Good PR of the week

#wantanR8

According to a blog on Quattro World, an independent Audi enthusiast website, Audi has done something very clever with social media. Only, you wouldn’t know about it unless you saw it early this morning, because the site has died under the sheer volume of traffic the article received.

The blog, which alleges that Audi was the very first company in the world to start using hashtags in its ads, goes on to say that a user – Julie McCoy – came up with the hashtag #wantanR8 and in response, Audi gave her the keys to a V10 Audi R8 for a day.

Spotting a good opportunity to keep it going, Audi will now be giving more users the chance to win an R8 for a day, by asking them to Tweet a “clever” Tweet (not sure what that means), including the #wantanR8 hashtag (as well as @Audi) in the Tweet.

Audi has effectively used people that love the brand and products to do all the hard work for them – with the independent Quattro World banging the drum on its behalf. At last check, the hashtag has been mentioned more than 2,000 times in the last 24 hours – admittedly, the majority of Tweets including it are simply people Tweeting about this campaign, but it’ll be an interesting one to keep an eye on. Top PR.

I just spotted that Audi has paid for the hashtag to be a promoted trend, today, also, tying it all up nicely.

Thanks to Sharon Chan for emailing with this one and the countless Twitter mentions that flooded my feed throughout Wednesday morning!

I survived the riots

I mentioned last week that JD Sports had done particularly well to sneak its losses into the mainstream press. This week, the post-riots PR grabathon continues, with supermarket giant Sainsbury’s stating that it won’t claim a £1m compensation payout – so it doesn’t deprive police of money to protect the high streets.

Twenty nine Sainsbury’s stores were damaged or forced to close during the riots, but the retail chain has kindly (and not in any way to look good in a PR way, you understand) said that it’d be “wrong to divert resources away from front-line policing“. The Met has received more than 1,000 claims for compensation from affected businesses, totalling about £200m, according to The Standard.

Thanks to former-Harry Potter PR Michael Greer for CCing me in your Tweet about this.

Bad PR of the week

Not only has Facebook – a service that none of us pay for and that none of us are obligated to use – made changes to the site (as if it has the right to make business decisions without consulting us first, the bastards), it's recently announced tie-in with digital music service Spotify has further diminished the public perception of mega-billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg. He now sits somewhere between Hitler and Mr Blobby, for me, personally, with some way to go until he reaches Gillian McKeith levels of malevolence.

In short, after the actually brilliant partnership between the two, it became apparent that Spotify now requires new users to have a Facebook profile in order to sign up. Hundreds of online news articles take a dim view of this new fact, apparently unhappy at the increasingly hand-forcing reach of Facebook.

Although most new Spotify users are likely to have a Facebook account anyway, you can see that it would make people feel a bit backed into a corner. I await some sort of revolt.