A wine guy from New Jersey provides the template for how potential public relations nightmares can be turned into a positive through the use of social media, including blogs, and by being transparent and truthful.

Gary Vaynerchuk who has brought wine appreciation to the masses with his Wine Library TV podcast and who has grown a family wine store into a $60 million business faced a potential PR disaster when his community wine review site-Cork’d-was hacked by an adult site.

In this video, he describes his response.  It serves as a real life pattern for anybody dealing with touchy situations that could go sour with plenty of backwash and potential for damage.  Those who could benefit would be politicians, pastors, business people and anybody else in the public eye.

Notice how he jumped on the problem and got his wine community informed and how they mobilized to help him deal with the problem.

I’ve spent a chunk of my life in the production and distribution of press releases.  My efforts centered on helping legislative officeholders, candidates and various interest groups.  These were always done on paper and distributed in–person, mail and later on email and fax.

Lots of people are still doing it way and the question has to be asked about its effectiveness.

The new method is PRWeb where the news released is distributed and made available on the web.

I was reminded of this when I got an email notice this morning of a press release from Detroit lawyer Ed Cohn about a case in the state of Washington where the governor allowed a symbol of atheism to be included with a manger scene.  Attorney Cohn, the press release, makes his argument for excluding the offending symbol.

How effective is this method?  I, personally, haven’t had any personal experience with it.  I hope to.

Anybody with examples of how effective it is?