The horror, the horror: @VodafoneUK's social media balls up
You may not think that social media is rocket science, but those big brand early adopters are certainly astronauts exploring an unknown quantity. And space exploration is not without its challenges. Or risks.
One intergalactic incident occurred late on Friday as a member of Vodafone’s social media team cut loose and posted a homophobic remark via the company's official Twitter account.
WIN a signed copy of Crush It, by @garyvee
Anybody who has met Gary Vaynerchuk – or seen one of his videos / keynotes - will tell you that he is a one-man whirlwind of ideas, passion and drive.
Gary has managed to condense some of his key ideas into a book called Crush It, which is aimed at wannabe entrepreneurs (and anybody who doesn’t enjoy what they’re doing for a living).
I had dinner with Gary last month and he suggested doing a Crush It giveaway for Econsultancy members. And sure enough, I now have 25 signed copies of his book at Econsultancy HQ and they're all up for grabs...
Why Econsultancy is unfollowing 19,000 Twitter users
It is almost one year since we launched our Twitter experiment, in a bid to get closer to our community.
Now, it is time for a bit of a spring clean, and one of the things we are going to do is to start from scratch with Twitter, in terms of who we’re following. I’ll explain why…
Google’s real time SEO ranking factors for Twitter
Google’s recent move into real-time search has generated a lot noise in the internet industry recently, not least among the SEO professionals.
The search engine is now indexing tweets from Twitter and other status updates from other social media sites, including Myspace and Facebook.
Most of the time real time results are currently displayed on the top half of the page, which is prime real estate, and as such SEOs are keen to understand what makes Google tick.
A fat-free guide to Facebook for brands
For consumer brands that want to harness - and feel the group hugs from - their community, there’s nothing quite like Facebook.
With hundreds of millions of unique users, Facebook offers a ready-made platform for companies to communicate with customers and fans, to support and extend marketing campaigns and to move some of those key brand metrics.
I have collated a few of the best presentations and videos to help you understand exactly why Facebook matters, and what it can do for your business (and how to do it).
Foundem vs Google redux: it was a penalty! And search neutrality is at stake, dammit!
In August last year I wrote an article called Foundem vs Google: a case study in SEO fail. Foundem had been complaining about Google, due to its lowly search rankings.
My article was based on a story published in The Guardian, which pretty much sounded like a big bunch of sour grapes to me. As such I called out Foundem, which didn’t appear to be doing an amazing job of SEO best practice.
But Foundem insisted that The Guardian article had been heavily edited, claiming that the newspaper’s lawyers didn’t want it to use words like ‘penalties’ and ‘whitelisting’ in the article, when referring to Google. Big, scary Google.
O2’s major mobile marketing spamfail
It’s been that time of year again, the season of goodwill and a time for giving, for caring, for understanding, and for tolerance. And for receiving…
So what did you get for Christmas? If, like me, you’re an O2 customer, then you will have received lots of text messages pimping out its ’12 Days of Christmas’ iTunes-related marketing campaign.
Unfortunately, you’ll have received these messages whether you wanted them or not.
News aggregator NewsNow to stop linking to big media
Well it had to happen sooner or later. One of the UK’s top news aggregators has decided to remove links to most of the national news sites following a spat with the Newspaper Licensing Authority.
NewsNow will now stop linking to newspapers including The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Mirror, among others.
21 ways to commit brand suicide in the 21st Century
I always believed that brand suicide was essentially the result of some major foot-in-mouth event, or a product fail of epic proportions. Moreover, it was not so much the failure itself, but rather the result of not being able to manage and recover from that failure. There’s a right way and a wrong way to dig your brand out of a hole.
But this big picture stuff isn’t the only way brands die. When it comes down to it brands die at a micro level. Brand suicide occurs whenever an individual has ‘had it’ with a company, be that the result of shoddy treatment, or disappointment with products and services.
Normally when this happens to me I tell people about it, in the strongest possible terms. That used to be a relatively limited group of people, but nowadays I can (and do) communicate my annoyance / misery on Twitter, which gives any disgruntled customer a lot more reach. And as such the world is a scarier place for brands than ever before.
The vast social media echo chamber means that brands are now at real danger from lots of small events, rather than one big one. We are living in an age where brands die by 1,000 cuts, rather than one almighty chop. The rise in popularity of social / user-generated platforms like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia means that brands are more exposed than ever.
So how can brands go about killing themselves slowly?
The Econsultancy Innovation Awards 2009: The Winners
After weeks of judging, occasional arguments, far too much coffee and – thankfully - lots of internal support, we are now in a position to reveal the winners of our 2009 Innovation Awards.
The judges felt that the standard of the 400 or so entries was remarkably high, and that the winners represent innovation, which can be defined in pure technology or creative terms, but also in context to an organisation or sector. The judging panel included Econsultancy’s in-house internet fiends and a bunch of third party experts.
Our hearty congratulations to all the winners, and also to the shortlisted runners up, and particularly to the ‘highly commended’ runners up named below. Kudos, glory and acclaim to all who triumphed.
20+ mind-blowing social media statistics revisited
Gleecommerce: 10 ways to improve job satisfaction
Google
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
