If you viewed Jon Snow’s talk you’ll know that he gave a fascinating insight into the changes that have taken place in the media over the past couple of decades.
Of course it continues apace.
I haven’t seen a lot of noise in the PR blogosphere on this, but I thought Facebook’s set up of TechCrunch was certainly unique.
So we’ve had our fun with Facebook over the years (Why We’re Suing Facebook For $25 Million In Statutory Damages, Republican PR Director Calls Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg “totally full of sh*t”, Randi Threatens a Bar Bouncer). But in general these things are supposed to flow one way – we mess with them, they take it gracefully.
Today that changed. They punk’d us, and we fell for it. Hard.
Writer Jason Kincaid noticed a new link “Fax this photo” on his Facebook page. So he contacted Facebook, got no reply and posted a story on the new “feature”.
But here’s the catch… the “feature” only appeared to members of the TechCrunch network.
It was a set up.
Jason then called Facebook PR. Jaime Schopflin took the call and, apparently, couldn’t stop laughing for five minutes. Between laughs while catching her breath she mentioned something about this being a joke, that nobody but us could see it, and that they were placing bets around the office on how long before we noticed it and posted. And something else about teaching us to contact them before posting.
It certainly is unique….
Update:
Murphy's Law 