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It seems the power of the PR ‘stunt’ to gain coverage is still well and truly with us - as the story of Winston the pigeon is anything to go by.

Winston was challenged to get a  4gb data stick from the offices of Unlimited IT in the town of Howick to Durban quicker - one hour and eight minutes -  than a transfer by an internet connection from the country’s biggest ISP Telkom.

Unsurprisingly, Winston’s pigeon post won delivering the data stick whilst just 4% of the data had arrived electronically.

The object of the exercise was to demonstrate just how slow broadband connections are in South Africa and give some profile to the IT company.

However perhaps this ‘stunt’, which gained global coverage, was timely as qualification games were taking place across the world and people were thinking about South Africa.

Today’s tournaments are so heavily reliant on the internet that the’ stunt’ offers a wake up call to the authorities and tournament organisers that its communication  network needs to be able to cope with the demands of the modern World Cup.

The last thing you want is a meltdown while the world’s media is in your back yard. Now where is that crisis management plan……

As “Sachs-Gate” rises up the BBC hierarchy, the whole Brand/Ross furore has been an instructive lesson in crowd psychology and crisis management.

On the first point, by yesterday morning 18,000 people had complained about the offending broadcast on Russell Brand’s show. By last night, when both presenters had already been suspended and Brand, ultimately, resigned, another 11,000 had added their ire. Why? And how many of them had heard the actual radio item?

Thanks to Wise Geek for the science bit, it might be something to do with “individuals adapting to the expectations of the surrounding culture…in order to identify with the crowd”. A bit of shared experience or, in this case, a collective moan. It’s certainly a phenomenon that’s playing out in social media situations and shows how a poor response to a crisis can escalate.

It took the BBC from Sunday, when the story broke, to yesterday for the Corporation to act decisively. A Sun journalist I spoke to last night suggested it was the worst example of crisis comms he’d seen. If the BBC had apologised and suspended them both straight away, he felt, the story would have died and each presenter could have carried on as before, though probably wiser to the boundaries of public taste.

The old wag, John Cleese - no stranger to media controversy affecting comedians - says in today’s Times: “It’s important to hire people with enough taste to censor  themselves. I thought Jonathan Ross had that.”