What price publicity?! A small UK design firm that has seen about half its staff made redundant recently has encouraged the rest of its staff to go naked in the office, with the managing director reported saying he thought it would be good for business.

Staff say they weren’t forced into it, but — while we can’t deny the publicity success of the stunt  — it seems that people who had just seen half their colleagues lose their jobs would be unlikely to say no to the boss!

And group nudity … it gets everyone looking I guess; but 12 years after The Full Monty (and 22 years after NZ’s own Ladies’ Night), it’s about time for a new idea.

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.