28 October 2008

Hotel in the "poo"

Pardon the headline, but it really is the case with Sydney's iconic Coogee Bay Hotel, which has been accused of allegedly putting faeces in customers' gelato after they complained about several issues.

The hotel's novel approach to PR was to offer its customers free gelato. This, from the Australian Hotels Association's top pub in 2005 and 2006.

On top of that, management wouldn't comment because it was "a legal issue" and they said they thought it was sabotage. Heaven forbid they express concern, or that they are taking it seriously.

There's also some argy-bargy going on, with the hotel saying the customers demanded $1m, and the customers denying they asked for any money.

More PR at the PR Lab - http://www.prlab.com.au

25 October 2008

Pitfalls of a social media release

As if we haven’t had enough information about social media floating around the “blogosphere” these past few years. Yet still, many people don’t get it. Social media is just one method (with several sub methods) of delivering PR.

I received a social media release from some students the other day. They had just attended the national PRIA conference and were, no doubt, fired up by one of the keynote speakers, who turned out to be disappointing.

At 6mb it was a “weighty” document. The main problem is that the Australian media wouldn’t even give this a glance, as they don’t accept attachments in e-mail releases. Apart from that, it didn’t contain the necessary elements people use in these documents (at least I think some people use them).

I commented back to the group, but they never responded (that’s bad PR, people).

As my boss at work said: “haven’t they heard of a phone call?”

See: Australian PR at http://www.prlab.com.au