Shannon’s pick of good and bad PR today...

Good PR

Click on to Google today and it won’t look how you remember it. The clean cut lines, blank white background and colourful Google logo have been ditched in place of a feature background, which changes throughout the day.

This is to help raise awareness of Google’s background feature, which allows you to personalise your homepage with images available from Google, or pictures from your own PC – or even just back to the standard white background.

You have to have a Google account in order to adjust or personalise the background image, but the feature has only been rolled out for 24 hours to make users aware of it and will eventually return to being optional.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing updates the homepage with a new photo daily and, although they are yet to comment officially on Google’s feature, various tweets have been reported. Ashley Highfield, managing director of Microsoft's consumer division in the UK said, "Imitation, however pale, is the sincerest form of flattery."

Still, it looks good and is certainly a good way of making users aware of the feature. Plus, it’s had some great coverage and is good exposure for the search engine giant - not that it needs it...


Bad PR

Sky 1 has announced that reality TV show Pineapple Dance Studios will not be returning for a second series, with the reason behind the drop still to be confirmed. Rumour has it, the studio owner and Sky failed to come to an agreement on the terms for the next series.

The show, which centred around the famous London dance studios and attracted a peak audience of 432,000, made stars of Louie Spence and Andrew Stone and, although a new series won’t be gracing our screens, Spence has been signed by Sky to have his own series, so it’s not all bad news for fans.

As someone who never watched the show, I won’t be missing it anytime soon!