Day: December 23, 2002

Nestle has a long and proud history of regularly shooting itself in the foot.

It’s most virulent opponents have seized Nestle’s attempts to aggressively market infant food in the third world and turned it into a global lobby.

There are many strategies for dealing with Non-Govermental Organizations (NGOs) but I don’t think making ridiculous financial claims on disadvantaged countries would be one of the first to jump to mind for more PR people.

But that’s just what Nestle is doing. It is demanding a payment of $6 million from Ethiopia for the nationalization of one of its subsidiaries back in 1986.

Ethiopia is on the brink of another savage famine. Nestle is a wealthy, multi-billion dollar, global conglomerate. Anyone see the disparity.

Not content with hurting their reputation through this claim, Nestle are now saying it’s a point of principle!!!! To put this all in perspective, according to a CNN report, the average person in Ethiopia makes less than $2 a day, while the Swiss giant makes about $6 million every hour.

There’s some great content on the web around this, check out CNN for the latest news. And the UK Guardian has two excellent pieces looking at this disaster from a PR perspective. They are written by journlist Julia Day and a second story from PR-consultant Mark Borkowski.

Maxim?

According to a survey carried out by Media Life Magazine, over 50% of respondents picked Maxim as the magazine that has the greatest influence on other publications. US Weekly came in second with 21% of the poll.

Unsurprisingly, Martha Stewart was chosen as Media Villan of the Year with 56% of the vote.

Season’s Greetings. Although PR Opinions is *not* a blog about blogs, there is some interesting stuff on blogging in general which I’ve found over the past couple of days. I simply post it for your perusal!

The Washington Post has a piece on Blogging Going Mainstream. It references a recent article in the UK Independent that asks if the current popularity in blogging has anything to do with the higher than usual unemployment rates in Silicon Valley and a lot of technical people with lots of time on their hands. Interesting, but I think that’s wide of the mark.

Infoworld has a reader poll on blogs this week that has some interesting findings (particularly given Infoworld’s “technical” readership). The question they asked was:

“Do you or your company publish a blog (Weblog)?”

3.6%. A. Both. My company and I both maintain Weblogs.
7.2%. B. Yes. My company publishes a Weblog.
4.8%. C. Yes. I maintain a personal Weblog.
43.4%. D. No. Neither I nor my company publishes a Weblog.
41.0%. E. None of the above, “what’s a Weblog?” or “why should I?”