Good PR

Let's face it; January is hardly the greatest time of year. Christmas is fast becoming a distant memory and the weather is pretty pants. Royal Caribbean, the cruise company whose adverts will leave you wanting to max our your credit card for the chance to hop on board, has claimed 2017's first 'best job of the year' stunt. These never really get old and they always do well from a PR point of view, especially if they're as cool as this latest one...

Royal Caribbean announced that it was looking to recruit an intern via Instagram to "work" on three of its cruise ships over the course of three weeks. It's basically a competition dressed up as an internship opportunity, which is awesome. The lucky recruit will get free food, drink and flights and also a healthy £3,000 in cash. Their role whilst on board the cruises, travelling across three oceans, will be "a hybrid between a photographer, documentary maker and storyteller" - that can be translated to 'taking envy-inducing pictures and sharing them on Royal Caribbean's Instagram account'.

Applicants for the temporary role need to be aged 21 or over and available for three consecutive weeks from June into July 2017. To enter, they've been told to head to Instagram, share their best travel picture, tagging @RoyalCaribbeanUK and hashtag #ExtraordinaryExplorer. Anyone wanting a chance at the "Intern-Ship" (love what they did there) needs to enter by the end of January.

This is a brilliant example of a campaign that ties PR in with social media, which I'm a huge fan of because they really are two of the same these days!

The coverage has been ace; I've spotted pieces on the likes of Condé Nast Traveller, Mirror, Express, Daily Star, CNBC and other media titles around the world.

Bad PR

This week's example of bad PR involves social media too, but this time is more of an example of what not to do. British Gas received some serious backlash on Twitter after sharing the following message from the @BritishGasHelp account: "Morning all. A year ago today we lost a pop icon David Bowie, time flys don't it? We're here till 10pm if you need anything. Thanks, Paul #RipDB".

Now, the issue here is that British Gas - however innocent the tweet may have been - appear to have hijacked a trending anniversary hashtag just to get eyes on their tweet. They've been accused of poor taste and also mocked for the way it was written.

The media picked up on the Twitter mayhem, with articles popping up on the likes of Mail Online, Metro, The Sun, Mashable, Telegraph and more.

Paul, to be fair to him, followed up with another tweet that said "Hey, David Bowie meant so much to me. I didn't mean to offend anyone & I only wanted to pay tribute to a master songwriter and true icon ^Paul". Some people had a lot of love for Paul on Twitter and saw nothing wrong with it, but others weren't so kind.

British Gas has received a lot of bad press for this and whilst it appears that Paul's job is still safe, he probably got a bit of a telling off from someone. This is what personal Twitter accounts are for. 

Written by Shannon Peerless, 10 Yetis, @ShazzaYeti on Twitter

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