Late last week, Arik Hanson had an interesting blog post about PR flameouts and asked if we’re hurting, or helping, the industry by talking about them.

His point was about the Ocean Marketing debacle (and also included The Bloggess when she called out a PR professional by name) and whether or not it’s helpful to continue talking about these things.

If you don’t know what happened with Ocean Marketing, I encourage you to read Kevin Dugan’s post about it on Bad Pitch Blog.  I won’t rehash it for you.

If you’re a regular reader of Spin Sucks, you know I’m an advocate of attacking an idea, but not a person. There is way too much agreement in the social media chamber. Unfortunately, if someone disagrees with you, they typically won’t comment or say anything. They just stop reading.

And that’s a shame. The only way we learn is to debate with an open mind. If we surround ourselves with people who agree with us all the time, we’ll stall.

Over here, when we see something that seems crazy to us, we blog about it. After all, the name of the blog is Spin Sucks. (more…)