Good and Bad PR: Snoop Dog, Mandy (yet again!) and the IOC

It is March next week… March! Wow the year is racing by and so is the news agenda. What a segway. Let’s get to the Good and Bad PR stories of the week!

David V Goliath spells headache for housing developer

My local media has long spoken about a resident IT guy who is in a building dispute with a national house building company. I never thought for one minute that this would hit the national headlines but it now has.

Lincourt Homes are in a dispute over a small wall that was built by IT guy Roger White’s dad 50 years ago on a piece of land that has been passed down through the family. The land only contains that one wall, but it represents the perfect emergency access point for the new housing estate and White is worried the building company will just remove it. He is so worried that he has now hired a security company to guard the wall 24/7 at a personal cost of £150 per day.

This could have so easily been resolved if Lincourt Homes had just spoken to White at the very start but now it has blown up into a PR crisis for the brand, with the national media watching on for the next move.

Bad PR for Lincourt Homes and to be very clear, I have no connection to anyone involved with this story!

Meta misaligns email inbox

This is one of the most shared bad PR stories of the week. Meta “director of alignment”, Summer Yue, hit the global headlines this week thanks to her AI faux pas.

I am not sure what she expected when she outed herself for using an AI tool to try and manage her inbox and it went very wrong. Nine million people have now seen her social media post about AI agent OpenClaw mass deleting items in her inbox by mistake. One can only presume that the Meta comms team have had a word and reminded her of the line in her contract about not bringing the company into disrepute.

Terrible optics for the social giant and Bad PR for them.

Snoop Dogg wows the Welsh but stinks out Preston Manager

You can’t turn anywhere without seeing Snoop Dogg of late. From the Superbowl through to the Winter Olympics, he is quite the man about town. This week was the turn of Swansea City FC. He is a co-owner and went along to their last game against Preston.

The Swansea fans loved his pre-match appearance where he swung a branded towel around his head and paraded around the pitch. The Preston fans were not as impressed and a columnist of my shy and retiring nature won’t dare to repeat what they sang at him.

Another person who was indifferent to it all was the Preston manager who said that the only reason he twigged that something was going on was the smell of weed in the tunnel. I don’t think he was getting into the spirit of the occasion as I for one will give Swansea and Snoop the final Good PR of the week.

Mandelson in the headlines again

What a week for Lord Mandelson. Arrested because of a tip off by the Speaker of the House of Commons to the Met police. Even worse (in my opinion), he was then accused of briefing the media at 4am, just a few hours after his release, by the News Agents podcast.

The general consensus is that he needs to adopt some of the crisis comms playbook that he has helped write over the years, and take a few moments out of the limelight. Right now, he is in a media whirlwind and needs to try and find a way to take a bit of air out of the balloon.

Bad PR for Mandy, although we are excited to see what happens next!

IOC president Kirsty Coventry threatens to sack her PR team

The final Bad PR of the week goes to International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Kirsty Coventry. In a wrap up press conference at the end of the Winter Olympics in Cortina she shocked the gathered sporting hacks media when she threatened "dismissal" to her PR team for failing to brief her on questions to expect.