Jackie Daly posed this cracker for the Friday Social Media/PR fun following on from the Star Trek PR Problem and Godzilla destroying London:

Parents across the country are up in arms after The Bogey Man was found volunteering at a soup kitchen. “I just wanted to give something back to the community,” he commented earlier today.

“How on earth am I going to scare my children into bed now?” one angry parent asked outside a local primary school this afternoon.

The Bogey man’s reputation is in tatters – can you save him?

As always with these types of posts, it’s quite long – about 1500 words.

There’s actually a couple of issues in this one – there’s reputational management (the bogey man’s reputation has been changed), change issues (the client has changed from their raison d’etre), Crisis PR (parents need to get their kids to sleep as the schools are starting back soon) but most of it boils down to the idea of using PR for fear with the 2.0 spin of crowdsourcing terror.

Don’t Stop the Bogey

So the Bogey Man is enjoying his new change of life, working on a soup kitchen, thinking that he’s finally doing some good for the community but parents are going nuts out there. The kids have heard the Bogey Man has gone soft and unless they’re afraid of chicken soup there’s nothing to worry about and they can stay up late, pick their nose and pull the pigtails off their little sisters (and much, much worse…).

In steps PR firm El Cuco (motto: “your nightmares are our dreams”) who realise what the problem is. They arrange a sitdown meeting with Bogey. He tells them that he feels good, it’s all positive. It took a while for people to trust him with the soup – after all wouldn’t you be suspicious if the Bogey Man gave you soup for nothing – but it’s good now.

While they sympathise with Bogey, they realise that the real problem here is a simple mid-life crisis. Bogey got bored and wondered what his role was. He started to look for something more fulfilling in the short-term, something that was new to him. And while you can’t blame him, it’s screwed everything up.

El Cuco point out that Bogey already had a job in the community that was much loved by many people – kids excepted – and that was making sure children were scared enough to go to bed, sleep and stay there until morning. It just wasn’t a job where many people sent you a thank-you note.

El Cuco back this point up with the observation that anyone (well nearly anyone) can work on a soup kitchen, but there’s only one Bogey Man. And he needs to step back up.

It’s pointed out that boredom was one of the reasons that he decided to chuck it in, so they come up with ideas for what they can do new to scare kids – they crowdsource that out to parents as well, making them feel invested in what the Bogey Man does.

Crowdsourcing to make people poop themselves with fear

And while they tell Bogey to hold off on being on the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook (as well as a blog) – after all half of his power is people not knowing exactly what the Bogey Man does or looks like – they do get kids to start online sites, spreading the worst stories they have heard about the Bogey Man, sending in videos and drawings too. Not only does this also let the Bogey Man get some more ideas, kids will spread terrible tales and rumours about the Bogey Man – all without him lifting a finger. They’ll be terrifying themselves.

Having said that, El Cuco do monitor what is said about the Bogey Man online and if mentions of him dip, then they go out there and add some content. Perhaps even setting up a new DIGG-style site call BOGIES where people post their Bogey Man stories and people rank them according to how terrifying they are.

Also set up an online competition called ‘is your parent the Bogey Man?’ and get kids to enter drawings/theories as to why their parent(s) is the Bogey Man. Again, that puts doubt and fear into the kids. I mean, wouldn’t you behave yourself if your dad was the badass?

(You could also spark a faux-PR row by saying it can only be a Bogey Man and not Bogey Woman. Watch as that gets certain groups outraged – and there’s whole spinoff campaigns around trusting your mother.)

Add to that, hire people across the country – of all ages – to be going onto buses and into large public areas, looking haggard and upset. Have them speaking into mobile phones telling people in hushed tones that “…it’s the Bogey Man’s fault” which again will build up fear levels in people.

For the fear to come back, it has to be lots of little things – little noises in the middle of the night, a shadow against a wall, a shadow against a shadow, that icky breating sensation on the back of your neck when you’re 12 and feel nervous – it’s not about one large stunt.

Also, get into the local DVD rental shop and put horror films in the cases of all the kids and teens films. Have the discs set up so that the first 15 minutes of the kiddie film plays before it goes into the horror. Most kids will watch the horror (and most parents don’t watch a kid movie past the first 15 mins so they are either elsewhere or asleep) and have nightmares. Do the same trick on BitTorrent sites.

You could also play on local events: someone moves house suddenly? Bogey Man chased him away. You want to get your kid to stop picking their nose? Tell them that the words bogey and booger come from bogey as in Bogey Man and if they eat enough bogies, they’ll turn into the Bogey Man and stop being themselves…

If the Bogey Man doesn’t want to do it all himself, you could even set up an Augmented Reality Game (ARG – (Charlie Stross had a great example of ARGs in Halting State) which gets people hooked into doing the work of the Bogey Man without them even knowing it. For example, you could set one person a mission of flashing a torch (with a bat on the light section) into a window at 8.10pm – exactly the time little Johnny in that room is meant to be going to bed but can’t because of the bat that keeps appearing and disappearing. The person flashing the torch thinks they’re doing something fun for a Batman fan.

Elsewhere wee Elsie can’t sleep because every night there’s three taps at her window at the exact same time but never anyone there. While Mark thinks all he’s doing is passing on a coded message every night to the person in that room.

And one last thing you could do is try and get children to come up with a scary new rhyme or saying for the Bogey Man. Something simple like the Candyman or Freddie incantantions of old… a simple rhyming song that the kids can’t get out their heads? They’ll be terrified. And that fear will last as the odds are a catchy tune will live on, be covered, turned into a dance remix or 20 – it’ll haunt them through their lives.

And if anyone writes to a newspaper asking if there’s such a thing as the Bogey Man and the newspaper responds with Yes Virginia, there is a Bogey Man then it’s large gins all round.

Of course, there’s a price for all of this. If your child becomes scared again of the Bogey Man, once a week you have to leave a tin of soup outside your house. No-one knows whatever happens to that soup, but the local soup kitchen does appear to reduce fundraising drives over time… It’s just like leaving the carrots, milk, beer and cookies out at Xmas (you think those are for Santa and the reindeer? Oh no, the truth is far, far more sinister than that. But that’s a blog for another day).

Bogey Soup

But what if the Bogey Man can’t be persuaded to come back to the job? It’s not unknown for companies or people to try something new. Apple went into the music player and phone business and did OK. Google went into email and adverts and did OK. Nintendo used to just make playing cards…

So what if the soup kitchen gets to keep the new worker. What does El Cuco do then? Simple. Time to find a new Bogey… but that’s a post for another day (the remit here was to get the original Bogey Man’s reputation back, which is covered by the above).

What about you, gentle readers? What would you do to promote the Bogey Man?