Muppets: Most Wanted Trailer

During the Superbowl last night a trailer for The Muppets: Most Wanted featured (as seen below). It was deemed hilarious as it used some of social media’s most used phrases, acronyms and emoticons to pump up the famous puppet gang’s upcoming big screen release.

The same technique was used with a different trailer.


The other trailer showed an apparent real life Twitter spat between users @HotFudge1218 and @Babybean1128.


Whilst this would be classed as advertising it definitely provides for a good story and that is at the heart of any campaign, which in turn can lead to us, as PR practitioners, learning about what makes a good story.


Muppets: Most Wanted is in cinemas March 21st 2014. Superbowl trailer

 Other trailer

Chelsea FC have a Paddy

Outside the Chelsea Football Club Stadium (Stamford Bridge) the 'bookies' Paddy Power have recently placed a billboard. On the billboard it says "FERNANDO. We’ve got an onion bag you can actually find. It’s in the burger van mate. Get your hair net on". This was an addition to the many jokes about Fernando Torres who has had a poor performance since joining the club after a £50 million deal. 
Apparently, according to the Daily Mail Chelsea have now started legal action against Paddy Power. 
The amount of coverage on social media this picture has received has made it good PR for Paddy Power but for Chelsea is this good PR? 
Is this a good use of advertising or is Chelsea right with not seeing the funny side?

Pink Ponies Case Study

This video highlights how PR, advertising and marketing are all entwined. I LOVE it!!!

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.