Personality in PR

Here are two statements from corporate PR spokespeople that I've seen recently.

The first is from 123-Reg about the downtime that their service suffered from over the weekend:

123-reg experienced intermittent performance issues on its DNS servers between late afternoon on Friday 16 November and Sunday 18 November. This meant that some customers have encountered difficulties with their domain names during this period...

We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience that the outage would have caused and we have begun an investigation to identify the cause of the failure, and any necessary actions required will be implemented without delay. Further information and updates is available from http://www.hosting-status.pipex.net

I expect this was written by a techie. It's functional, but completely devoid of personality.

The second is from Skype, commenting (or not commenting) on rumours about them being up for sale:

What would we do without rumors?! We’re sure that someone is using Skype right now to give new life to old ones and create new ones from scratch. We certainly understand it — after all, Skype is about making conversations possible. That said, we don’t comment on rumor on speculation (beyond what we’ve just said).

Two very different situations but such a great example of how you can bring your brand to life with a bit of personality, using a simple 'no comment' as an opportunity to make a statement about who you are and what you stand for. Love it.