Whats that coming over the hill? Is it a PR nightmare?
Jul/091
Horizon Realty have got a few things to learn about reputation management and social media…
The company are attempting to sue twitter user @abonnen (followed by just 20 other users) for £50,000 after she sent the following tweet to a friend:
Now, they could have let it slide quietly away, witnessed by only a small handful of people, that would likely have been the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to deal with the situtaion. They could have used social media properly and responded to the issue, showing that they cared about their customer , that would have been the most sensible way to deal with it and would likely have improved their reputation as a company. Of course, instead of the first two options, they decided to blow the situation out of all proportions creating a huge amount of bad press and bad will for themselves…
Yesterday most of us probably hadn’t heard of Horizon Realty, with todays news their brand image has been tainted, internationally, by moldy appartments, customer bullying and money grabbing…
It doesnt even matter if any of these things are true or not, attacking a customer for complaining about your service (especially with law suits) is a sure way to:
- Make you look guilty of whatever your customer is complaining about.
- Alienate your existing and future customers.
- Make the inital molehill in to a huge bad PR mountain.
Spokesman for Horizon, Jeffrey Michael, was quoted to say:
“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization”.
Stories which feature customer bullying through, or because of, social media tend to become very visable very quickly these days and I’d suggest that this policy is in need of an urgent review…
Blogging Tips from Tim Ferriss
Jul/091
Some great tips to help you increase your blog traffic without neglecting the rest of your life and work in the process.
The rest of Tim Ferriss’ Blog is very much worth checking out at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/
Social Media Knowledge Comments
Jun/090
Please leave comments regarding the jump! digital social media knowledge pages here 
It’s all in progress so if there is anything you would like to see in the future let me know!
What are you thinking?
Jun/090
This week I have been working on a project that has got me interested in how one might get a snapshot of the interests of the general public at any one time. I thought I’d share some of the tools I have been using.
There are a number of trend tools based around blogs and user generated content but looking at them from the eye of a non-technical user these tend to be bias towards more technical topics:
Twitter trends:
http://search.twitter.com/
Technorati’s Popular Blogs:
http://technorati.com/pop/
and even Delicious to find out what people are book marking:
http://delicious.com/
With all the talk of social media tools giving us a better insight into our customers / audience / users it was interesting (if not surprising when you think about it) that the best tools to get a taste of the general publics interests are based around search engine results, still the most popular of all online tools.
Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
Yahoo Buzzlog:
http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/overall/
and Asks tool for popular searches:
http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml
I love looking at all the different ways people search for the same topic, especially those not yet covered by the mainstream media and as such have not had terms around them concreated.
Finding a way to deliver useful content to the masses based on these interests is the next stop!
Unemployed Gray
May/090
A tribute to randommel.com and all the guys who have a little too much time on their hands because of this so called recession. I love unemployment!
St. Vincent: “Now Now”
Mar/090
Games and the music industry
Dec/080
“I don’t really look at the last 10 years of music business as a negative,” Weezer bassist Scott Shriner told Wired.com. “A lot of people are sad — nobody buys records anymore and everyone’s downloading and all that. But I think there’s more interest in music than ever, and I just want to use technology to reach people as much as possible.”
source http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/gadgets-games-h.html
