Good idea + good idea = great idea

Many of this year's students found it challenging to come up with completely new ideas for PR, but be assured - there is NO SUCH THING as a completely new idea (well, 99.99% of the time anyway). For instance: take T-Shirt War(!!) the YouTube phenomenon made for minimal budget by Rhett and Link, with over 7 million hits. To this add the oogachaka dancing baby, one of the first internet viral phenomena back in 1996, later immortalised in the TV show Ally McBeal. And what do you get? The new Evian dancing baby T-shirt TV ad, which is brilliant all its own right.

Online reputation management

Today's 'The Times' has a good article on page 9, about the manipulation of online reputation particularly through reviews posted on TripAdvisor or Amazon. This is either about organisations enhancing their own reputation, using tactics such as posting fake positive reviews, hiding genuine negative reviews, building links from other sites, and amassing fake followers and 'likes' on Facebook and Twitter - all of which boost search engine rankings or build reputation. Or, more insidiously, competitors can post fake but damaging reviews, or find other ways to scupper search engine rankings. This is leading to online war, where rankings are skewed by professional online reputation management companies promoting their clients, and demoting the opposition. This practice is outsourced to countries such as India and Thailand, where low-paid workers create fake accounts and post numerous blogs and reviews for or against the targeted companies. I would provide a link to 'The Times' but as that involves paying for online access - here's a similar Daily Mail article from today (both emanating from the same press release!).