Good PR of the week

Arresting development

There’s hardly ever any good PR for the police (excepting the brilliant live-Tweeting social media work of Greater Manchester Police), which is why I think it only fair to highlight a story that has been everywhere in the last week.

In short, undercover officers at Derbyshire police sent letters to dozens of wanted criminals, asking them to ring a marketing company to collect a free crate of beer. This led to 19 suspects calling the number – which was, in fact, the number to Chesterfield Police Station, leading to their arrests.

I’d imagine working in the PR department for any police force would be a tough gig, so the team at Derbyshire must have loved this coming in, and have done brilliantly well with it, with hundreds of media mentions online.

Bad PR of the week

Taking it on the chin (not)

Well, it just has to be this, doesn’t it?

You may remember media agency PHD’s ‘We Are the Future’ promotional video (202,000 views, 82 per cent dislikes on YouTube at the time of writing), an unmitigated disaster that incurred the ire of social media pundits the world over.

A new promotional video has been unleashed unto the suspecting online public – and it’s not good.

In fact, it’s worse than that.

Imagine the kids at your school who were never part of the cool crowd, but seemed to just get on with things, relatively unnoticed. Now, imagine those same kids, but with jobs at global interactive marketing agency Sapient Nitro, and dreams of being as musically gifted as Rebecca Black.

Add some guitars, some ill-advised Linkin Park-inspired verses and you pretty much get to this (sent to me by PR Julie Howell), a video pronouncing the virtues of being a Sapient “idea engineer“, where “out of the box ain’t box enough”.

Once the video had been spunked out in all its ropey glory and people began taking issue with its woefulness, Sapient began deleting Facebook comments criticising the effort (hat-tip to The Wall Blog for that link) – before trending on Twitter.

If you put something out there, you open yourself to opinion. Censoring this opinion to inaccurately portray public reaction is never a good idea.

Which brings us neatly onto this...

If you work in PR, you’ll have been asked to not email a journalist again, through both polite and not-so-polite methods. Don’t threaten legal action, this isn’t America.

Thanks to Martyn Rosney of Wilson Hartnell PR for getting in touch with this.

Image courtesy of Darach  http://lockerz.com/s/156118723

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.