Thursday, February 26, 2009

Idiot bloggers...

The Guardian Newspaper in the UK ran a story yesterday about Jason Roe who having found what he thought to be was a flaw in the Ryanair online booking system, ran the information on his blog see http://tinyurl.com/cemrb6

Whilst the initial and informal response from Ryanair was average at best, their official comment was bizarre:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel."
Is this a Ryanair stunt maybe?

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Australian Twitter use hits all-time high

Use of the micro-blogging service Twitter service in Australia hit an all-time high for the week ending 10 January 2009, increasing year-on-year in web visits by 517.9% for that week compared with the same week in the previous year.

While corporate take up is slower in Australia than in the US the service offers the same advantages to organisations here which are keen to communicate short messages to a time poor audience.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Top ranking social networks

According to www.compete.com the following is a list of the top 25 social networking sites by total monthly visits at the end of January ’09:

1. facebook.com
2. myspace.com
3. twitter.com
4. flixster.com
5. linkedin.com
6. tagged.com
7. classmates.com
8. myyearbook.com
9. livejournal.com
10. imeem.com
11. reunion.com
12. ning.com
13. blackplanet.com
14. bebo.com
15. hi5.com
16. yuku.com
17. cafemom.com
18. friendster.com
19. xanga.com
20. 360.yahoo.com
21. orkut.com
22. urbanchat.com
23. fubar.com
24. asiantown.net
25. tickle.com

facebook.com had over 1.1 billion visits in January from nearly 69 million unique visitors, in comparison to tickle.com which was visited 109,492 times by 96,155 people. In comparative terms then, on a frequency basis, each unique user visited Facebook 17.4 times during the month in comparison to Tickle’s frequency of 1.1.

The big winner on frequency would have been asiantown.com with a frequency of 13.8, equal to My Space in frequency albeit just over 809 million visits behind in absolute terms!

Google doesn’t find Atlantis after all

With the demise after a scant 13 episodes in 1977 of the Patrick Duffy lead Man from Atlantis many of us assumed that the rumours of lost civilizations beneath the sea would die away, until last week that is, when a Brit searching through the latest incarnation of Google Earth, spotted what he believed was the famed lost City http://tinyurl.com/amvdbl

The discovery is unlikely, the denial from Google was swift, but it was the wording of the denial which garnered interest from us.

As part of the news release denying the find, Google did confirm that Google Earth had discovered a new forest in Mozambique that’s home to previously unknown species and the remains of a previously undiscovered ancient Roman villa.

Is there nothing Google can’t achieve?

Oh and by the way, for those of you with treasure hunting aspirations the exact coordinates of Atlantis are apparently 31 15'15.53N, 24 15'30.53W.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

A SledgeYammer blow?

In an update to yesterday’s Yammer post, the enterprise version of Twitter announced the release of new hosted version of the software allowing organisation’s to install it with their firewall which should fully remove any ITC concerns with regards to the security of the posts.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Stop, Yammertime

You will most likely already be aware of Twitter, but just in case you’re not, Twitter is a micro-blogging social network that allows its users to send and read other users' updates. Each blog posting, or Tweet, can only be a maximum of 140 characters long. They are swift, short, sharp updates of what’s new, what’s happening or in many cases, simply what’s trivial and pointless.

Tweets are displayed on a user's profile page and delivered to other users who have specifically signed up to receive them. The service works by choosing people you want to ‘follow’ so you view their messages and have people ‘follow’ you in return, so they receive your updates.

This can certainly be trivial, but it doesn’t have to be and there are some great examples of organisations which are driving social media strategies using Twitter. Daemon Digital has recommended the use of Twitter to a number of organisations as part of a wider strategy and for more information see the following post on Mashable http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands

Taking this concept further and inside an organisation is Yammer – http://www.yammer.com/ – an enterprise version of Twitter which excludes any user without a specific enterprise’s email suffix, for example @daemongroup.com to join any given feed. This creates a very simple tool through which colleagues can update one another more securely with items of information that are useful but not worthy of a newsletter style article.

What’s so effective about this is that useful information can be communicated, for example “We had a great meeting with XYZ Co.” and dialogue can be created, for example, “I have a great idea for XYZ Co. does anyone have a contact there?” intra-day and across an organisation without waiting for the company update.

It feels as though this type of internal communication, which is fast, timely and cost effective, is more likely to be read than the traditional email or newsletter update, if for no better reason than it’s short and actually adds value.

And lest we forget, in the immortal words of MC Yammer (sic)

Break it Down
Stop, Yammertime.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Just a little latitude

Last week Google launched a new service named Google Latitude which allows registered users to track people, with their permission, using Google software and the GPS device in their mobile telephone. The ‘tracked’ individual’s location appears on Google Maps after the ‘tracker’ has logged into Latitude.

This service is similar in many ways to conversations Facebook were reported to be having linking its mobile site to the GPS device in phones allowing members to see the current locations of their friends.

Good idea or Orwellian Big Brother?

One of the statistics used regularly in presentations available for download at http://www.daemondigital.com/ is that of 1 in 8 marriages in the US being derived from an online meeting. If past use of the web created 1 in 8 marriages, could future use of Google Latitude be the catalyst for 1 in 8 divorces?

As an alternative, is there a less sinister humanitarian upside with Latitude helping to locate disaster victims on land or at sea with Google’s equally new Google Ocean’s. Furthermore, will parents sleep better at night if they can see their teenagers whereabouts online at the touch of a button?

Find out for yourself by downloading Google Latitude at www.google.com/latitude

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Veggie Love

Commercial spots in the SuperBowl are, and it seems always have been, the most expensive adverts money, or at least media buyers, can buy. So having one of your spots banned would concern most organisations - not so PETA.

‘Veggie Love’ was banned by NBC this year for being too sexually explicit using the premise that vegetarians have better sex! The ad itself depicts lingerie clad models being ‘intimate’ with vegetables.

However, an extremely brief piece of Google based research by Daemon Digital, found the PETA TV channel which shows ‘Veggie Love’ and the other 11 spots that PETA has created that have also been banned at various points in time.

An even briefer search on You Tube found, on the first two pages of search results only, 30 uploads of the 30 second ‘Veggie Love’ spot which had been viewed over 1.61 million times (2 February 09). In addition, there were also a number of uploads of the behind the scenes video and interviews with each of the model’s.

This would seem to be a great example of how to use online social networking to communicate a traditional media message at a significantly reduced cost, not to mention the additional traditional media exposure and commentary in the blogosphere that NBC banning the commercial has generated.

For those of you keen to review the rest of this year’s SuperBowl commercials, try http://superbowl-ads.com/ or to view ‘Veggie Love and propagate the free publicity, try You Tube.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Monetising Facebook

The Sydney Morning Herald, filing from Davos, reports that Facebook is planning to harness the personal information it holds on its members to make one of the world's largest market research databases available to corporate buyers.

Facebook has struggled to monetise its strength with advertising revenues slow to start and the aborted attempt to monetise member behaviour through the Beacon software system which tracked member’s activity both through Facebook and through third party sites which also had Beacon installed.

Online research panels have been in existence for some time and do offer a very cost effective alternative research solution for a range of research assignments. This is an interesting move from Facebook and a very logical and sensible way to harness member’s time on site whilst providing some reward for member’s loyalty to the royalty of online social networking.