Facebooking and PR!

Today on the PR Squared blog there was a post talking about Canadian Club Whisky’s Movember event. The event itself centers around a moustache growing contest which takes place in November and is done to raise awareness towards men health. The interesting thing about the post was how SHIFT communications chose to implement a promotional campaign. Using Facebook, the team created an application that allows you to, in short, draw moustaches all over your friends’ profile pics.

The great part about this campaign was that they chose to avoid the mainstream media and use a social media tool. If this application is successful, there is no counting the number of people who become aware of Movember. I’m sure that most of us have Facebook profiles and understand how quickly new Facebook applications become popular. It is also highly possible that if the application reaches a huge number of people the mainstream media will become aware of its popularity and give Movember additional coverage.

Overall, I just think this is a great illustration of how we all have to think outside the box when it comes to brainstorming campaign ideas for our clients. I’m sure that most PR professionals turn to traditional media when they need to garner press coverage, however, with the evolution of the internet and with more technology savy individuals joining the professional ranks perhaps we will continue to see more innovative campaign ideas. What non-traditional media routes can we take to gain exposure for our clients? How can we use social media to create innovative campaign ideas?

Most importantly, let’s all go moustache our friends on facebook and support Movember!

PR on the brinks of a change

In a post on PR Studies blogging site, Recession Proof PR, I was reading about the affect of the recession on the PR industry.  It was interesting because it was one of the first posts I have seen that look at all aspects.  They didn’t just discuss the industry for businesses but they also included Educators and Students in the analysis. 

For students they basically stated to not get frustrated that the baby boomer population maybe didn’t have all the right answers, but instead we could change how PR works.  I think that is very true.  Students that are graduating now have tons of ideas and ways to expand the industry just because of the way we all grew up, internet being developed in our years of learning, it lets us know that there are no limits on what we can do. 

In the section that the blogger wrote to teachers they basically instructed that teachers have to change their way of educating students.  The way they should change it to is to not be formatic about what they teach.  By this he means don’t explain the right and wrong ways to do things, but rather explain the ideas of things and have students develop their own opinion on things.  The author said that this could get confusing to a student, which I agree.  I already get frustrated in class when I don’t understand something and it takes days to finally get but I couldn’t imagine if the teacher was PURPOSEFULLY doing this to students.  It almost seems like it should go against the code of a teacher, not sure if there is a code of teachers, but I hope you get what I mean. 

Finally, the author talked about the businesses dealing with PR, which we have all heard about before.  It seems like the recession won’t give PR a bad wrap at all, rather just not much business for a bit.  In the end it will roll back around where businesses need PR agencies to re-establish businesses legitimacy in order to maintain respect. 

It seems like things will be a little backwards for a bit, but in the end things will straighten out and maybe even improve with the new faces going into the industry with fresh ideas.

Should company blogging have rules?

When we first started blogging for this class I wondered to myself if there were any type of rules or codes that I had to follow when blogging. Well this week one of my friends told me that the company he interns for asked  him to write and comment on particular  blogs. The interesting thing about this, is they told him to write the blog as if he was an authority on the issue that he was blogging about. He was so disturbed by this that he went to one of his professors and asked what he should do. Clearly this is an ethical dilemma, but when someone is cutting your checks do you challenge their assignment? Do you think blogging is a big enough deal to have an ehtics code? I did a little research and came across this article that not only gives specific examples of ethical/unethical blogging scenarios, but also rules for bloggers to adhere to. Rule number one is, “I will tell the truth.” I personally believe that PR professionals should take blogging rules just as seriously as they would the PRSA code of ethics, no matter what position they hold with a company. Usually if you don’t have a good feeling about something, you shouldn’t be doing it.