TK Maxx doesn’t have a particularly good track record in this area. The chain has been caught out previously, selling real fur marked up as fake. Others have also spotted fur for sale at TK Maxx but say that the store will remove it when it’s pointed out. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful policy – who’s to say what happens to it after it’s taken off sale, and how much is actually sold without the store realising it? I don’t want to get into a debate about the fur trade but the simple fact is that TK Maxx claims to operate an anti-fur policy (and presumably reaps the PR rewards from that) so it’s not a very good state of affairs.

In this case, the label states clearly that the coat contains fur. There’s even a sample attached to the tag, so we’re not exactly in Sherlock Holmes territory here. But you don’t expect to find real fur for sale in a high street store, which is why we didn’t notice until we got it home.

We took the coat back today. The assistant looked a bit shocked and it was taken off sale with assurances that checks will be made to remove others. I’m no retail expert but if TK Maxx made these checks before putting fur on sale, or maybe stopped using known suppliers of fur, that would help everyone out.

I’m not sure what journalists did before Twitter. Maybe they phoned people or something. Nowadays though, all they have to do is type some inane request into Twitter, tag it #journorequest and watch PR companies and wannabes fall over themselves to help out. Maybe.

It’s perhaps a little lazy but the process is, at least, entirely open, which I suppose is an improvement on the days when lifestyle hacks just phoned up their London PR friends when they needed some “real-life” story. Still, it feels weirdly uncomfortable to have the base practices of journalism laid bare for all to see. Most of these requests tend to involve something “saucy” or prurient, or simply reveal journalistic laziness/incompetence (“Does anyone know the PR contact for so-and-so?”, etc.) The cleverer PRs have also realised that they can tout their clients to lazy hacks by re-appropriating #journorequest for their own ends.

Anyway, here’s a selection of my favourite #journorequests from the last few days. They’re presented (mainly) without context or explanation, just as they appear on Twitter.

We’re looking for people who’ve had sex at work for a naughty confessions feature. Any used will be paid. Please get in touch #journorequest

I’m looking for a 13 year old girl who is pregnant for a magazine feature. Please message me if you’re interested #journorequest

Anyone know the press office for Odeon/ Vue cinemas? #journorequest [Dave's tip: Financial Dynamics does the PR for Terra Firma, the private equity firm that owns Odeon; Vue's corporate website lists Clarion Communications as their PR company and provides a phone number]

Seeking women who think they’re absolutely marvellous looking and can’t stop admiring themselves in the mirror #journorequest

Looking for people who have taken the new ‘legal’ high ‘ivory wave’ #journorequest

Anyone out there tried this new recreational drug, ‘Ivory Wave’? It’s meant to be a rival to Meow Meow. Get in touch #journorequest

Ooh – I’m also looking for someone who’s had sex at work – will need to be pictured and identified for #journorequest

#journorequest Tiens Tianshi Toothpaste is launching in UK this September ….DM for more info

Does anyone know who does then PR for Aresnal / The Emirates? #journorequest [Dave's tip: Google > Arsenal Football Club > Contact us > Club switchboard > 020 7619 5003]

Need to find unemployed overweight women who think their weight stops them working. Good fee. DM me. Pls RT. #journorequest

I’m seeking examples of celebs who have had, or are planning to have, a Victorian themed wedding #journorequest

And so it continues. Forever.

By the way, does anyone know where I can find a medium-sized bag of heroin at a reasonable price? #journorequest

Today’s CashGordon fiasco has got me thinking about the point of a social media campaign and reinforces the point that simply getting your brand or campaign mentioned on Twitter is not an end in itself.

For Tories, the CashGordon strategy was based around creating something that would inflame people on Twitter, and then watching as the #CashGordon hashtag began to trend highly, regardless of the actual merits of the campaign or content of the CashGordon site (in this case, Charlie Whelan and the Unite union’s supposed hold over Gordon Brown and Labour policy). This much was admitted by Tory blogger Samuel Coates, who said on Twitter earlier:

Sitting back and marvelling at #CashGordon – we had an open hashtag policy, and have not changed that today, for a reason!

Other examples of self-satisfied gloating on Twitter earlier today came from the Tories’ in-house “online communities editor” Craig Elder, who praised Labour and lefty-types for drawing attention to the CashGordon site:

@psbook Such an own goal on your part, repeatedly drawing attention to our campaign. Please continue.

What was actually happening here was not any discussion of Whelan or Unite. Instead, there was lots of criticism for CashGordon. The Guardian had noticed that the site used a template that had been developed in the US as a campaign tool against US healthcare reform. The phrase also started to trend highly because people quickly realised that since the Twitter stream on the CashGordon website was unmoderated, you could write embarrassing things about the Tories (or indeed childish swearwords, or even adverts) and get them on to the CashGordon site in real time, provided they were tagged #CashGordon (see image, top left).

Then someone realised that the site could be exploited by script commands. Pretty soon, CashGordon was redirecting to a site saying “David Cameron is a c**t” in 48-point type, a Rick Astley video on YouTube and some OAP porn (link is safe for work). The site was subsequently taken down and remains offline. All in all, then, this was fairly obviously a total embarrassment, a mega PR fail and a terrible idea very poorly executed.

Yet, after a couple of hours, Elder and Coates reappeared on Twitter, still maintaining that all was well. After I sarcastically observed that CashGordon was “a social media triumph”, Elder replied to me like this:

@davidquinn Can’t disagree with that – it’s still trending in the UK…

How stupid do you have to be to think that just because a word or phrase trends on Twitter, that automatically makes it a good campaign? It obviously doesn’t, and to think otherwise is simply confusing the medium with the message.

I realise that as an employee of the Conservative party, Elder’s job is to talk up its “successes” against all rational logic but, really, does he actually believe that this idea was executed in a way that was positive for the Tories? His argument, and that of some other social media practitioners, seems to be that if you get something trending, you’ve automatically “won”. But in this case people aren’t talking about Unite, the BA strike or Charlie Whelan (the point of the Tory campaign). Instead, they’re talking about how a flagship Tory website has been forced offline in embarrassing circumstances – and having a bloody good laugh about it. How is this a win?

Using the Tory rationale, Nestlé had a good day on Friday, when the company’s name began to trend on Twitter following claims by Greenpeace about the slaying of orang-utans during Nestlé’s harvesting of palm oil, which was compounded by Nestlé’s disastrous intervention on Facebook, in which it told people to stop using its logo. In reality, of course, the brand has taken a dive and the thing is already a case study in how not to “do” social media.

Looking back, if it’s remembered at all, I very much doubt CashGordon will be seen as a brilliant use of Twitter as a political campaigning medium. Instead, it will be seen as a byword for total technical incompetence and a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of social media.

Footnote: In case you’re wondering, and since there’s an election brewing, this blog is not pro-Labour, nor is it pro- any other political party.

• You’ve not seen any actual corn flakes with the logo on, have you? All you’ve got is a JPEG that’s been knocked up in Photoshop and no real idea whether the technical gobbledygook Kellogg’s mentions makes any sense
• Kellogg’s makes 67m packets of Corn Flakes each year, with 2.7bn bowls consumed annually in the UK (according to Kellogg’s). How the hell are they going to burn each of those tens of billions of corn flakes with a frigging laser while keeping costs and production levels constant?
• There’s no incentive for Kellogg’s to do it. They constantly say they don’t supply cereals to anyone else, so how could their corn flakes be mistaken for another brand’s? Unless someone is inserting “fake” own brand corn flakes into a Kellogg’s box (which they’re not)

I guess I might be perceived as humourless for complaining about what is, admittedly, quite a witty joke that ties in cleverly with an ongoing PR strategy blah, blah, blah. But actually, isn’t it a bit worrying that newspapers will willingly publish an April Fool’s gag as fact in the middle of October? Is the internet to blame for this? Whether or not something is even vaguely plausible seems to take a back seat to how many hits it generates on the (Telegraph) website.

In another triumph for Flat Earth News, it’s been revealed that a bunch of filmmakers have been planting made up stories about celebrities in the papers in a successful attempt to prove that the tabloids will print any celebrity-related rubbish without bothering to check whether or not it’s true. Consequently, the Daily Express reported that Russell Brand wanted to be a banker and had a Fisher Price cash register as a child, while the Mirror, the Star and the Times of India went for a story about Amy Winehouse’s hair catching on fire. Both stories are wholly untrue.

Meanwhile, it’s been reported today that Kirstie Allsop might be getting a Tory peerage. Unfortunately, there’s every reason to suggest this particular slice of implausibility may actually be true.

Look at this picture I captured from the news earlier. I’m surprised the BBC allowed Michael O’Leary, boss of “low-cost” airline Ryanair, on air in this get-up. The point is to publicise some new routes from Leeds to fifty miles outside a number of European cities. In the most shameless and embarrassing way possible.

I actually think O’Leary could have maximised the opportunity a little better. He should have worn a sombrero with the maximum baggage allowance scrawled across it and had the departure times tatooed all over his puny forearms.

Earlier this year a Ryanair spokesman described a blogger who pointed out a glitch on the airline’s website as a “lunatic”. Obviously I object to this, so I hereby state that Michael O’Leary is a ball bag. In a stupid shirt.

Mark Brown, director of the Association of Cycle Traders, noticed that in the TV advert, Asda had managed to put the front forks on back-to-front, meaning that if you managed to avoid steering the thing into the path of a double-decker bus, you’d almost certainly come a cropper with malfunctioning brakes. It was also pointed out that a self-assembly bike is actually maybe not that much of a good idea in principle, since you’d really need a range of tools and technical know-how in order to put it together safely. Aside from which, the bike’s components are utter shit.

As the Guardian’s reviewer noticed:

The derailleur, gear shifts and more are made by a brand that sounds like Shimano but isn’t. It’s even written in the same font.

Asda’s response was to pull the TV ad. But, rather foolishly, its press office attempted to mask the fact that the supermarket is – in the view of at least one expert – selling dangerous merchandise with a series of crap bike-related puns.

A spokeswoman said: “As soon as we spotted the error, we put the brakes on the TV ad and pulled it. Our agency is back-pedalling as we speak and we will be wheeling out the new one tomorrow…”

So, if you’re unlucky enough to have bought one of these things and find yourself in an unfortunate death-related scenario, remember to think about the Asda press office’s funny bike jokes. It’ll hurt less.

Within each of these categories, you can assume that the individual Twitterer is between 25 and 49 years old and has a full time job. As such, it’s unclear how they have the time to permanently frequent what is basically a chat room for old farts.

1. The famous person

Most famous people have several thousand followers but only follow a handful back. The reason for this is ostensibly because they fear stalkers but is really because they think they are better than “normals” like us. The exception is Stephen Fry, who tries to follow all his followers back. He even follows me, despite the fact that I stopped following him some time ago after I got bored with his tweets about African wildlife and being stuck in a lift.

2. The “social media specialist”

As many as 91% of all people on Twitter talk about nothing except Twitter*. These people, who are often men with trendy beards, are bafflingly popular on Twitter. This is mainly because they were among the first people to “get” it. As such, when everyone else finally “got” it between October 2008 and March 2009, these people already had 900 followers and, like the popular kids at secondary school, were able to attract more. They apply hashtags to everything and often say “haz” instead of “have” because this is how people on the internet speak. LOL!

3. The weird semi-stalker/spammer

Beware of people who have 46 followers but are following 1,289. The sort of people who live in places like “Sacramento, CA” and mention “Zen” or “life-coaching” in their profile. There is no explanation for what these semi-stalkers want. (Most people don’t block them because even though they say they don’t care about their own follower numbers, secretly they are happy to have lots of apparently harmless people bumping up their stats.) Spammers are similar to the semi-stalkers, in that nobody knows what they want. The difference is they use a grainy avatar that looks like Britney Spears doing something unusual with a carrot.

4. The PR consultant

Twitter is a godsend for PRs because it allows them to bolt half-arsed “web strategies” on to otherwise lacklustre campaigns, which they (correctly) assume will impress their clients. Many PR people pretend they are being conversational about something new they have discovered (a “funky new ironing board!”, a “revolutionary new tampon!”, etc) when in fact they are “creating online conversations” about something they are being paid to “create online conversations” about.

5. The relentless cross-poster

Since most people have nothing interesting to say in their daily lives, it’s understandable that most people on Twitter can’t think of much interesting to say either. Consequently, they set up some kind of automated service that aggregates lots of other stuff (blog posts, bookmarks and general web waffle) and churns it out incomprehensibly, with odd sets of brackets, dots and bit.ly addresses to the annoyance of the entire world. It’s the equivalent of walking into a room and yelling “Page 41 of the Guardian G2 section!”, then reading out the first sixteen words from the headline and intro before walking off. Then doing the same thing again five minutes later with page 42.

6. The person who thinks you give a toss about their record collection

We’ve all been to a house party where someone hogs the record player and plays dreary music, failing to notice that everyone else in the room lost interest in the Bluetones after that one single they did that was quite good in about 1994. The online equivalent is the Twitter link to the Spotify/Blip FM playlist.

7. Some lunatic at a conference

There’s always someone on Twitter who’s at a conference that’s demarcated purely by a hashtag, an apparently random series of lower-case letters and “09″. In fact, up to 97% of these conferences* are about social media and/or “online engagement”, presumably because these are the only types of conference where the chairman considers it acceptable for delegates to sit typing stuff into a mobile phone like a pig-ignorant teenager while somebody important is on stage doing a carefully crafted presentation. They then tweet stuff from the unmissable #xmklwfdf09 conference every five minutes for six hours, AS THOUGH THEY ARE WITNESSING THE BLOODY OBAMA INAUGURATION. Clearly, they aren’t.

Considering all of the above, is it any surprise that 15-year-olds have found much better things to do with their time?

*All figures are made up

Damian McBride, a “special adviser” to the Prime Minister has been caught sending e-mails to Derek Draper (of Labour List fame) apparently suggesting some things that could be used to slur David Cameron and George Osborne. Somehow or other these got into the hands of Tory blogger Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes). They have also been touted around the Sunday tabloids.

McBride has said nothing publicly but this morning someone unnamed at Number 10 claimed he had apologised:

Neither the Prime Minister nor anybody else in Downing Street, except the author, knew anything about any of these private emails. The author of these emails has apologised for their juvenile and inappropriate nature and for the embarrassment caused. All staff will be reminded of the appropriate use of Number 10 resources.

It’s a slightly silly story with nothing much to commend it except for the similarity to a storyline in The Thick of It (see below), which in turn was based on the Jo Moore incident of 2001. (If you recall, she was the remarkably talented government “adviser” who issued an e-mail on the day 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks suggesting it was

a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.)

The bloggers’ spat between rugby shirt-wearing “mystery man” Staines (check out his appearance on Newsnight if you are unfamilar with the man) and the unfortunate Twitter-spammer Draper (“a former regular on ITV1′s Kyle’s Academy”, according to his biog) is also tedious in the extreme.

But the question remains: How is it that people like McBride and Moore are employed to give out advice about political matters, and yet can’t figure out that by putting stuff in e-mails they might as well fax it directly to the offices of the News of the World?

UPDATE 10.35pm, Saturday: The Sunday Times has revealed the contents of McBride’s idiotic e-mail, which includes a plan to force David Cameron to reveal his medical records on account of an alleged sexually transmitted disease (?). What’s startling is the way Draper commends McBride’s suggestions as

Absolutely totally brilliant Damian.

McBride has resigned. If these two pillocks are the best of the attack dogs then Gordon Brown surely has much more to worry about than the minor problem of a massive recession come the next General Election campaign.

Allison Pearson: The Mail on Sunday columnist commanded that we should all “look away now” in a piece on January 21, which was illustrated with a disturbing image that, in Pearson’s words, caused Jade, a mother of two young children, to resemble “a human sacrifice”. Unfortunately for the entire world, the columnist didn’t follow her own advice. Returning to the subject of Jade on 18 February, Pearson filled a few hundred more words on the subject, hypocritically thanking Jade for reminding her to get a cervical smear and “fighting like a tigress”.

Choice quote:

With her head covered with bald patches, her eyes full of fear and her arms wrapped protectively around her naked shoulders, Jade Goody looks like a human sacrifice… At what point do the cameras look away out of common decency? After years of gawping at inmates of the Big Brother house as they bitch, flirt, fight and have sex, does the concept of common decency even exist any more?

Martin Samuel: Writing in the Daily Mail on 5 March, Samuel made an irrelevant and utterly confusing link between Jade and the miners’ strike of 25 years ago (no, really), using the tale of “Bob” – a union organiser who joined a picket line at News International, lost his job and died of a brain tumour. Samuel reasons that because Jade has merely appeared on television and has never gone on strike in support of miners or newspaper workers, this makes her death “different” from Bob’s. He even invokes the ghost of Princess Diana in a column that, even by the Mail’s standards, is bizarre, cruel, nonsensical and stupidly pointless.

Choice quote:

The miners’ strike began 25 years ago yesterday. Few called the miners brave back then, whether working underground or gathered in anger around a doomed pit. These days, we have different notions of bravery. A 27-year-old mother-of-two from reality television dying of cancer in public, while her new husband contemplates his latest assault conviction and her publicist provides sound-bite updates of the latest setback, is one definition. How strange to destroy the principles of working-class Britain, and replace them with morbid sideshows, tragic little turns imbued with false significance. Bravery is about choice, and cancer forbids that. Jade Goody will leave a legacy of awareness, for as long as her story dominates news bulletins, but there was no design. She did not become ill to teach the world to have a smear test, any more than Princess Diana died to make sure we belt up in the back.

Carole Malone: The former Mirror columnist takes the award for Jade-related hypocrisy. As the Guardian recently noted, Malone has previously been vicious in her criticism of Jade, having variously described Goody as fat, talentless and thick. She even predicted that Jade’s kid would turn out to be stupid and hoped he would be “good at sport” because he had no chance of getting to university. However, Malone swallowed her words in order to churn out a simpering tribute in the News of the World on 22 February. If the money’s good, why worry about consistency, eh Carole?

Choice quote:

The truth is, I’m in awe of Jade Goody. I have been since I was in the Big Brother house with her and saw that for all her faults, her unfettered anger, her lack of education, this was a kind girl, a loyal girl, a strong girl… I don’t know why this young woman has touched me, touched us all, so profoundly — but she has. For me, it’s because I recognise I’m a coward and I know I couldn’t have fought this illness the way she has — with laughter, tears, optimism and always, till now, with the unerring belief that she’d be OK.

Rod Liddle: The Twatosphere’s founding father used Jade as a platform for his unique brand of comedy-free satire last August. In a monumentally distasteful article for the Spectator just days after Goody had been diagnosed with aggressive cervical cancer, Liddle wrote that the “coarse, thick Bermonsdey chav” might have specified the need for a diagnosis of terminal illness as part of a contractual arrangement.

Choice quote:

I daresay we will be told very quickly indeed if it has not been caught early and there will be cut-out-and-keep diagrams of Jade’s cervix to help us all understand what is going on inside her. There may well be sidebar articles on the possible causes of cervical cancer and, in the rightwing tabloids, warnings about recreational sex to the nation’s young women — exposure to semen is suspected of causing pre-cancerous changes in the cervix and Ms Goody has had plenty of exposure to semen over the years, apparently.

Well, here’s the Yes campaign’s press release from yesterday. Note the stinging final sentence. God forbid either side in this increasingly rancorous debate might actually stick to the topic in hand during the weeks leading up to the referendum…

 
YES CAMPAIGN CONDEMNS ‘NO’ VOTE ASSAULT VIDEO
GMMG SUPPORTER’S AD “BEYOND BELIEF”

The Greater Manchester Yes Campaign today condemned as “beyond belief” an advert produced by supporters of the Greater Manchester Momentum Group, which portrays a young woman being assaulted because her father was unwilling to pay the Congestion Charge.

The film was withdrawn after its existence was highlighted by a Yes Campaign supporter.

The advert, filmed at Peel Holding’s Trafford Centre, was apparently produced by Sonassi Media, supporters of the Greater Manchester Momentum Group.

The video purports to show a women [sic] pleading with her father to collect her from the Trafford Centre because she fears she is being followed by a potential assailant. Her father refuses because he states he cannot afford to pay the congestion charge. The woman is subsequently assaulted.

Commenting, Yes Campaign Chair Lis Phelan said:  “For members of the ‘No’ Campaign to use images of violence against women to promote their campaign is beyond belief.  I simply cannot understand how the Trafford Centre allowed such a disgusting video to be produced on their premises.

“Everyone associated with the official ‘No’ Campaign should immediately disassociate themselves from its production.”

Greater Manchester Rape Awareness Week was launched today, November 24.

-Ends-