Good PR

Dance Marathon, a UNC organization that helps raise money for the North Carolina Children’s Hospital, has done an excellent job for pubbing for this year’s annual dance marathon event. This year’s recruiting week was a lot more publicized than it has been in the past. Organization representatives were constantly in the pit, yelling, dancing, giving away free food, and encouraging people to sign up. Recruiters wore ridiculous costumes and went from door to door asking people to register to be a dancer. There were emails, posters, flyers, and Facebook status updates concerning registration and information about registration was extremely accessible.

In class we talked about how Public relations is becoming more transparent and more of a conversation between a company and the public. The PR campaign for Dance Marathon’s recruitment week embodied this new definition of what public relations is becoming. The use of Facebook played a huge role in setting up a space for current and potential dancers to communicate. The organization was transparent in the sense that their presence on campus was made known by their persistent day to day campaigning.

Bad PR

An example of bad PR would be the campaign for OJ Simpson’s “fictional” account of how he would have murdered his wife if he had actually committed the crime. After a highly publicized trial with an unpopular verdict reached (not guilty), some people believed that it was extremely insensitive to the victim’s family to publish a book with such subtext. Many American’s believed that Simpson was guilty, and the book played off of these sentiments. The backlash that resulted from this seemingly unethical PR campaign resulted in the publication of the book being canceled and the publisher in charge of the publication release being fired.