The HashTag

Just wanted to share this great article from Matt Dickman which gives a great insight into online brand reputation monitoring and the use of the HashTag. Definitely worth a read.

Amazon's Latest Blunder

Over the weekend, in a move that defied any logic, Amazon suddenly removed all gay and lesbian themed books from their top-selling and recommended lists. This sparked thousands of Tweeters and Bloggers to start posting. Using the hashtag '#amazonfail' the entire incident became the most talked about topic on Twitter almost overnight. Suddenly we have a prime example of what Social Media can do when a business does something stupid. It also doesn't help that Amazon failed to properly monitor their online reputation.

So what happened?

While Amazon remained mostly quiet all weekend with the only explanation of the event coming from Patty Smith, Amazon's director of corporate communications, that the event was a 'glitch', Gawker reported that the hacker Weev had claimed credit for the whole thing. He was quoted as saying it was an "exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools." This in turn drove a large amount of interest in the hashtag #glitchmyass.

Amazon has since responded saying the incident was "embarrassing and ham-fisted", giving no further insight into the origin of the mess. However, it isn't really important if the event was a glitch or the work of a hacker. The main point of all this is that Amazon completely failed to monitor social media and online conversation. If they had had any sort of reasonable system in place they should have been able to deal with the whole thing much faster then they did.

This is just another example of why companies can't turn-off and go home for the weekend. The rest of us don't sleep, and if something goes wrong we're going to talk about it!

Bad News, Bad Taste

via the good work over at Assistant to the Brand Manager

This almost turned my stomach. You go to do a photoshoot for the Belfast Telegraph. You realise that the coverstory is not something that will promote good feelings (I really hope they noticed!). So what do you do? Call someone and get them to mock up something that could be stuck over the front cover? Get yesterday's cover? No, if you're the Belfast Telegraph you just push ahead.

Bad move guys. Very bad move.

Twitter from Mars

Last Thursday (19th June) Nasa announced the discovery of Water Ice on Mars.

Seriously, Water Ice!

Next to actually encountering an alien, this stuff is the Holy Grail of space exploration. This is pretty much the biggest news they've had since Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words. So how do you let the world know about this historic event?

Twitter.

Honestly, NASA announced to the world that water-based ice had been discovered on another planet Via this tweet:


NASA are using Twitter to feed constant information about the Mars Phoenix Rover to over 20,000 followers!

I bet they wish it didn't go viral!

Last week Coldplay's new album went straight to No 1with sales in excess of 300,000 copies. This is some achievment in just three days, but on top of that they also sold out a string of concerts and had huge iTunes coverage. In short, things were going fairly swimmingly.

Swimmingly didn't last long though. Just as suddenly as Viva La Vida soared, the band were hit with potentially crashing news. A small band called the Creaky Boards has launched a plagiarism suit against the band for their title track,which the boards claim has elements stolen from a track of theirs entitled 'The Songs I Didn't Write'.

Andrew Hoepfner, the Creaky Boards' singer and songwriter, has posted a video on YouTube, comparing the two tracks, which do have very similar sounds. Unfortunately the claims made by Hoepfner, that Chris Martin attended a Creaky Boards concert in New York last year have been completely refuited the band's spokesman Murray Chalmers.

"First, on the night in October when the band say Chris Martin was watching them, he was actually working at the Air Studio in London, and we can prove that. Second, even if he had been at the gig, "Viva la Vida" was written and demoed seven months before the night in question, so it couldn't possibly have been copied." . "We were flattered when we thought we saw Chris Martin in the crowd," said Mr Hoepfner. "He seemed pretty into it... Maybe TOO into it?"

Unfortunately Hoepfner's clip rapidly went viral and has already attracted nearly 430,000 views!, and although Coldplay have said they will not persue legal action against the Boards, this bad press could potentially cause serious damage to the bands reputation.