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By now you’ve likely read about the negative press Best Buy has been receiving, and you may have even read the CEO’s blog response to the coverage. This response has been receiving the predictable praise and pans from various circles of the blogosphere…and with good reason. There are some things the response managed to achieve very successful, and in my opinion there are some things Best Buy could have done better.

Keeping up with the Kardashians—how can you not?

This has been even easier to do since Kim announced her divorce after 72 days of marriage. The media spotlight has been the name of the family’s game lately—even more so than usual.

This entire situation further begs questions about the authenticity of this family. From a branding perspective, negative questions like, “Is Kim genuine?”, “Did she marry for love or money?”, “Was the marriage all for the television spotlight?”, have definitely garnered more naysayers. With this post on her website, she tried to explain her actions to fans, but it’s yet to be seen if this stunt will negatively impact her brand of perfumes, diet pills, clothing line or other endorsements. Will her beloved celebrity status fade as a result?

Be prepared in order to avoid mistakes… and be prepared to manage when you make them anyway.

Politics, paparazzi princesses, professional athletes…anyone who is a position to present themselves to their communities needs to be prepared to manage their perception like any company manages a brand.

During last week’s republican debate, Texas Governor Rick Perry initiated a media frenzy with an embarrassing flub of forgetting a major portion of his political platform—an agency he would choose to remove from government.

Stephen Sondheim has written music and lyrics for some of the most enduring musicals of the last half a century. I have no idea if he has ever written a press release, yet the lines he wrote could have emerged in whole from the textbook for PR 101:

On a daily basis, PR professionals decide which story ideas to share with media, when to pull the trigger and which publication/reporter would make the most sense for the angle. Appropriately acting on these issues is the difference between your story or client hitting in the media or becoming the PR pro who always annoys media.

Here are some simple things to consider to avoid the latter: