PRexamples.com: First few days in review

Well, that was certainly an interesting week.

I went back to playing rugby after about 18 months away from the game (I’m writing this with a meeting-friendly shiner, whilst nursing an ankle – professionally wrapped with my dressing gown belt, I may add – that feels like an entire Weightwatchers class has Zumba’d all over it).

I, along with a colleague, was a whole two (and a bit) hours late for a PRmoment.com social media event at Ogilvy’s office, How Brands Use Facebook. That the event was only two hours long and we’d been in the car travelling to it from Gloucester for near enough six hours was instantly improved in the way only free alcohol can. Cheers Ben and sorry Laura.

I was part of an effort to send a liveried tank through central London and to Parliament in protest of Stephen Hester’s £1m RBS bonus, despite the fact the company is majority public-owned. No, the picture below isn’t Che Guevara. It’s Mark Pearson, founder of MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, the UK’s leading voucher code website (and a client of ours). I forgive you for thinking otherwise.

I should probably gloss over the bit of the week where I may have incurred the wrath of a huge American network and skip straight to the bit that ties all this together:

I also launched this very blog, PRexamples.com.

I promoted it on Twitter – @PRexamples. I contacted some agency heads. I emailed a list of you that said you wanted to hear what I was launching. And not one of you lovely people told me to cock off.

In fact, far from cocking off, I’ve been surprised at just how positive the response has been, with related emails ranging from the heartfelt and nicer-than-it-sounds ‘well done, you made a thing’, to flattering praise from a couple of the industry’s biggest international bosses.

Since launching on Tuesday – four days ago – almost 1,500 of you have visited these here pages. If this rate of unique visitors continues, more than 11,000 people will have passed through come the end of the first month. This figure is, of course, as existent as Katie Price’s dignity. I won’t count my chickens – after all, you may all have hated the way I singled out a troupe of fad-loving dieters in paragraph one and choose to never visit or promote the site again – but it gives me hope. Hope that I won’t give up on this site as quickly as I give up on just about everything else.

I also asked people to come forward as contributors, to act as the site’s eyes and ears with relation to great PR and social media campaigns and stunts – to write as little or often as they pleased.

Twenty five people including students, freelancers, agency employees and prominent agency heads have asked for and been given a login to get involved and of these; five have already posted at least once. I would like to give these people one big communal hug. They’re spotting things I would have otherwise missed or not had time to mention and contributing to helping the site become a useful resource as well as a good place to waste time. Special thanks to Sharon Chan for being the first to agree.

I know this is early days, and it may be the life-threatening quantity of Ibuprofen I’ve ingested to numb the aforementioned ankle injury talking, but I’m still really excited about the site and what it can become. I just wanted to say thank you to everybody so far for reading, tweeting about and just generally helping me forget that I once gave the parents of a teenage spina bifida sufferer £1.25 in an ill-advised grand gesture of charity.

If you can think of ways the site could be improved, please do get in touch, I’m open to any ideas. If you are a PR/marketing student or work in the communications industry and would like to get involved as a contributor, please do just ask (after reading this to make sure you’re not making a horrible mistake).

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