Why being rude is cool

To those of you unfamiliar with the Good and Bad PR format, allow me to be upfront – rocket science it ain’t. 

For the past three or so years, every single work day, somebody at 10 Yetis has forgotten to do the bloody blog until threatened with violence trawled the media to blog about one good example of PR in practise for that day and one bad. The examples can relate to brands, products, organisations and people.

Bad PR is always fairly easy to come by due to our lovely media’s cynical approach to news telling, but if you have any examples of either to put up for this column, please email me, Rich Leigh, on rich@10yetis.co.uk. We’ll be sure that you and your agency get a credit if used.

Good PR of the week

Inbetweeners cast will be [at] Fingrinhoe in Essex

- In association with Red Nose Day, The Inbetweeners, the hit E4 TV show responsible for brilliantly puerile insults such as "Briefcase Wanker/Mong (delete as appropriate)", "Bus Wanker’"and, my personal favourite – "bumder", launched a challenge that is pure publicity genius.

The campaign, which began on the 18 January, saw stars Simon Bird (Will), Joe Thomas (Simon), James Buckley (Jay) and Blake Harrison (Neil) attempt to call at 50 "lewd" locations in 50 hours. Fans took to Facebook and Twitter to suggest rude place names for the stunt with the hash tag #rudetrip – with the added caveat that if they sent in photos of themselves with a rude sign, they would have the chance to appear in the finished film.

To top it all off, the cast travelled across the UK in Simon’s crap yellow Fiat, in aid of Red Nose Day which will be on 18 March.

Comic Relief’s Rude Trip trailer

Bad PR of the week

Jobs blow (snigger) rocks Apple’s share price

• Following the announcement that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would take an indefinite medical leave of absence, company shares fell as much as 6.5 per cent in early New York trading on Tuesday, proof that Apple hasn’t done enough to prove that the company could survive without him. In his place will be COO Tim Cook – a man the world knows little about. As number two at one of the world’s most high profile companies, his public profile needs raising – and fast. Timing the leave announcement with a good story couldn’t have hurt either, something the company didn’t do until Wednesday, by which time investors were already panicking.

New answer to "Is Quora dead already?"

• I’ve had hiccups that have lasted longer than question-and-answer service Quora’s recent popularity – with Speed Communications MD Stephen Waddington summing up the general sentiment by stating "never before has a social network launched with such hype and disappointed so quickly". I’m going to stick with it for a while, as I genuinely still think it has potential, but the lack of proactive PR from the site is disappointing.

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