It’s a Sunday afternoon and we’re all due back in work tomorrow after the Christmas holidays, so I’ll keep this post short My issue is the emerging trend in social media, that is the obsession with failure. Calling out companies or individuals, at times extending to bullying for the latter is rife in social media and there is less that is celebratory. It seems we revel in failure and this is starkly demonstrated by two sites ‘PR Win‘ and ‘PR Fail‘.

The sites function as tweet and delicious streams of people highlighting PR wins or fails. I’ll give you 2 guesses which is more popular. Even more telling, running a search on Twitter for #prfail returns results as recent as one day ago. Running a search for the tag #prwin returns…. no results. Really?

Now, these sites shouldn’t obviously be taken as a total sum on online sentiment and behaviour, but it is certainly an interesting and fairly unique example. It seems we have a bigger desire to highlight the negatives, call out the fails, than we do to celebrate the wins. (And I’m sure it’s not the case that there are no companies practising good PR). Whether this is a basic function of human nature, or behaviour that’s specific to online and social media is an interesting issue. It’s certainly a given that when it comes to review sites such as tripadvisor, you’re only really going to say something if you were either extremely happy or quite pissed off. Social media has little to offer in the area of neutrality because, well, if you don’t have anything to say then you don’t say anything at all. But why are we louder about the fails than the wins?