Good and Bad PR: World Cup disasters, Ryanair, Vodaphone's trust factor & a coo’ing baby

This week has been the busiest for story suggestions that I can remember. 

A special mention to all the egg accounts who submitted the Vodafone fake review story. I certainly don’t think it was a concerted effort to manipulate this columnist. Voda-competitors should have had more faith. My investigative PR colleague, Alan S Morrison was all over it. 

More on that shortly.

The World Cup teeters on brink of overall Bad PR verdict and it has not even started

I want to give the World Cup a PR chance. So far though, it has been a car crash of epic proportions. England’s first warm up game had a pitch side big screen where it would appear that a 7-year-old was in charge of typing out the players names. Ok, let’s put that down to teething problems.

Then came the news that a Somalian FIFA endorsed referee was barred entry to America. Surely a mistake that could be rectified quickly by the FIFA president who has made some very public claims that he is bezzies with Trump. Nope, FIFA rolled over and tried to make light of the situation. The ref is not coming back. The same happened to 15 FIFA officials from Iran and the official Iraqi team snapper.

Then came the news that FIFA was banning fans from taking water bottles into stadiums. This was seen as being a pure commercial play dressed up as a security concern. We should not forget it is peak summer in some places where the games are taking place, and water is essential. FIFA eventually overturned that one, but too late for them to avoid all the negative publicity that comes from such a decision.

Finally, you will all remember the headlines about the exorbitant cost of the tickets. This has really backfired on FIFA. The Financial Times (avid football fans I hear) ran an exposé outing FIFA for being forced to flog its rumoured 180k of spare tickets on third party ticketing websites.

All it will take now is for an A-list celeb to miss a penalty in the opening ceremony (or, “doing a Ross” – as it is called in our house), and I will bang the gavel and declare this a Bad PR World Cup. 

Obviously, if England or Scotland do win, I shall declare it a hugely positive tournament.

Ryanair swerves Bad PR just because it mocked British Airways

At almost the same time as the story broke about Ryanair standing accused of charging parents extra if they want to sit next to their kids on a plane (side note Ryanair, I am not fussed if they sit far far away), I was also sent a link to some of its excellent shit-housery on social media.

Yes, the parenting pricing would normally trigger a Bad PR nod, but the social media mockery was so good, the flying giants have swerved it.

PR fans will remember me gushing over O’Leary taking on Musk over the latter’s Starlink gadgets not being added to the formers fleet of planes. Musk had a tantrum, O’Leary never flinched.

Musk’s team had pointed to other airlines using the Wi-Fi tech such as British Airways. So, when BA announced it was pausing the roll-out (albeit, allegedly, for a short time) Ryanair’s social team dived on it and it landed. A simple eye’s emoji on Facebook and Insta had us all chortling along. Ryanair once again turned this columnist around from doubter to believer. 

Good PR for the flying giants.

Have you ever Meta better whistleblower book marketing person?

Sarah Wynn-Williams, take a bow. She is the former director of global policy at Meta. She has written a book on the toxic culture within the offices of the social media giants.

Meta could not stop the book being published, but they did manage to obtain a legal restriction on her promoting the book. Wynn-Williams used this to her advantage. She was invited to be part of a panel at the world-renowned Hay book festival and she took up the offer. She then sat on the stage for one hour and did not say a word because of the legal situation. Genius level marketing. Sales increased week on week by 304% and it now sits top of the nonfuction paperback charts.

Great PR for Wynn-Williams, and a massive screw-you to the social media giant is an added bonus.

IBM accused by whistleblower of covering up breaches

I have a love hate relationship with IBM. I love to hate them. Harsh? Maybe, but as someone who has witnessed the behind the scenes IBM team panic of a public demo of Watson, you may start to understand why.  It came as no great surprise to me that it was revealed this week by a former staff whistleblower, who was once IBM’s vice president of threat intelligence, that in 2020 the company had its core network breached and simply covered it up.

Bad PR for the tech giant.

Vodafone staff allegedly write their own positive reviews in customer names

As I mentioned at the outset, the sheer volume of name and faceless accounts that sent me this story on Twitter made me quickly realise that a rival to Vodafone was trying to manipulate me into writing about this story. It worked, but it was also flagged by Hercule Morrison.

The story goes that once customers had come off the phone with the Vodafone customer services team, the staff were then writing positive Trustpilot reviews about their interaction, in the customers name.

A muggle who this happened to went to The Times and once they dug into it, it found this was not an uncommon occurrence. It would not be a big issue if this was a team member going rogue, however… the plot thickens.

A company that reviews the reviewers, called Truth Engine, found that pre 2023 around 8% of reviews on Trustpilot mentioned a staff member name. Since then this has shot up to 73% of reviews naming a member of the Vodafone customer services team. The Times discovered, shock horror, that Voda-shops can earn a bonus for reviews that mention staff. Surely these two stories could not be connected.

Trustpilot has thrown Vodamoan under the bus with its comms, citing that it removed nearly 4000 Voda reviews in the last 12 months as they considered them to be suspicious.

Voda trotted out a bland statement about customer services training and investigations. I am sure the Competition and Markets Authority, who have a live investigation into fake reviews, will have sat up and taken notice.

Bad PR for the phone giant.

Stories that I ran out of space for this week

Toby Carvery gets redemption PR for funding the growth of a new orchard after previously taking a chainsaw to an ancient tree. Aviva gets Good PR for revealing just how many times muggles fib on insurance claims, thanks to – you guessed it – its adoption of AI.

Uber announcing it is now consulting consumers in London about the use of driverless cabs ahead of them launching in the city, Great PR, albeit a bit Amazon-Droney. Finally, Royal Shakespeare Company dealt hugely well with a potentially tricky story about a noisy coo’ing baby being asked to leave a performance. It demonstrated the value in really thinking through your crisis comms statement, and trotting out some bland words.