Mayor Bloomberg warned of impending riots and the recent Occupy Wall Street protest may foreshadow such an event.
The protest started off with only a couple hundred people last week (your usually assortment of hippie-esque protestors) and went unnoticed for the most part. However, after a week now, the number of protestors seems to be growing and YouTube is now starting to get a constant stream of videos regarding the event.
I've talked about video becoming more and more important in marketing / communicating anything. Just as important is the video editing software which is allowing people to add music and audio tracks to their video, creating more compelling viewing experiences (see the video below at mark 3:00 for an example of this).
The video below shows the police are starting to crack down on the occupy protest. While video of police managing a protest always looks 'dramatic' what's interesting here is that the 'occupation' has officially become a spectacle, which is usually when such protests start to draw in ever increasing numbers.
We'll see what happens over the next week, they'll either have locked up enough of the protestors that the occupation will come to an end, or I suspect the crowd will simply double or triple in size.
You have to give it to the protestors, this at first didn't get any media attention (in fact the media laughed at how few protestors there were). But through persistence (the protestors simply did not go away) they are now getting people's attention.
From a PR perspective there's something to be said about persistence - get in people's faces long enough and you'll become a media story. Gandhi's hunger strike garnered endless media coverage and actually ended the war between Pakistan and India at that time, all through nothing but the public display of persistence.
If the police had been smart on the PR front (which they rarely are, because PR isn't their job) they would have handed out water to the protestors in the days prior. This would have showed that they weren't against the protestors. Then, when they had to break the protest up, it would be harder to make the police look like simply the strong arm of the law if there was video of them being 'kind' to the protestors only days earlier.
It's always the images of peaceful demonstrators being manhandled by the police that cause more protestors to show up.
d
The protest started off with only a couple hundred people last week (your usually assortment of hippie-esque protestors) and went unnoticed for the most part. However, after a week now, the number of protestors seems to be growing and YouTube is now starting to get a constant stream of videos regarding the event.
I've talked about video becoming more and more important in marketing / communicating anything. Just as important is the video editing software which is allowing people to add music and audio tracks to their video, creating more compelling viewing experiences (see the video below at mark 3:00 for an example of this).
The video below shows the police are starting to crack down on the occupy protest. While video of police managing a protest always looks 'dramatic' what's interesting here is that the 'occupation' has officially become a spectacle, which is usually when such protests start to draw in ever increasing numbers.
We'll see what happens over the next week, they'll either have locked up enough of the protestors that the occupation will come to an end, or I suspect the crowd will simply double or triple in size.
You have to give it to the protestors, this at first didn't get any media attention (in fact the media laughed at how few protestors there were). But through persistence (the protestors simply did not go away) they are now getting people's attention.
From a PR perspective there's something to be said about persistence - get in people's faces long enough and you'll become a media story. Gandhi's hunger strike garnered endless media coverage and actually ended the war between Pakistan and India at that time, all through nothing but the public display of persistence.
If the police had been smart on the PR front (which they rarely are, because PR isn't their job) they would have handed out water to the protestors in the days prior. This would have showed that they weren't against the protestors. Then, when they had to break the protest up, it would be harder to make the police look like simply the strong arm of the law if there was video of them being 'kind' to the protestors only days earlier.
It's always the images of peaceful demonstrators being manhandled by the police that cause more protestors to show up.
d
Comments
Post a Comment