Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

There’s a lot of companies out there at the moment that are engaged in a number of initiatives for publicity purposes. While many experts are urging others to jump onto the bandwagon, one has to ask when similar initiatives will come across as boring.

For example, Wired reports on a political viral campaign on the Internet by a US politician. The campaign has helped James Gibson to shake off his dull image somewhat and now David Johnson, a political consultant, claims that this sort of campaign is going to be come commonplace. This is nothing new in Ireland either. The PDs, one of the parties in the current government coalition, distributed a flyer in a college a couple of years ago depicting the main players in the parties in the guise of the characters from Star Wars battling the ‘evil socialists’. The image was picked up and appeared in numerous papers and did the rounds on the Internet.

It was pretty amusing at the time and grabbed a lot of attention. However, when colleges enroll next September/October and every political party did the same thing, you can pretty much guarantee that students will start to switch off and ignore these tactics.

If organisations hope to take advantage of emerging social media tools like podcasts, blogs, etc for publicity purposes, then they’d better do it now because plenty of folks are starting to jump on the bandwagon as it is. There will come a day when a company launches a podcast and people will say to themselves, “God. Another podcast. Whatever already!”

Of course, organisations could create something meaningful rather than just do it for the sake of publicity!

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