Offering a journalist a ride in a fancy vehicle  of some sort is an age-old way to get them to come to an event. Here’s a great set of videos (from 2006) showing a reporter taking a speed-of-sound ride with the US airforce Blue Angels team in an F/A-18 fighter jet.

We see him pass out three times as the G forces become too great for him and still he presented a positive report!

A restaurant in Latvia’s capital Riga has certainly found its marketing niche.

Decorated like a hospital, Hospitalis serves food, shaped like body parts, on operating-room dishes. Syringes contain liquids to go with the meals.

And just to take their image one step further, customers are treated liked patients by waitresses in nursing uniforms. From time to time deranged patients are wheeled through the restaurant in strait-jackets.

Personally, I’ve never liked dining on gore and nurses never help me feel relaxed, but I guess the owners of this places (real doctors, apparently) are confident the dining experience will live up to the publicity generated by the medical theme.

Photos here.

Controversial Australian former politician Pauline Hanson, who has made and lost a career on race-based policies, is trying to make her umpteenth political comeback – this time on an anti Muslim and African platform. Er, is that a vote winner, Pauline?

While on the campaign trail, she has reportedly been shocked by nude photos of herself from the 1970s being published in newspapers and websites around the world after an old boyfriend sold them.

But one wonders if, given the nature of her policies, she should stop being embarrassed by the photos and realise that they may be the only (ever-so-slightly) positive and widespread publicity that she will get!

Update (16 March): Some commentators say it a deliberate political ploy. Pauline says it is not her in the photos. Whatever the story, she certainly knows how to play up the publicity!

Update (22 March): Pauline wasn’t elected. The Australian newspaper that broke the nude photo story has apologised to her saying the photos were of some one else and they had been fooled by a con-man.

This interview gives some good info about the importance of finding niches for social marketing:

A couple of weeks back we posted about the world’s best job – a hugely successful social media competition that had spanned the world and gained vast positive publicity for its tourism cause.

Recently the press has been pretty negative: the competition is still a great success but the IT systems to run it have not been up to scratch causing the website to crash under the weight of people wanting to submit entries.

I guess the impetus of the campaign will carry organisers past this, but it’s an unnecessary stain on an otherwise creative success. A good example, if ever there was one, that you gotta have your systems sorted if you’re online.

Some good tips here (thanks Social Computing Magazine) on how to launch a social media campaign, keep it real and keep it tied into and integrated with the rest of your PR and marketing efforts.

There’s explanations of some good dos and don’ts, including — don’t let your social media strategy be an orphan; don’t stand in a corner, get out there and dance; don’t get distracted by those fireworks; don’t go it alone, Cowboy.

But wait, there’s more! No, not a free Ginzu knife, but they also offer some basic but sound advice on five ways to integrate social media with public relations.

Opt-in PR: letting the media actually choose if they want to receive information from a PR agency.

Kinda sounds like a death knoll to all us hardworking PRs working to get our clients noticed (!), but a PR guy in the U.S is banking his business on it and, so far, reportedly, has had 165 media outlets signing up.

The gourmet food publicist clearly has a good feel for the taste of his media contacts.

Following on from yesterday’s post on a political social media campaign gone global, have a look at this tourism campaign featuring a competition to win ‘the best job in the world’.

Around 20,000 people from over 180 countries have so far applied! The Australian promotion has been going since last month but it is still so strong that this week the organiser’s reported that their website fell over due to the high number of visitors.

The winner of the competition gets to be ‘Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef’ and will be paid to live in a luxury villa for six months, and explore, swim, snorkel and also blog about their experiences.

Applicants’ 60-second video clip entries have been uploaded to the competition’s website, driving huge numbers of visitors to the site to check them out.  (By the way, the competition closes Monday!)

Once again, a brilliant example of social media well-executed and showing its power to reach and engage global audiences, and posted here to show social media’s potential for powerful PR.

It’s been fun this week to observe some NZ political campaigners getting huge global visibility with their innovative social media take on the mass protest.

Instead of gathering hundreds of people with placards in a street march, the organisers of a campaign against government proposals for internet regulation have asked people to blackout their photos on their personal Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, et al, social media accounts.

Thousands have done do: high profile actor Stephen Fry amongst them on his very widely read Twitter account (the third most popular in the world behind Barack Obama and CNN, apparently).

The online campaign has been prominent in articles in highly regarded media outlets around the world – both online (ReadWriteWeb and boingboing) and traditional (here’s a story in The Guardian).

It’s a great example of an online campaign gone viral very quickly. Emails have done the rounds in offices around New Zealand alerting people to the campaign; organisers have ben spreading the word on social media sites; and a topic that may have been of little interest, and even unknown, to many people has caught their imagination.

It shows very clearly the effect that some creative thinking to develop a simple and quirky idea can have when teamed with the power of social media to organise and galvanise people and an easy-to-participate-in campaign.

Ah, yes, what exactly is the campaign about: the legislation requires ISPs to have a policy to disconnect users after repeated accusations of copyright infringement … here’s the proposed legislation and here’s the protest’s main web page.

A good new article details how U.S airline South West uses social media tools in its PR work: from employee-writen blogs to Twitter accounts, podcasts, video and a social networking site.

Each tool is overseen by a single team member and is geared to reach a slightly different audience.

South West recommends keeping social media channels distinct. It has used its employee-written blogs to look at issues, Twitter to break or tease news (South West also uses it to share photos, highlight competitions and job opportunities) and its Facebook account to highlight promotional events.

The article says that the airline’s Flickr group pool is for customers interested in posting or viewing photos of trips on the airline; the YouTube channel is for people wanting information about destinations or South West trivia; and South West’s Facebook fan site is for people wanting to know about airline-related events and news.

(Better read the article promptly! The guys at Ragan, who have published this article, only leave things up for a few days. You can register on their site, though, to read all their back copies. It’s well worth the effort to register.)