The Olympics has had some brilliant PR moments and stunts. For instance, the PR person that said in a brainstorm “Why don’t we turn the local athlete’s post box gold when they win a medal?” deserves all the plaudits they get. It’s sometimes the simplest ideas that work the best. Add that to the beauty and honour of sharing a stamp with the queen and I think we can all agree that Royal Mail got it right for London 2012.
So here is my random PR stunt of the week, I think the idea of tweeting from your shoes could be interesting but I can’t really see the actual benefit of it. Unless it tweeted your followers to tell them where you were running, how far you had been and weather you had smashed a record. Nobody wants a “Chris has done 10 minutes on the cross trainer tweet”.
There has been a recent wave of products that are related to gaming and getting fit including the Nike Fuel Bands which have been doing the rounds. However, I think this one was simply a PR stunt which has been videoed to get the most buzz for the brand from the Olympic wave and there is nothing wrong with that.
This video actually remind me of the Tweetable scales which came out a while back (2009) and were supposed to shame you into losing weight by sharing your weight online everytime you got on them. Again that was a stunt and I think we may have found one here but if you are in any doubt why don’t you tweet the shoe direct @adidasbarricade and see what happens.
Do you think you can see these catching on? Fancy buying a pair yourselves PR stunt or genuine product?
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
