Keira Knightley will fire you on Twitter

Sitting down at the laptop on a fine Sunday morning to check up on how our lovely viral campaign is doing, I took a moment to procrastinate via social media (you know you do it) and logged into my Twitter account.

I follow a very diverse and wide-ranging cross section of society, from SEO gods like Dave Naylor, to stars of the silver screen such as Keira Knightley (cough*..um she was in Pirates of the Caribbean..cough*) some of them for their educational tweets and interesting links, others for the sheer stream of consciousness comedy that it affords me.

It is the latter statement that this next little tid-bit of information should be categorised into,  as this morning I was lucky enough to read through the demise of Keira Knightley’s assistant Daniel via my Twitter account.

As you can see from the above, Daniels demise was quite a public one, and frankly I was surprised no one had picked up on it and syndicated it via the interwebs, so, being the kind-hearted soul I am, I thought it would be best to warn Keira of the possible online PR fiasco that could lead from such activity on a public Twitter account.

As you can see, I have already waited over 2 hours to write this blog post, two hours in which Ms. Knightley has been tweeting frequently, so I think it’s only fair that I now share the comedy and allow myself a little bit of link-bait.

But.. .and there is always a but.

This is a very precise example of online reputation management going awry, and one that we can all learn from. Nowadays with sites like Facebookfails and Failblog (just to mention a couple) our mistakes have the propensity to cause us real harm, whether “we” means a real world brand or a professional reputation, online PR and reputation management must be taken seriously when engaging in social media, something I have been stressing for quite some time in my professional life.

So, maybe this will lead Keira back to a view she expressed earlier this year:

Keira Knightley- “I hate the Internet. I find it dehumanizing to constantly check emails or social sites which have become so fashionable.”  Source.

Or maybe she’ll do the right thing by social media and take control of her Twitter account and use it as a personal way of engaging on the Internet with fans, peers, reporters etc.

I guess we’ll just have to wait for the next tweet.

Love,

Callum

British Airways – work for free – fail at PPC

As you all know my team and I manage Search  and as a result of this we have to keep track of what people are doing online. You will no doubt have heard about the recent British Airways disputes over pay freezes, job losses, staff cuts and the rest of it either in the news or here on the inter-webs, we have been keeping a close eye on the developments too and genuinely feel for what their staff must be going through right now.

In an industry (an industry I am incredibly new to) where I have found staff to be intensley loyal to their employer, and really care about the service offered and how well customers are taken care of it must be unfathomably frustrating to be asked to make such extreme personal sacrifices such as taking three months paid leave, or freezing your salary for up to three years while still ensuring that you are doing your all to maintain genuine pride in your work and making sure your customers are taken care of as well as they always have been.

It is because of these reasons that I decided to write this post.

last week British Airways began offering summer sale prices on their website to generate as much revenue as possible during what is sure to be a couple of hard months for them.

 I set about checking up on the British Airways offer and found something quite startling.

Try this search on Google (don’t be scared of the phantom mouse):

“BA summer sale”

Now click on the sponsored link at the top (the British Airways one)

As you will now no doubt be aware of, British Airways are sending traffic through to an expired landing page, and have been doing so since the start of their sale.

In a genuine effort to save them money and improve their campaign I tweeted about this at www.twitter.com/callumadamson the day after I discovered it (British Airways follow me on Twitter) and gave them a day to realise their mistake and correct it. Well folks it has been three days since then and they still haven’t fixed it.

I can’t realisticly predict how much money they have spent on traffic to send customers to an expired landing page, but what I can say for sure is that if you are asking your staff to work for free, freeze their pay, or any other measure that will help them bring the company back into profitability, the least you can do is ensure that every penny spent is going towards revenue generation.

What can we learn from this?

When you launch a new PPC campaign check it by hand on live search engines – don’t trust the Google ad-preview tool, sure it will be laborious and slightly boring, but you’ll reap the rewards, and if it is a short run campaign (our summer offers end on the 14th July) then it is doubly important to ensure that your campaign is running at full speed from day 1.

I’m not saying that all of our campaigns are 100% unbelievably the most amazing bestest campaigns ever run (we still have a lot of work to do to get there) but we’re careful with our spends and targeting because we know that in this industry every penny counts at the moment, and we’re doing our best.

Love,

Callum

*Caveat

This post is an entirely personal viewpoint and in to way constitues the views, opinions or thoughts of my employer or anyone connected with me. It is merely an observation and is in no way slanderous in it’s intent.

When you can’t be found on Google

I recently dropped my Blackberry bold while rushing to a departure gate in Gatwick airport (I left my ipod at home and had to go back for it) which resulted in the rear casing becoming permentantly loose and falling off randomly while using the phone.

SEE:

So I called O2 (read un-human corporation)  to see if there was anything they could do for me.  As expected, even though I have been a loyal O2 customer for 8 years there was nothing they could do for me, except sell me a new phone at around £450 (awesome).

Now I’m not the kind of person that let’s things like this get in my way so I started looking online for a company that a friend introduced me to a little while back. They make very cool custom replacement parts for Blackerry, iphone, PSP etc.  And seeing as how I needed a new back plate for my broken bold I thought that I’d slplash out on something a bit flash. The company I am talking about is called Colorware, but I didn’t know that when I started my search as it had been months since I checked out their site, so I began with quite a straight forward query:

http://tinyurl.com/lxyeoe  – Clicking this will run the same Google query I ran “custom blackberry housing”.  Now I can accept that Colorware might not be very “up” on SEO, so I tried again, and again and couldn’t get the Colorware recommendation from any site within the SERP.

This was the beginning of my frustration, so taking stock, I tried to think about where I’d first seen a post on Colorware and jumped areound a few tech sites that I read regularly like Gizmodo etc.  entering Blackberry query strings into their search boxes, scrounging round old forum posts and still found nothing.

Did I give up?…. of course not ;o)

I changed my search tactics. I knew that they also customised iphone covers and thought that because the iphone and anything to do with it is juicy link bait, I would be sure to find something using the same query strings replacing the work “blackberry” with the word “iphone”, so I began my search:

http://tinyurl.com/l3vbnh- this is the first query replicated using the word iphone instead of blackberry.

Nothing…….. So I tried a second query:

http://tinyurl.com/njxs8s – BAM ! – This  gave me the result I was looking for.

So what does this teach me?

If you have a great site and a great product, then please, market it:

• Run a PPC campaign, several if you’re a geek like me.
• Find out who is linking to you and ask for relevant anchor text.
• Protect your brand early online:  www.colourware.co.uk takes me to a completely unassociated site.

Follow those rules and I’ll be back for more, don’t follow them, and someone less stubborn than me will quite possibly never know who you are trying to appeal to as a company, or what product you are trying to sell>

Know how I am going to search for your product and put yourself in my path, optimize simply and often and you’ll definitely get results.

Love,

Callum