leading the Sunday Times’ comms team when they were hoaxed into publishing a faked Adolf Hitler diary, how would you restore the paper’s reputation?
and
What comms advice would you give the 1816 British government to repair its standing following accusations of vandalism, pillage and looting when removing the sculptures from Athens?

The next issue’s topic is again interesting:
From 14 to 28 October 1962, the world was gripped by the Cuban Missile Crisis, which threatened to thaw the Cold War and bring about nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. It ended in an uneasy, partly-secretive truce between President John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev – but how could the US government convince the American population that the threat had truly subsided, and that mutual assured destruction was no longer a possibility?

Have an answer? Drop an email to Molly or summarise it in a tweet with the hashtag #commsrewind. The best responses will appear in the magazine and one will win a bottle of champagne.

Working in Leicester Square can sometimes be a pain. Tourists, crowds and queues are everywhere. But it also means that Central London’s festivals, events and exhibits are often no more than a stone’s throw away, giving us lots of options to pop out at lunch.

Today Feeding the 5000 is taking place in Trafalgar Square. For the next hour and a half, charities, volunteers and the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, are serving a free lunch to 5000 members of the public.

The meals are made from fruit and vegetables that are cosmetically imperfect and would otherwise be destined for waste. The event sets out to show how easy it is to reduce the levels of food waste in the UK and internationally, and how governments, businesses and individuals can help.

The line-up for grub went around the square. But it was okay, I just stopped by to take a look at the food waste eating pigs.

It has been a while since I’ve written anything on information security, but noticing these two Twitter spammers quickly got me back in the game. While this is in no way indicative of any large scale threat, I thought it was neat how it is targeting our industry specifically.

Complete with racy photos, spam Twitter accounts with bios claiming to be PR people are targeting real PR people.

The accounts launched this week, with a series of news headline tweets, which would be easy to automate from RSS and wouldn’t look too out of place in a real PR person’s Twitter feed. Along with the headlines, the occasional spam pharmacy link is thrown in.

While this kind of Twitter spam is not uncommon, by glancing at who they are following, they appear to be using some sort of follow/unfollow algorithm based on PR-related words. This, combined with their bio, shows that some thought has been put behind the spam campaign to deliberately target PR people.

By blending in and targeting a very specific sector, they are likely to be trying to generate higher quality click-throughs. The question is, why PR people? Are we particularly gullible? Perhaps we have a weakness for Twitter pics of the Iranian lingerie model the spammers used?  Or maybe we’ve been recognised as having Twitter habits that make us easily phished? Judging from the recent spate of dodgy DMs, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case.

Working in public relations can be emotional. PR professional is one of the most stressful jobs out there. Where can we turn to put things into perspective and find guidance when things get rough?

In the tradition of taking internet memes and repurposing them for PR, here are The PR Advice Animals. For advanced interneters, you will already be familiar, but for those who don’t know advice animals, here is a quick guide.

Tech Impaired PR Duck

Foul Bachelor PR Frog

Paranoid PR Parrot

Depression PR Dog

Rich PR Raven

Creeper PR Canine

I’ve got a thing for QR codes and like spotting creative examples being used effectively in marketing, for good or bad. In Soho this afternoon, this combination of QR code and street art caught my eye.

Made up of over 700 images and pasted to the wall, the poster was a pain to scan. When I finally got it, the link was to a Youtube channel for a band Clean Bandit. Seeing how difficult it was to scan, I can’t imagine that it would generate many click-throughs, but the piece itself is a great bit of street art. Even if it isn’t effective for driving traffic, it still more interesting than traditional band poster flyposting.

I have a fascination with mechanical turks and “freelance” online labour. Whether it is for skilling up MMO characters to sell for cash or joking about outsourcing my time sheets, I am happy to have strangers on the internet helping me out with menial electronic tasks. And I’m really interested in the economies and labour force behind the jobs too. This emerging workforce is varied, from a bored student in Saskatchewan to a computer sweatshop in India, there is always someone somewhere on the web willing to spend a few hours clicking away for a little cash.

My fascination recently led me to Fiverr, a site that is great for quirky art kids to draw MSPaint portraits or pose for funny pictures at $5 a pop. Fiverr keeps 20%, and workers can make some nice pocket money. There’s other sites like this out there, TechnoBuffolo reports that Fiverr has “spawned several clone sites, like Fourerr.com, Goferr.com, Tenbux.com, TaskArmy.com,Gigsbucks.com, and Uphype.com.” The market is huge.

One thing that grabbed my attention on Fiverr is the abundance of offerings on the front page for Facebook relationship status stand-ins. “I will be your Facebook girlfriend for $5.” Exploring these posts and it seems that some are genuine young ladies renting out their relationship status, but most appear to be fake accounts, part of networks of other fake accounts, boasting thousands of friends and photo albums of beach vacations. Complete with reviews from former customers (surely most of these are fake too?), and filed under Social Marketing, there clearly is a market for impressing your old high school friends with a fake fb hottie.

Along with menial Excel tasks, online influence is being bought and sold, from large scale social marketing scams and now apparently your Facebook friends. Is there any task that you can’t pay someone to do online?

A few hours ago I tweeted an image that I made: “How PR people see each other http://i.imgur.com/jXyr6.jpg”

The plan

1. Steal an existing meme and edit for the public relations industry
2. Distribute on Twitter
3. ????????????????????
4. Profit

After 15 minutes several people I consider influencers in my circles has retweeted it. Success!

Under an hour and it went past my network. I was getting new followers and strangers were asking me questions about the meaning behind certain squares.

After about an hour, Twitter etiquette be dammed, it was gone and away, being tweeted without the usual credit, getting hosted and shared on other image services and blogs. It also apparently trended.

Two hours later and the image is circulating around offices as an email attachment, a bit of Friday fun. This includes Speed’s office, my colleague unaware of where it originated.

I think it is a hilarious example of how quickly content can spread and how there is an appetite for humour amongst the usual industry news.

Yeah, it was only for a laugh on a Friday, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the stats over the weekend. Hopefully I’ll learn something and make my next press release as much of a viral success. Watch the blog for an update on Monday!