Hearses, infidelity and empty seats… More Olympics PR

The Olympic Games have given PRs the opportunity to take the media ‘summer silly season’ to new heights. You’d have thought that weekly posts on London Olympics PR highs and lows would be enough. But no, there’s just too much good material. So here’s today’s top five:

Biggest social media fail: The #NBCfail over its coverage of the Olympic Opening Ceremony was bad enough. But then trying to ban critical commentators from Twitter took this fail to a whole new level.

Most inapropriate PR tactic: Threatening the world that London would pile up with hearses. And that horse drawn carriages would take the city back to the Victorian Era. Tastless stuff from a funeral firm. (h/t Alastair Jamieson)

Most promising campaign: Politicans, journalists, tweeters and bloggers, including David Prescott, are keeping the pressure on organisers with campaigns against empty Olympic seats, such as #filltheseats. With a clear call to action and plenty of text and image-based social media activity (helped along by the Twitter profile Empty Seat), fingers’ crossed that the organisers implement a solution to the problem soon.

Sex-based story of the day: The world seems obsessed with what will happen in athletes’ bedrooms. While a smart piece of PR from gay-chat-app Grindr claimed the arriving athletes had crashed its network, the ‘strategic’ PR firm AOB is encouraging athletes to cheat on loved ones back home and deserves to be named and shamed…

The PRs PR Medal: Industry body, the PRCA claims that three-fiths of PR agency bosses think that the Olympics will be good for Britain’s reputation. But with all the good and bad PR taking place during the Olympics, it’s no wonder that over 15% of PR execs expect their budgets will increase during London 2012.

And with so many PRs going into overdrive, it looks like this may become a regular series of posts…