Good PR of the week
 

Africans for Norway
 

Timed, perhaps, to coincide with Children in Need, this stunt by The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (try saying that when pissed) is both funny and makes a good point.

To raise awareness of the many, many charity appeals that do the rounds, a fake appeal dubbed Radi-Aid has started a campaign to ship radiators from Africa to Norway, to help Norwegians cope during the “harsh winter months”. Frostbite kills too, you know.

According to the campaign, it's hoping to raise awareness of the positive developments happening in African countries and abolish the stereotypical assumptions about the nations.

Watch the official music video and appeal below:

Premier Inn’s fast move
 

In light of the news that former Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez would replace Roberto Di Matteo at Chelsea as temporary manager, Premier Inn and its PR team cracked the whip to respond in lightning speed.

Given Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich’s penchant for sacking managers, Premier Inn has renamed a suite the “Rafa Benitez suite“, because it’s perfect for a short stay.

Although it’s not directly related to getting people to stay at the chain, you have to praise the speed of execution and the creativity behind it.

Bad PR of the week
 

PRWeb gets stung
 

For the first of two times this week, Google is involved, albeit this time inadvertently.

On Monday morning, press release wire PRWeb distributed a two paragraph press release announcing Google's supposed $400 million acquisition of WiFi provider ICOA Inc. A number of high-profile news providers and sites picked the story up as gospel, including Associated Press, TechCrunch and WSJ’s AllThingsD.

But the acquisition was untrue.

As such, sites that ran it have had to put up apology updates and PRWeb has issued a public statement stating that the service reviews all press releases and “follows an internal process designed to maintain the integrity of the releases we send out every day“. Coming to a lecture about journalism integrity near you.

This write-up on SearchEngineLand by Danny Sullivan pretty much covers it if you want more of a blow-by-blow account.

Google security glitch
 

This week, as reported on The Next Web, a serious breach in Google accounts security occurred.

At my agency 10 Yetis, we work quite closely with SEO agency Bronco and co-MD Dave Naylor. Naylor is about as on these things as you can be and quickly blogged about it here, as featured in The Next Web piece.

In short, access to Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and perhaps others tools to users who previously had access, but then had that access revoked were reverified.

What this meant was that ex-employees or agencies that no longer work with certain clients but previously had access to tools that could easily affect a company’s search rankings had access restored. The potential to act maliciously, given the fact the sites many found themselves able to access again are now probably ex clients, was very real.

As I write this, nothing has been publicly announced, but it appears Naylor is the first to document it in such a way. It’ll be interesting to see how Google responds.

Have you seen any good or bad PR?
 

Contact PR Rich Leigh with it by tweeting him @GoodandBadPR or by emailing rich@10yetis.co.uk throughout the week and we’ll happily credit you for your trouble.

Good and Bad PR is a feature on the blog of 10 Yetis PR Agency.