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By Lucy Harvey
One of the first lessons I was taught when I entered into PR was the importance of PR-ing your own successes: Essentially blowing your own trumpet and making noise about your accomplishments.
Well, recently Smile on Fridays was part of a hugely successful PR campaign, which we are extremely proud of and want to shout about it from the rooftops.
As we have mentioned in a previous blog post, our coolest client HackerOne recently announced one of its hackers had made $1 million through bug bounty hacking. To launch the news, Smile on Fridays pitched the BBC who loved the whole concept so much that they agreed to visit the hacker in Argentina and film a short documentary on him.
The show was broadcast at the end of February and it was a huge success and it got everyone talking about hacking and, of course, our million-dollar hacker, Santiago Lopez.
A couple of weeks after the initial launch, the BBC posted Santiago’s interview on its YouTube channeland it has done incredibly well, so much so it is now one of the most popular YouTube videos from BBC News!!!
Santiago’s video has been watched by almost 1.3 million people in just three weeks, making it the BBC’s 127thmost popular video ever. This is an incredible achievement considering the BBC has been uploading news to YouTube for over five years and generally posts two videos every day. Basically, Santiago’s video has jumped up to one of the top spots out of thousands in a very short space of time.
To put this into perspective, this means Santiago’s interview is proving to beat some of the world’s biggest celebrities and politicians in terms of popularity, for instance, the Trump and Justin Trudeau handshake. While the power-struggle handshake was widely reported in the media, it is not as popular as an interview with the world’s first million-dollar ethical hacker. Unlucky Trump, we beat by over 300,000 views.
As you can imagine, we are all delighted that Santiago’s interview is proving to be such a hit and we hope it encourages others to look into ethical hacking as a career choice. The industry is booming and we need more ethical hackers like Santiago to keep our systems and data safe from those with malicious intent.
For many years we have been working hard to change the perception of hackers, so that people view the community as critical players in defending against cybercrime, rather than threats. The BBC video has helped do exactly that – highlight a young hacker in Argentina who is earning money by making the internet a safer place for us all. I’m sure you will agree this deserves to be recognised and celebrated.
This brings me nicely on to encouraging our readers to vote for their very own unsung hero in the Eskenzi PR Unsung Heroes Awards. The awards are run annually and they are a chance to celebrate the real grafters within the IT security industry; The security teams who work tirelessly defending against threats, or the CISO who is working hard to improve security awareness within their organisation.
More information on the awards can be found on the Security Serious website, or you can get in touch with the event organisers:
Yvonne Eskenzi: yvonne@eskenzipr.com
Beth Smith: beth@eskenzipr.com
