Jaimee Robinson » PR

Kanye Creates Trouble for His Publicist

Jaimee — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:31:02 +0000

Part of being a publicist means dealing with crisis management. Especially if you do publicity of Kanye West.

Many of us remember the stunt he pulled at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.

19-year-old Taylor Swift won her first MTV VMA at this years MTV Video Music Awards for Best Female Video for her hit “You Belong With Me.” She began her acceptance speech by thanking MTV for giving a country singer the chance to win a MTV. She seemed very excited… Until Kanye West hopped up on the stage and took the microphone from her. He then proceeded to tell all of America that Beyonce actually had the best video of all time… suggesting she should have won the award… leaving Swift speechless during her own acceptance speech.

That was a huge blow to Kanye. Shortly after it aired on TV, blogs, Facebook groups and discussions stormed the internet talking about their disgust and hatred for Kanye for what he did to Taylor. His repuation had been permanently damanged and many fans lost all respect for him due to his distasteful act.

His poor publicist had to do some major damage control. He was put on several talk shows soon after to discuss what had happened and apologize. He called Taylor to apologize personally and posted a blog explaining his action… Ouch.

Swine Flu Creates Trouble for WSU

Jaimee — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:18:44 +0000

As WSU began fall semester in August, 2009, warnings of a swine flu outbreak were all over. Living so closely with 20,000 other students put us all at risk.

However, the media seemed to blow things out of proportion. International students were receiving phone calls from parents across the world to see if they were OK. Each day, newspapers read higher and higher numbers of swine flu cases. However, if you look closely, you would have noticed Pullman only had a handful of confirmed swine flu cases. The rest were flu like symptoms.

It wasn’t long until Pullman was considered plagued by the swine flu.

This created huge PR issues for WSU. They had to step in with serious crisis management techniques to stop the bad publicity. Student Heath and Wellness Services handed out germ masks, flyers, information and hand sanitizer. They offered emergency walk-in times for students with flu-like symptoms and advised all students to stay home if they felt ill and not go to class.

It is interesting to see how it all played out… Since WSU was one of the first schools to start Fall Semester so early in the year, WSU received all the swine flu publicity. I’m sure many other schools would have experienced the same wrap if they had started earlier than late September.

Here’s a video about the swine flu outbreak in Pullman… just shows how blown out of proportion it became.

Focus Groups

Jaimee — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:58:44 +0000

I just conducted my first focus group today for the WSU College of Engineering and Architecture. I had participated in focus groups before, but it is a very different experience being on the other side of things. It’s difficult not to talk or comment on what the group is saying but just encourage them to continue with their ideas. It is incredibly interesting. I now get the joy of typing up the dialogue of the focus group.

I am currently the account manager for a PR campaign we are doing for the WSU CEA in my PR 412 course. The WSU CEA wants to learn more about their alumni and donors and how to reach them. We are learning all about the importance of research in PR campaigns. After we complete all our focus groups, we are sending out a survey. The focus group provided a lot of very useful, in-depth, qualitative information to use in our PR campaign and research.

It’s all very exciting to finally get to put everything we’ve learned into action. I have taken countless PR, communication and research classes. Now I finally get to implement it all. It makes me that much more excited to get my PR degree and enter the PR field. I can’t wait to see where this PR campaign goes from here!