Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Say you’re stranded on a desert island with nothing but a bottle of wine and—inexplicably!—the contents of your entire junk drawer. But a corkscrew is nowhere to be found amidst the clutter.

...Telling the public what they want is like teaching a cat to play golf. Cats don’t like to play golf. Cats like to do cat things. The public likes do public things. And what does the public like to do? Put French fries in its burgers. In fact, the public has been sticking French fries in its burgers since the 1970s at least, and probably long before then.

Burger King, exercising our sage advice that it is always a good idea to listen to the public, to study the public, to talk to the public and hold the public’s hand and ask if everything is okay, and then go back to corporate headquarters and start brainstorming PR strategies and marketing campaigns. The public will show you what they want; brands just have to pay attention.

And that’s why we can say with complete confidence that Burger King has managed to implement one of the greatest and most profoundly simple PR strategies ever seen on the planet earth....

There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world. For Christ’s sake, there was an accompanying story with the headline “Miley’s Shocking Moves.”

In fact, putting that story front and center was actually doing, if anything, a disservice to the public. And come to think of it, probably a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Syria, those suffering from the current unrest in Egypt, or, hell, even people who just wanted to read about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

But boy oh boy did it get us some web traffic. Which is why I, Meredith Artley, managing editor of CNN.com, put the story in our top spot. Those of us watching on Google Analytics saw the number of homepage visits skyrocket the second we put up that salacious image of Miley Cyrus dancing half nude on the VMA stage. But here’s where it gets great: We don’t just do a top story on the VMA performance and call it a day. No, no. We also throw in a slideshow called “Evolution of Miley,” which, for those of you who don’t know, is just a way for you to mindlessly click through 13 more photos of Miley Cyrus. And if we get 500,000 of you to do that, well, 500,000 multiplied by 13 means we can get 6.5 million page views on that slideshow alone....

Memes are a big deal these days. You can’t go on Facebook without seeing a new version of the Grumpy Cat, or the Most Interesting Man in the World, or perhaps some variation on the “Keep Calm” theme. If you’re not sure about this whole meme thing, check out Know Your Meme, and you might just get it.A picture hits the web and people start making their own, either with their own Photoshop skills or through a service like the Meme Generator. Others might do their own version of a popular video, perhaps lip-syncing to a song. Some memes take off, while others whither and die....

The category of "most hilarious fire safety sign" is rather limited, but we just found our No. 1 candidate on the list of options.Vivian Schiller started at Twitter as the company's new head of news on Wednesday. While getting the lay of the land, she tweeted this picture of a sign in the company's New York City office...