Wedobuyanycar.com

Jamie Jones posted a letter on Twitter that he claimed came from car dealership website WeBuyAnyCar.com.


In the letter, they ‘reached the conclusion that you sent your request to simply waste our time’. He had tried to sell them a Little Tikes play car for children.





It received over 28,000 retweets in a day and was widely shared across social media, being picked up by sites like the Mirror. However, the letter was exposed as fake, with the Twitter user that posted it doubling his followers in the fallout of the stunt.


However, the condescending tone of the fake letter posed a PR challenge for WeBuyAnyCar.com. Yet how they dealt with the situation was amazing. They turned criticism around with some humorous responses.





Their tweets were even mentioned in The Metro.

SURPRISE!!!!

David Beckham surprised fans for Team GB.
Rita Ora for Mastercard.
Rihanna for River Island.

The celebrities seem to have taken a new turn and decide to surprise their fans. These stunts have had a phenomenal success. The stunts have been successful due to the human interest that they gain, social media coverage and videos of the stunts going viral.
What celebrities would you like to be surprised by?
What other companies will use this method?

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?

anyagram - London fashion week

With london fashion week around the corner designer Anya Hindmarch has created a new website to find your anyagram. it says you can fashion a new identity for yourself to tie in with LFW. I used my name to complete the website and have posted the picture below of the anyagrams for my name. The website has brought fun and excitement to everyone, even those who do not care about fashion. So how will be you be using your anyagram?
http://anyagrams.com/

Dulux - the brits

After the brits on Wednesday night Dulux decided to jump on the hype and tweeted about the use of colours Damien Hurst used on his version of the brit award. This was brilliantly implemented and reinforced ideas of Dulux's image they portray. The company have looked at current trends and used these to their advantage as to what to focus. Although not much notice was taken in Dulux's tweet it has identified that they are current and how important it is to have this quality in the world of PR.

Tweet not speak

I just came across this lovely idea for introducing new Public Relations students to Leeds Met University. The students used Twitter to demonstrate the power of social media. The campaign was called #tweetnotspeak. They had to use twitter and the hashtag to communiate in the class rather than talking to each other. Maybe the University of Greenwich will adopt this hands on and creative approach when looking at social media as I know I would have loved an activity like this in lectures.

http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/news/leeds-met-pr-students-get-creative-with-tweet-not-speak-campaign27112012.htm?type=student

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.