Greenpeace reputation sails into dangerous waters

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Greenpeace has been hauled over the coals with allegations that the large multinational pressure group used classic spin tactics of lies, disinformation and sensationalism.

Roughly Drafted has gone toe-to-toe with the well financed pressure group to press for the truth around their greener electonics campaign:

• Greenpeace lies about Apple
• Greenpeace Apologizes for Apple Stink
• Top Secret: Greenpeace Report Misleading and Incompetent

The PR problem for Greenpeace is pretty simple, once they start being discovered using such underhand tactics they will appear less credible and start to lose the funding and goodwill they need to make some of their more valid campaigns and devalue what dedicated supporters have already achieved.

Roughly Drafted also cites well known mistakes by the large multinational pressure group including damaging a healthy coral reef in the Phillipines because they had the wrong maps and a series of lies told during the Shell Brent Spar debacle.

As media becomes more transparent with the blogosphere, both corporates and not-for-profits cannot afford to step out of line.

This time Greenpeace did not ignite the kind of media furore that Edelman and Wal-Mart caused, but if they keep on going they may be on the receiving end of protestors both online and in 'meat space'.

Greenpeace relies on the fact that it is doing the right thing to protect them and most corporate won't go toe-to-toe. However that doesn't mean that individuals and activist organisations won't.

Think about it this way:

• Greenpeace is a large multinational organisation with 360 million USD revenues recorded for 2005, it has a network of international offices and a fleet of ships
• The organisation has a well-known high profile brand that runs against the grain (like many large fashion brands from Nike to Stussy would like to position themselves)
• You could even consider a lot of their protests as an extreme sports marketing campaign (abseiling, scuba diving, sailing, running around in RIBs and thumbing their nose at authority like skateboarders or graffiti artists)

Sounds like a large corporate in structure and behaviour?

Reverberations

At the time of writing the Edelman Wal-Mart flog furore has about 1,125 blog posts according to Technorati and over 49 news stories on Google News. Enough has been said about the incident here and elsewhere, but I wanted to use it as an example to illustrate another point.

News flow on blogs is very different to news flow in the mainstream media (MSM). We had been used to the news agenda constantly churning over to meet the need for new content required for the following days newspaper or the next major news broadcast. Instead with blogs the news moves much more slowly, or more accurately reverberates around.

It reminds me of when I moved into PR and I first worked in a female-dominated environment. I got particularly frustrated by the way meetings were conducted where an idea was passed around the table, each person acknowledged the idea and wrapped their own spin and a bit of empathy around the idea parcel.

Since blogs cannot only break news like MSM, but also act as an echo chamber to make that news last longer for the audience, is giving bloggers special access or embargoed material worthwhile?

Would it not be better to keep some of the news back and feed it into the bloggers a bit later to give the story a different slant or more legs (rather like game developers have done with the media by providing cheats a while after a game has launched). Thoughts?