Dumb ways to die

I really love this website - it's a brilliant piece of PR. Reminding people to be safe around trains has always been a hard topic to address to the public yet this video manages to give an element of humour to the topic and hopefully will help. The video is family friendly as well so suitable for a wide audience.

Social Media - good or bad?

Is social media really effective PR or is it a 'cop out'. Whilst writing an assignment for university it got me thinking does social media really class as effective PR. For it could be argued that the practitioner is not doing any work and is using the power of social media as a bit of an easy ride in their job. Is this why so many businesses and organisations are obsessed with sites such as Twitter and creating hashtags because someone somewhere can not be bothered to do their job to an acceptable level. Yet, on the other hand is social media that much of an influence on peoples opinions and behaviour that this is the new way forward and this explains the dramatic emphasis with organisations. Personally, I could see the rise of social media in PR falling just as quickly in the future. For every 'good' PR campaign through social media you see one which has gone terribly wrong. For example, the waitrose "I shop at waitrose because..." campaign which could have said to failed miserably.

So will social media last in the PR practice?

Public Relation Apps

I just downloaded a Public Relations app for my iPhone and I think it is so useful to my studies. Already I have been able to apply some of the press releases to my assignments so thought that I would share this with everyone in the hope it can help someone else.
I downloaded PR Web which is brilliant.
I also downloaded PR 101 to develop my vocabulary for my assignments and in lectures generally but I have not used this yet so will post about this later.

The PR 101 app is useful, however, I have not managed to work out all of its features yet. I think I need to play around with it some more but overall I would rate both the apps they have certainly helped me.