Good day to you all, Andy reporting in with this week’s examples of Good and Bad PR. It feels like Donald Trump could feature in the Bad PR section every week and this last week has been no different for the germaphobic leader of the free world. His much-anticipated press conference turned into a farce of biblical size. This is certainly going to be a fun four years.

Good PR

Anyway, on to far brighter things and, obviously, the world of Good PR. The first gold star goes to the brainiacs over at the University of Cambridge who have rehashed an old story around recruiting for someone to go and get paid for playing with Lego. Apparently the role first appeared in 2015 and has been relaunched for this year. Not only are the Uni boffins good at a science challenge, they are also good at breathing life into old public relations campaigns. I salute you.

The next example of Good PR really highlights the benefits of piggybacking on current news trends. Sadly though, it goes back to Donald Trump, sorry. A PR-wise evolutionary biologist (I don’t know either!) called Dr Vazrick Nazari has named a new species of moth after D to the T because of its unique hair style and (according to the Daily Mail write up) its odd genitalia. The California-based scientist (and moth) were made famous after a write-up in a journal called ZooKeys. This story surely means that no journalist can ever claim a PR pitch is too tenuous ever again.

Bad PR

Onto the bad side of the PR world and Lily Allen, a fellow, yet slightly more famous, resident of our county of Gloucestershire, has been getting herself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons once more. This week it related to her attempts to comment on Theresa May’s Brexit announcements, naturally. Allen made a comment via Twitter relating to Britain’s role in slavery and the internets went mad. The tweet was deleted, the Daily Mail et al still wrote it up and all has now gone quiet on the music maestro’s Twitter account. A 24-hour storm in a Twitter cup that we are all used to nowadays.

Finally, EasyJet got embroiled in an odd employment row after an employee was allegedly sacked for eating a £4.50 bacon sarnie that was given to her by her boss (and didn’t pay for it). This is one of those where I want to believe that some of the details played out in the press have been missed or left out, because it seems bonkers to sack someone for something so trivial. EasyJet has been left looking very silly and this is going to float around for branded search in Google for some time to come.

Written by Andy Barr, head of 10 Yetis

Seen any good or bad PR lately? You know what to do @10Yetis on Twitter or andy@10Yetis.co.uk on email