Ohio water park angers breastfeeding moms, lets them take over its Facebook page

Silence is golden … at the movies. In social media it’s like shooting your business in the foot.

Over the weekend, a Columbus, Ohio news station ran a story of a woman told to stop breastfeeding her child while at a local indoor water park. The story made it over to Facebook and soon the very vocal breastfeeding community went in droves to the Fort Rapids Indoor Waterpark Resort page to tell them their displeasure with the business’ decision.

First, the water park ignored the news’ request for comment, then it ignored its Facebook page for 49 hours letting hundreds of negative comments and exclamations of lost business pour in with zero response.

Public relations definition has a PR problem

If you had an elevator ride to explain your profession or industry to a stranger, how would you tell it?

Would you tell the most interesting / exciting / engaging parts of what you do, or would you give your elevator passenger a robotic, jargon-filled rendition that is likely to confuse and make eyes glaze over?

For us communications professionals who work with the media, formulating succinct and interesting sound bites is a regular part of the job we do for our clients/organizations. And this is a valuable skill to have when speaking with any other person who you want to educate and keep interested in your organization or what your role is at that organization.

So when I read the three proposed definitions the Public Relations Society of America wants its members to choose from, I was confused.

Komen digs an even deeper hole

I wasn’t going to weigh in on the Susan G. Komen for the Cure PR nightmare because I thought it has been already sufficiently digested and analyzed, if not overly, by many others. But the latest wrinkle makes my blood boil.

Two days after pulling grants from Planned Parenthood because Komen doesn’t fund organizations under investigation, and deleting negative reactions to it on its Facebook page, it is now back-tracking from that argument to a much more disingenuous one.

Now SGK is saying it isn’t funding Planned Parenthood because it doesn’t actually perform mammograms and breast cancer screenings, only refers women to other organizations.