Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Mel Gibson: Nowhere To Hide
byIt used to be if a company or celebrity had a PR crisis, the mainstream media was the force to be dealt with one way or another. The problem today is those who deal with reputation triage must consider a much wider source of negative fallout. The Web—and what would more narrowly be described as Web 2.0—has allowed individuals to rapidly magnify a situation and spread the message virally to an even faster degree than big media. Witness the Mel Gibson debacle. No sooner did that story hit the AP than bloggers all over the world were on it in a huge way. It is currently the most popular item on the blog search engine, Technorati. And, of course, it’s making digg, too.
Before Web 2.0, a celebrity or organization could at least issue a press release to the media to answer/explain allegations or a nasty issue, but how do you answer the blogosphere when there are over 50 million bloggers! When PR goes viral in a negative way like this, it presents a major challenge to publicists and anyone else who must deal with vast amounts of consumer-generated PR content.
It isn’t only bloggers that are spreading the word far and wide. Mel is all over YouTube, and he’s a major topic of conversation in Internet discussion groups and social networking sites like MySpace.
Consumer-generated Web content has recently created a communication revolution, but today I know of at least one celebrity’s publicist who wishes mainstream media was the only thing he/she had to worry about.
