Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Although social media has been around for a few years, plenty of businesses and entrepreneurs still get it wrong. When planning your social marketing strategy and being active on social channels, avoid these 5 common content mistakes....

An online shirt shop kicked off Amazon for trying to boost its numbers with randomized apparel phrases runs out of cash....

As a company with six employees relying on a computer algorithm to spew out T-shirt catchphrases, you'd think Solid Gold Bomb would have wanted to dedicate some time to eliminating words like "rape" from its list of cleared random phrases. Nope.

Just days after Amazon (AMZN +0.11%) shut down Solid Gold Bomb's accounts after it produced shirts with phrases like "Keep Calm and Rape a Lot," company founder Michael Fowler told CNN Money that his company is "dead in the water" as a result. According to Fowler, his company, based in Worcester, Mass., has enough cash to make payroll on Friday and that's about it.

Fowler issued an apology on his company's website, but the red flags leading to his company's demise should have been easier to spot than the offensive slogans on the company's shirts. Fowler started producing the “Keep Calm” T-shirts as a parody of the British "Keep Calm and Carry On" propaganda posters from World War II that were embroiled in a copyright dispute both here and in Europe. He decided to “create a large-scale release of parodies (something T-shirt companies often do) and relied on both computer based dictionaries and online educational resources.”...