10 Yetis Examples of Good and Bad Public Relations - Thursday 9th August 2012

Good PR

My example of good PR today surrounds upcoming video games console Ouya, which is set to be built after more than enough funds were pledged via the Kickstarter website to go towards its development. Ouya is expected to be available from March 2013 and will cost £63.00.

On funding platform Kickstarter, Ouya requested that backers pledged £606,000 to turn designs for the console into a working product, but by the time the pledge period had come to an end today, the total promised had reached around £5.8million.

The Ouya console will be around the same size as a Rubik's cube and it will be built around a processor made by graphics company Nvidia that would normally appear in smartphone devices. It will run on Google's Android mobile operating system and users will therefore be able to play any game designed for the mobile operating system. Pretty cool stuff!

Great PR for the device itself and, of course, the Kickstarter website for making this possible.

Bad PR

An online payday loans company is now under threat of being shut down, after claims that the site allowed fraudsters to impersonate thousands of customers; who were later hounded for millions of pounds worth of loans they had absolutely no clue about.

MCO Capital faced a £544,000 penalty issued by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), after trading under the names of Helploan and Balanceloan at the time the fraud was carried out.

Apparently, at least 7,000 victims of the identity fraud had been contacted by the company, with letters chasing repayment, despite the company having full knowledge that they may not have taken out fresh loans. Naughty!

	Shannon posted on 09/08/2012. Follow Shannon on Google+.