DPK Public Relations: Caught With Its Hand in the Chocolate Jar?

Our friend Kirk Brewer alerted us to a little PR mess in Dallas that appears to have been made messier by a Houston PR firm called DPK Public Relations. From Kirk’s e-mail:

A friend of mine (also named Scott) did a 10-part “series” on Plano-based chocolatier Noka, on his food blog, http://www.dallasfood.org. It’s a brilliant piece of detail-oriented and quirky (not to mention humorous) investigation. Scott, by the way, is not trained as a journalist.

The gist of his series: The two owners of this business, former accountants, are, essentially, melting down $8 a pound chocolate, forming it into tiny squares, putting it in fancy packaging and selling it for as much as $2,000 a pound. (Maybe they should have named the business Koka Chocolates????) All sorts of blogs (including FrontBurner) started commenting on and linking to Scott’s blog. Several posters have suggested Scott submit the piece to mainstream media; one even suggested submitting it to the Pulitzer committee.

Most crisis communications experts would have counseled Noka not to overreact. (I might have told them that they need to make some basic changes to their business, pricing and honesty models.) But earlier this week, a Houston-based PR consultant named Dan Keeney, APR, jumped into the fray and started posting his “personal” response defending Noka on every blog where he could find the story; not all of them, by any means, but a lot. Keeney used pseudonyms in the posts to expound the position. And a lame position it was, in my opinion: That high price can actually be part of the “value” of a product, so don’t go dissing Noka. (There is certainly the “snob appeal” factor to many products, but few marketers would sell a product for $100 when $10 equal competitors are available … at least not for very long.)

Several bloggers almost immediately identified the pseudonymous poster as Keeney, and wondered whether he was working for Noka. (I subsequently pointed out that if he were, and he really was an APR, he should be disclosing his relationship.) His eventual response (paraphrased): “Well, I am working for them now, but I wasn’t when I made all those posts.” So either the guy wears his “ethics” wrapped in semantics, or he used his “personal posts” as a way to chase Noka’s ambulance.

All of this silliness and “inside baseball” aside, this situation really does drive home the fact that blogs, in a matter of days, can feed the fires of a communications crisis in ways that most companies (and, apparently, some counselors) can’t manage. It’s a great lesson in how fact-based ideas (i.e., truth, as opposed to baseless rumors) can quickly blossom among smart people, and how poorly conceived and disingenuous responses to the story can make matters far, far worse.

Ugh. We’re really going to drink our share of champagne tonight. This kind of embarrassing crap is exactly why we prefer posting about Freudian nipple slips these days.

If you want to read more about the DPK-Noka affair, you can do so here and here. Meanwhile, we’re going to open the bubbly early and watch our pitiable Miami Dolphins in their meaningless final game of the season.

At least we still have Dirk. Oh, and Evangeline, of course. And Cathy; wait — she goes before both Dirk and Evangeline. And Reggie. And Nick, our kitty.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Tags: dallas public relations