The preparation for Global PR Blog Week 2.0 has started!

WHAT

WHEN

WHERE

WHO

• have great quality content
  
• accommodate as many participants as possible
  
• encourage new voices to join the conversation
  
• organize the content in a way that makes sense for readers.

• original content. No republishing or refactoring of old articles.
  
• fresh content. Not yet another “blogging is good for business” type of article.
  
• research. Quantitative research, case studies, best practices.
  
• collaboration. Articles written by two or more authors.
  
• group discussions. Podcasts featuring more than one interviewee. Round tables. Debates.
  
• non-commercial, non-partisan approach. Don’t pimp your company, services, or expertize; put everything in a larger context.

HOW

GET UPDATES

SPREAD THE WORD

I don't know how long the site will remain live but Spin Bunny has just posted the following:

Official Statement from Spin Bunny

Spin Bunny received a gagging order last week from solicitors representing a UK PR agency offended by a Bunny story, and seeking recourse to Bunny’s sources. The order prevents us from naming the PR firm.

The team behind Spin Bunny has done its utmost in negotiations over the last week to keep Bunny alive and reach resolution out of court. That effort failed this morning and Bunny’s only option now is to shut down the Spin Bunny blog in order to protect the anonymity of its contributors and its sources.

Now I've just had a quick scan back over Spin Bunny's stories and can't find any that should merit this sort of heavy handed response. The only story that appears to go over the line is this one because it names three agencies, thus narrowing down the gossip to six individuals.

Surely a more sensible route would have been for them to have quietly asked for the story to be removed. My prediction is that this will simply encourage the story to spread throughout the internet, probably with more damaging details being added all the time.

The PR firm responsible should possibly have taken some PR advice of its own before embarking on legal action. It is often much harder to deal with your own crisis management than it is to assist a client where you can take a step back and make rational judgements. As an outside observer it appears to me that this decision was taken on emotional rather than purely professional grounds.

Fans of RSS should be reasonably impressed by the UK General Election. Two out of the three main parties are providing RSS feeds to help you keep track of their progress, news and announcements.

The Conservatives offer three separate feeds for news, speeches and articles.

The Lib Dems provide 12 separate feeds covering different policy areas. Personally I don't think this is the right approach as it is quite a pain to have to register 12 different feeds in my news reader. It probably reflects their split personality when campaigning. The Liberal Democrats are infamous for saying one thing in one area, and something entirely different elsewhere. For example one of their ten pledges in the south west of England is to ensure that the south west gets a fair share of national government spending and put an end to the Barnett formula which means Scotland gets more. In Scotland, not surprisingly, one of their ten pledges is to get even more resources for Scotland.

A single combined feed might make this difficult for them!

Even the tiny Respect provides a feed. Although they weren't quite internet savvy enough to register all the alternatives for their name so you get www.respectcoalition.co.uk.

The glaring omission in all this is of course the Labour Party which provides a grand total of zero feeds despite the fact it is employing former MoveOn.org and John Kerry campaign adviser Zack Exley.

BTW I need to declare my allegiance. I am a long-standing Labour Party member and activist. Currently I am an elected city councillor in Leeds. I have also worked as a full-time officer for the Labour Party and the Labour Party has been a client of my company NetworxPR.

As a native Cumbrian I'm proud of my home county which despite the stereotypes about daffodils and sheep is actually leading the way in many areas of science and technology.

I was therefore very interested that the Evening News & Star is looking to publish blogs by its readers.

Asda has always been good at surfing on the back of topical news events. It has done it again with these rather amusing party political ales.

As much as it pains me to say it - as a Labour Party member - the Lib Dems appear to be ahead in the on-line election campaign. The latest is the Kennedy Campaign blog. The brains behind the blog is retiring Lib Dem MP and veteran blogger Richard Allan.

I suspect Richard is also behind this Lib Dem campaign to "Stop Nuisance Election Calls". I admire it for its execution - the advert on the blog, the send a letter to your local paper, forward to warn a friend, the local news releases etc.

However, I think its substance is extremely dubious. The Lib Dems are doing democracy a deep disservice by encouraging people to look on political phone calls as being the same as cold-calling for marketing purposes. One consistent complaint from people is that they only hear from political parties at election times. Using phone calls is one way that parties can actually listen and talk to people all year round. It's also far less intrusive than having someone knock on your door.

At a time when the number of people voting is falling it should be the duty of every political party to encourage turnout. This campaign does the very opposite.

I fully understand why the Liberals are doing this as a campaign tool but I really don't think they've thought through the consequences and if they have it's a quite despicable attack on democracy.