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"I apologize if anyone was confused by my original post,..." In DC this is called the non-apology apology where you express regret for someone else's error. T

• mojonixon 17y ago
  god I hate PR flacks. "As the [pr] plan was constructed, Johnson & Johnson's top management put customer safety first, before they worried about their companies profit and other financial concerns." Do it for PR, not because its the right thing to do!
  • rfreytag 17y ago
    Interesting that communicating why one should do 'the right thing' appears wrong. And yes I agree it is somehow unseemly. Perhaps PR has the language to help financial types appreciate the value of good ethics. I think software development has had similar problems making the case for good s/w engineering practices being financially sound and not just an nice idea.
    • anigbrowl 17y ago
      What was really going on was that J&J put their long-term interests ahead of their short-term interests. It was not as big risk for them to do so as the writer implies, because they knew their brand was damaged by an external factor rather than something they had done themselves - quite different from the contrasting example of Perrier, where the problem was in their supply chain.
• Alex3917 17y ago
  As a rule of thumb, if you are going to accuse someone of being unethical you should have to name the rule of ethics that the person is violating. The criticisms of the original project, at least the ones I read, didn't actually do this. Instead people were complaining because it reminded them of something unethical that someone else had done, or they didn't think it fit Seth's personal brand, or they were afraid he would do something unethical in the future, or they never liked him to begin with. Now if people are saying, "you violated X rule of ethics" then it's really easy to apologize for doing that. But in this case that's not what people were saying, so how exactly do you apologize to those people? Especially since in the end the reason Seth backed down was probably at least in part because his personal brand is worth more than the money he could make from the project anyway, regardless of whether he was right or wrong.
  • callmeed 17y ago
    It may not have been in the original article, but someone here on HN stated it best–this is basically a protection racket From Wikipedia: "A protection racket is an extortion scheme whereby a powerful entity or individual coerces other less powerful entities or individuals to pay protection money which allegedly serves to purchase protection services against various external threats, usually violence or property damage." Powerful entity: Brands in Public with their authority domain and SEO ranking Purchase protection services: if you pay BIP, you can edit your page, thereby protecting your reputation. External threats: in this case, not violence but the PR damage your company might suffer if negative/false information appears on the front of your BIP page.
    • hegemonicon 17y ago
      According to the blog post the pages made were all "samples", presumably to demonstrate the service. Fairly shifty, but now that they're taken down and the only way to get one is by request, there doesn't seem to be much to complain about.
      • dasil003 17y ago
        And conveniently now everyone knows about them. hmm...