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You only get one chance to make a first impression. Or, in business terms, you can only launch once.

If it goes wrong, quite a bit of PR effort can be required to persuade dissatisfied customers to return.

Earlier this year we were advising a venue (not in the Midlands) of the merits of a 'soft' opening. There would be no fanfare, just a few invited guests and critical friends, a chance for the staff to iron out any unforeseen problems. This came back to me at the weekend when I was a customer at a new venue closer to home.

Having read Terry Grimley's preview of 'The Public' in the Birmingham Post, I took the kids along for the opening day. We arrived when West Bromwich's new gallery/venue was just an hour old.

A whip cracks in the darkness of an ancient tomb. Flickering torchlight casts the shadow of our fedora-clad hero as he stoops in the gloom, his hand sweeping away ten thousand years of grime from a forgotten relic. As the dust falls away an ancient clue is gradually revealed and the secrets of a long-dead civilisation come slowly into focus.

Like practically every 20-something bloke I know, I've been swept up in Indiana Jones fever, eagerly anticipating last month's release of Indy 4 by reliving all of those backyard fantasies of fighting Nazis, dodging fiendish booby traps and snatching priceless relics from highly improbable places.

Whether watching an ageing Dr. Jones creak his way through two hours of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo was actually worth the 19 year wait is a matter for debate, but the recent tidal wave of Indy mania got me pondering our own place in the annals of recorded history.

And I came to the conclusion that we're a future anthropologist's dream come true.

To help us save the planet, what we need is lots of really heavy rubbish.

Go on. Start throwing it in the recycling bin. The more it weighs, the better.

That's nonsense of course - so why do we give our local councils recycling targets measured by the tonnes of waste collected?

As part of it's recent Climate Change Festival, Birmingham City Council challenged all residents "to increase the amount of waste they recycle over the coming months by at least 20 kg per person."

I was discussing the issue with someone who knows the waste management industry pretty thoroughly (someone who journalists writing about fortnightly bin collections would call 'an industry insider').

Whilst browsing the web the other day I happened across a fairly innocuous-looking story that, at first glance, seemed nothing more than one of those "strange but true" tales that you mentally file away to impress your mates with down the pub after work.

However, something about it set a few alarm bells ringing for me and, on further inspection, this throwaway story turned out to be a nugget of pure viral marketing gold.

It also prised open a family-sized can of worms in my hardened TV researcher's brain and set them wriggling in the part of my cranium that exists to remind me that the web can also be a truth-hunters worst nightmare.

The story concerned Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old kid in Texas who had been arrested after he swiped his dad's credit card and embarked on an epic $30,000 spending spree. This misadventure wound up with him and his mates holed up in a hotel room with a pile of junk food, a brand new Xbox and two nubile $1000-a-night prostitutes procured from the local whorehouse. It also landed Ralph in the arms of the law when the hotel room was raided by the local Texan constabulary after being tipped off by a delivery guy who'd supplied the boys with snacks.

Apparently our young hero claimed he was funding this escapade through the winnings of a World of Warcraft video games contest and, when the high-class call girls questioned his age, he convinced them that he and his friends were in fact "people of restricted growth" who worked for a travelling circus. Even better he went as far to inform them that, if they refused his custom, they would be in direct violation of the state's disability discrimination laws. Only when the boys seemed more interested in playing Halo than getting to grips with their "hired help" did the penny finally drop.

In a strange twist of narrative the poor, misinformed sex workers were released without charge whilst young Ralph was slapped with a three year community order for fraud, presumably ruing the day he figured out his dad's pin number.

Unsurprisingly the story turned out to be complete hogwash. It was later revealed to be the result of a viral marketing experiment by Cornish social media marketer Lyndon Antcliff (aka Lyndoman) who unleashed the story on popular finance site Money.co.uk.

Lyndoman deliberately laced his Munchaussen-esque tale with every conceivable narrative trigger point needed to ensure its viral success.

All of us doing business in Birmingham are tied up, whether we like it or not, with the reputation of the city. We help create it and we are measured by it.

Your address is a part of your company image. That's presumably why big corporates like tall buildings (and why helicopter shots of Canary Wharf feature in the title sequence of 'The Apprentice' even though Sir Alan Sugar's office is miles away in Brentwood.

Or it's why traditional craft industries like to use pictures of country cottages and rural workshops in their literature.

I still can't quite believe that the Baggies have won promotion by ending up as Champions, whilst also reaching the semi-finals of the FA Cup where 'we' (you can see I'm a Baggies fan) put in a very creditable performance.

In fact, we haven't won anything for ages, and the chance for an open-top civic victory parade and party to celebrate our dizzying heights seemed a no-brainer. Well not to the PR chiefs down the Hawthorns who thought it was all too much hassle.

Being a Baggies fan, even a fairly lazy one like me who only makes a handful of matches a year, isn't exactly fun for much of the time. You're either biting your nails hoping to make promotion or the play-offs, or biting your nails hoping to avoid the drop.

Such is the reality of yo-yo football. Of course, it's all hugely exciting, but like others I do crave the boredom of mid-table mediocrity and safety. Until that happens it would make sense to celebrate our victories as they don't come around too often (my dad was still talking about that 68 Cup Final well into the 90s).

How do you feel if you get a free gift of an electronic gadget, but then have to buy the batteries to make it work?

Do you remember the story of a radio station offering a free trip to watch the Champions League final in Athens? A winner was all ready to soak up the atmosphere in the Greek capital, only to find out he'd actually won the chance to watch the game on TV at a restaurant called Athens.

It was supposed to be a joke, they said. But Ofcom didn't find it that funny (they actually described it as a "serious breech") and so the result was a publicity stunt that generated bad publicity.

The following is another tale of a special offer that wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The amount at stake is only a few pounds, but the value of the lost goodwill to the business is, I would suggest, considerably more.

Sometimes the longer you spend in a creative job, the harder it becomes to actually keep on innovating. Over time, you find that your ideas are just becoming rehashed versions of things that have been done before or that you've become so entrenched in your day-to-day routines that you just can't remember how to think outside the box any more.

What's more, because everyone in your industry is most likely reading the same magazines as you, browsing the same Sunday papers, watching the same TV shows, and exploring the same websites, chances are that even when something does spark off an original idea, a dozen other people have just seen the same thing and are now beavering away on projects pretty damn near identical to yours.

So what the hell do you do about it? Jack it all in and work in a factory? Cryogenically freeze yourself until a time when your hackneyed ideas suddenly seem ironically retro? Bury your head in the sand and try to ignore the whimpered cries of your inner muse as it slowly shrivels up and dies?

No. Just get yourself lost.

A teachers' union this week has been discussing how the cult of celebrity is damaging children's education and there are not enough 'ordinary' positive role models.

Is it really any worse than it has ever been? Or is it simply that with the opportunities for publicity offered my a multitude of global media we now turn our ordinary heroes or villains into celebrities much quicker?

When I was first being schooled in journalism I was told about the 'five Ps' to help decide on news values: princes, people, pay, power, policies. When I was being interviewed for a job in the museum many years ago I once added a sixth: princes, people, pay, power, policies, paintings.

Our job in PR is often to take stories clients give us that clearly fit in the fourth, fifth (or sixth) category and try to win news coverage by moving them up the interest ladder. That's why we look for a human-interest angle or sometimes even pay for a celebrity to cut the ribbon.

So to today's newspaper front pages.

While the world's financial markets are see-sawing between Armageddon and "Asian bounce back" and a couple of papers use the fifth anniversary to try and revive interest in the Iraq war, the popular press devote their front pages to celebrity stories.

They are dominated by Heather Mills, now the target for popular hatred, with the McCanns and Shannon Matthews' family also featuring strongly.

The comparison between the parents of Madeleine McCann and Shannon Matthews is an interesting one.

The Independent notes how the rewards offered at the same time in the hunt were £20,000 for Shannon compared to a celebrity-endorsed £2.6m for Maddie.

"Has class influenced the rewards offered and publicity given to two campaigns to find missing children?", it asks. It certainly took a lot longer before the media started to turn against the McCann family.

So the front of today's Daily Star is worth filing away for study by future PR and media students.

Top right is an amazing apology: "Kate and Gerry McCann: Sorry"

Middle banner: "Amazing fantasy world of warped Mucca - pages 4,5 & 6"

Main picture: Someone from Coronation Street

Splash headline: "Shannon mum is quizzed again"

Firstly, I want to point out that a proper digest of this year's SXWX interative festival is in the pipeline and secondly I want to apologise for this rather epic blog post.

The thing is I really want to convey what struck me as one of the biggest revelations at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas: Technology accelerates gossip so fast it's out of date before you even get to blog it.

My epiphany came during the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg keynote event where the Facebook CEO became the subject of probably one of the worst-received interviews in recent history at the hands of Newsweek journalist Sarah Lacy.

Many of you who follow tech news on the web would have seen the video clips of the disasterous keynote on Youtube and many of you may be wondering what all of the fuss was about. We'll nothing I have seen online conveys the sheer hostility of the crowd that day and this was something I really wanted to convey in my blog.

Unfortunately I was hamstrung by two factors. Firstly, I was caught up in a wave of mob hysteria that amplified this barely remarkable event into something approaching a war-crimes trial. Secondly, my decision to delay writing my post until the next morning meant that the legion of Twitterers, live bloggers and industry gossip-mongers present at the interview had practically burnt the hype out before Lacy had even left the stage.

So much so that I decided it wasn't worth publishing the post after all.

In hindsight, however I thought it would be pretty interesting to revisit it now the storm has blown over just as an example of the wacky zeitgeist that swept the blogosphere over one 24 hour period in March 2008.