Current PR students and recent college grads: are you stressed about turning your great internships into a full-time entry-level gig? Do you embody the phrase “shameless self-promotion”? Are you an expert in all things social media? (Come on, you know you are.) If you answered “yes” to any of those three questions, then you may be an ideal candidate for Affect PR‘s “New York Job Project“–a program designed to simultaneously encourage talented applicants and promote the firm itself by “crowdsourcing” the hiring process.

This all started more than two years ago when Affect, a small-ish Manhattan firm, started the “New York Intern Project” because, according to president and founder Sandra Fathi, they were “having trouble attracting interns in one of the country’s most competitive markets.”

Applicants’ resumes often boasted of college gigs with brands like MTV, Def Jam and Glamour, but Affect wanted to find dedicated public relations professionals. Affect’s b2b (that’s “business to business”) services are crucial to the industry at large, but they’re also not quite as flashy as those big names–so Fathi created the intern project in order to “make [the internship] more attractive to people around the country.”

A quick look at 2011′s entries will tell you that the project worked better than expected.

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Sometimes the key for a startup or other new business venture looking to break out can be a single article in a big-name magazine or newspaper. What startup founder looking for “Angel investors” wouldn’t want to say “did you see us in the Wall Street Journal?”

Of course, in order to receive such press mentions, businesses usually require the services of people called publicists or PR professionals who specialize in pitching the story of the scruffy startup to big name glossies, trade papers–or even lowly blogs like ours!

But for those who want to get all those press mentions on your website without actually, you know, doing the work, we present The Startup Legitimizer–a single webpage that can fill all your startup PR needs with a few simple clicks. Which publications would give your cred the biggest boost? The New York Times? TechCrunch? BuzzFeed? TED Talks?!

These famous names, divided into the “kind of legit” and “really legit” categories, even come in pre-organized bundles like “innovators” and “game changers”, which are totally different things. Just choose your favorites, copy and paste the HTML code and say goodbye to pesky PR flacks forever! Check us out!

(Just kidding. Startups absolutely should invest in PR services. And thanks to Digiday for the tip.)

It’s been nearly ten years since Dove introduced “Real Beauty“, one of the 2000′s best rebranding campaigns. Its focus on “real-looking” models helped distinguish Dove in the crowded beauty category–and the company’s Canadian division just used a crafty PR stunt to try and extend that winning streak.

First Dove posted a download on Reddit that supposedly offered users a free tool to help retouch photographs by “enhanc[ing] skin tone” and “hiding all the imperfections”–in other words, all the things that Dove’s campaign opposed. But when users pressed the button, this “tool” reversed all the modifications to the image in question. (They could then “undo” the reversal, but the point had been made.)

This “hack” was a sneaky attempt to once again push the claim that Dove keeps things real in an industry dominated by digital tummy tucks, facelifts and tone-ups. In the video below, the company directly calls out “art directors, graphic designers and photo retouchers” for using Photoshop and other tools to promote unrealistic ideals  (never mind the fact that Dove has been accused of doing the very same thing).

Oh, and this is all part of a larger campaign which includes the hashtag #DovePositiveChange and a Facebook “Ad makeover” app which purportedly lets users revise ad spots designed to play on insecurities by promising to help women improve their appearance.

So is this another branding win for Dove, or do they need to stop pushing the same old concept?

In what seems to be a combination PR stunt/staffing experiment, Pizza Hut announced that it will be choosing someone to fill its currently empty Social Media Manager of Greatness role (what, no ninjas?) at the upcoming South by Southwest Festival in a very…unconventional way.

In honor of the 140-character Twitter feed that the lucky winner will run, company reps will give applicants 140 seconds to perform what amounts to a personal “elevator pitch”, explaining exactly why they’re qualified to manage a brand with 166,000 followers and more than 10 million Facebook fans.

The chain’s PR director hopes to meet “the best and the brightest” among the thousands of media fanatics attending the festival. In explaining his team’s thinking, he says: “The time you have to tell a story, engage a customer or leave a lasting impression on someone socially has shrunk to seconds”–so he wants someone who can make his or her case in just over two minutes with nothing more than a smartphone and an acceptable ID.

Of course, hopefuls can apply for the position in more traditional ways as well, but who’d want to do that? Here’s the job description, redirected from the URL “BecauseImGreat” in case you missed the point.

So is anyone up for the challenge this Sunday at the Austin Hilton? And will there be perfume?

We can certainly see why so many clients are rushing to sign with “viral marketing firm” Thinkmodo, which combines the video, social media and promotion trifecta into campaigns like the “Zombies in New York” stunt for AMC‘s mega-hit The Walking Dead. That video clearly didn’t have a script. As for the agency’s newest project, a promo for the upcoming  revenge thriller Dead Man Down, we’re not so sure…

The spot asks viewers “What would you do if you walked in on a murder in progress?” and the movie’s hashtag is #ISawWhatYouDid, so we get the connection–but based on the range of reactions, we hope that a few people in this clip were either in on the secret or didn’t quite realize what was going on.

So was this a real experiment or did everyone have a “script”? Most importantly, does it make you more interested in seeing the movie?

In case you haven’t heard, the biggest names and soon-to-be names in tech will be at the upcoming South by Southwest Festival to show they public what they’re all about. The best related PR stunt we’ve heard of so far is Razorfish‘s tweeting bikes project. Here’s the deal: the digital marketing/design/PR/etc. agency bought 20 “community” bikes, each equipped with its own GPS and its own Twitter account.

Building 0n the #UseMeLeaveMe theme/tag, the agency’s social media team will give each bike its own personality and, with the help of the public, use these feeds to give attendees and other interested parties around the world a better sense of what’s going on at the festival. Razorfish plans to leave the bikes at events, encourage members of the public to ride them around the festival and, thanks to the magic of GPS, use the accounts to tweet about the weather, the food and, hopefully, the startups.

Most importantly, this is really all just a big promo stunt for Razorfish. It already got our attention.

Today in Did They Really Think This Would Work news, the “baby-naming website” Belly Ballot just admitted that its “let the Internet name your baby and win free money” promotional stunt, which managed to get a lot of media attention last week, wasn’t even remotely true.

Thanks to a tipster with a guilty conscience and some investigative journalism on behalf of The Today Show‘s Moms blog, we now know that the woman named as the winner of the $5,000 contest is a professional actress–and she’s not even pregnant.

A “struggling single mom” named Natasha Hill supposedly won after submitting an essay about why she should be the one to let the wi-fi equipped public name her baby and claim the $5,000 prize. If the name turned out to be something lame like Aiden or Facebook? “There’s always a nickname.”

But there was no contest. There were no contestants. There was no baby.

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Today in This Sounds Kind of Gross news: words on paper are somehow still around! This week sugary drinkmaker Fanta wants to turn its latest product launch campaign into something of a PR stunt with a new twist on that classic branding tool. The company and its agency, Dubai’s OgilvyOne, claim to have created the world’s first “tastable print ad” to promote its new “orange” flavor.

Intrigued? It’s a page that looks like this:

As you can see, the spot encourages dupes in the audience to “tear off a piece of this page, pop in your mouth & enjoy a Fanta”. What does it taste like? The team got a little creative with their copywriting, describing it as:

“…a burst of sunshine through a cool wisp of wind, it’s sweet and tangy, surprising and juicy. It tickles like a delicious secret that you cannot bear to share. And how lush it feels at every sip, like an instant whiff of a fresh bouquet of flowers in spring! With a quick sharp jolt of tart and a sudden burst of sugary-citrusy-sweetness, it leaves your tongue tingling pleasantly. Then, it curls deliciously around your taste buds, tantalizing your imagination & ripples happily down your spine.”

OK then! Here’s the video:

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OK, a couple of questions between friends: Do you have a lot of money lying around, ready to be wasted on an exotic “experience”? Does the prospect of life on Mars seem a little too far-fetched for you? Do you have a healthy sense of fatalism and/or a creepy obsession with Leonardo DiCaprio?

If you answered yes to any of the above, then you’re in luck: today some random billionaire named Clive Palmer announced his plans to create an identical working replica of the world’s most famously doomed ship–the Titanic. And it will be ready to set sail by 2016!

Yes, it’s true: The boat, which will be made in China (of course), will weigh more than 55,000 tons, include space for 2,435 passengers and 900 (poorly paid) crew members, and stand as one of the more ridiculous PR stunts in recent memory. But Palmer insists that it will be a “real financial bonanza” that will be so successful that he’ll soon have to work on a third! We’ll see about that…

Say, did anybody notice that this guy is a year too late? Did he miss James Cameron’s imminently punchable face reminding us that 2012 was the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster? More importantly, does he not hate Celine Dion as much as we do?

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Earlier this week we posted on the Lay’s “Do Us a Flavor” competition, which is a pretty good example of an interactive social media/crowdsourcing promo campaign. Several publications have tasted and tested the final three flavors, so we figured we’d review their reviews and give you a hint as to which flavor will win. (We also want to satisfy the anonymous tipster who keeps sending us his or her ideas for new flavors like “Caesar Salad” and “Roast Beef and Horseradish”, both of which sound totally gross.)

The three finalists and their respective appraisals:

Chicken and Waffles

• “That combination for a potato chip doesn’t sound all that appetizing.” – random, very wise member of the public via The Long Beach Press Telegram
• “Awful…Tasted like burnt ice cream cones.” — The New York Post
• “I see why Lay’s went with the more flavorful name rather than just calling these Lay’s Sage, Maple and Grease. No one would buy those, except for me.” — Kotaku
• “Remind(s) me of a nice rosemary chicken with some kind of sweet dipping sauce.” — JunkFoodGuy
• “…funky, almost mildew-inducing stench.” — TheImpulsiveBuy

Sounds absolutely awful! More please!

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