Comments on: Dr. Myra Defends McKinney’s Fake Wikipedia Entry

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 06:52:00 +0000

Scott - Stealth may work short term, but long term it won’t benefit the agency or the client.

What should PR folks do? Keep doing our best work. Any agency trying to cash in quickly on a hot new technology without understanding it will eventually stumble.

By: Constantin Basturea

Constantin Basturea — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 16:02:00 +0000

The Wikipedia page is gone now.

By: Susan Getgood

Susan Getgood — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:04:00 +0000

The sad thing is, this could have been a funny and successful character blog - sex sells after all! But two serious mis-steps in my opinion:
- Stealth. I think you have to be upfront about who is sponsoring a blog, whether it is a joke, or a character blog, or just a plain old regular blog. You also have to be upfront that it is a character.

Some may disagree with me on this, citing stealth ad campaigns and the like which have been very successful. IMO there are vastly different expectations for blogging. You know, honesty, transparency….

- The wikipedia manipulation. just silly. Post all the made up joke stuff on your own site — we’ll all laugh — but it is unethical to mess around with shared resources like wikipedia.

And if you don’t care about ethics, remember you can’t do it without getting caught. Whether its a fake entry or just a manipulation of a real one.

By: SB

SB — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 18:28:00 +0000

I hope you’re right, Bruce. I just feel like most of the feedback to this point has been, “What’s the big deal?” and even Steve at Adrants has backed down a bit and accepted the Dr. Myra blogads.

I’m usually the person who SAYS “what’s the big deal” about blog “ethics” and such issues. But in this case, there appears to me to be a remarkable lack of concern over what McKinney has done.

My advice to McKinney is to pull the Wikipedia entry, issue a brief apology, and be done with this. Live and learn, guys.

By: Bruce Stewart

Bruce Stewart — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 18:17:00 +0000

Thanks for the link Scott. But I’m not sure that it’s true that this has been all that successful or that “McKinney clearly could care less”. Most of the blogosphere buzz is about whether they should be doing campaigns like this at all, not about the mysterious campaign itself. The rapid outing of McK as the creator of the site and the bogus wikipedia entry forced them to admit that it was a marketing campaign probably far sooner than they would have liked to, and I have a hunch that some of the people involved may be feeling like the whole thing wasn’t such a great idea now. We still don’t know who it was intended to promote (and maybe now we never will). This isn’t looking like a terribly successful marketing campaign to me.