#AskRKelly – A Lesson in PR Disasters
In case you don’t use Twitter, chances are, you’re missing out on a great PR train wreck in progress.
#AskRKelly was set up as a Q & A for publicity for R Kelly’s new album Black Panties. I honestly don’t know why he did this. Even years after the accusations, all I can think of when I hear ‘R Kelly’ is ‘he peed on someone’.
Apparently, I’m not the only person who thinks this, because the second the whole #AskRKelly thing started, dozens of sarcastic questions started flooding in asking about his love of golden showers and his sexual orientation.
The top pending pictures on #AskRKelly are these two;
R Kelly made a famous mistake. He asked people for their opinions. Don’t do that, especially on the internet…and extra-especially when your name is synonymous with urinating on underage girls.
Asking fans for opinions, with absolutely no restrictions in place is just asking for trouble. For evidence, I bring up the case of the ’07 Chevy Tahoe social media train wreck.
In 2006, some marketing genius probably had far too many drinks and brought up a terrible idea for Chevy. In order to get publicity for their upcoming 07 Chevy Tahoe, they invited fans to make their own commercials and post them on the website. The result was hundreds of commercials about American’s destroying the wilderness, causing global warming and whoring themselves for oil. The below commercial is my personal fave.
The positive commercials were ignored, while the negative ones live in infamy on YouTube to this day and have hundreds of thousands of views.
Have you every heard that a satisfied customer won’t tell anyone about their experience, while a dissatisfied customer will tell at least 10 people about their experience?
On the internet, a positive person probably won’t take the time to post a positive question. But the angry, the practical jokers, and the downright snarky will take every opportunity they can to outsnark each other. It is the circle of life on the internet.
Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I need to go ask Mr. Kelly what brand of hand sanitizer he recommends after urinating all over someone’s face.
