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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

> a company specializing in optimizing LinkedIn posts, has been criticized after posting a crying selfie of himself on a LinkedIn post

And got press pickup from it. Everybody in the media (really, everybody on social media) should read Trust Me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It talks about how companies plant negative media stories about themselves for publicity (from the pov of someone who has done it).

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"There's no such thing as bad publicity"

There is. If an e-commerce provider got publicity for a data leak revealing unencrypted credit card number, unhashed passwords, and email addresses, it is definitely bad publicity, because its a negative story about a core feature of the company.

So seeing how the CEO of a marketing company is so out of touch with reality, and created a PR disaster for his company, it is in no way good publicity.

You'd be surprised how quickly people forget those bad things and go back to shop at said e-commerce provider, though... I've seen it happen so many times. Sometimes it takes days, other times months, but people eventually go back once the anger subsides and they remember that website. :/

I agree, but maybe a more modern angle is “there’s no bad engagement”. Algorithms don’t distinguish whether a post is going viral because people like it or because people are dunking on it, and a category of posters have definitely exploited that.

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