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January 7th, 2010 by Louise Mackintosh

Mr Motivator

…Who needs him? What with all the New Year reminders that fat is evil.

Take the hilarious story about a health club in Bristol which took it upon themselves to point out in an ad that
“WhGym Alien Warningen the aliens come, they will eat the fatties first”

Needless to say, the locals were far from impressed.

And earlier in the week, a story so bad that I am in two minds as to whether it was born from mind-blowing stupidity or mind-blowing genius:  dating site BeautifulPeople.com – which only allows new members to join if existing members deem them to be good looking enough – has axed 5,000 members for having posted photos of themselves showing weight gain.

And the official company quote?

As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said site founder Robert Hintze. “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

Yes, you did read that right. “Letting fatties roam free”.  Somebody approved that.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or impressed, I really don’t.

 

May 18th, 2009 by admin

Google improves search options

Google has soft-launched a sea of new features including ‘Search Options’ enabling search queries for videos, forums and reviews specifically and filtering search results by time period. If that’s not enough, the new feature also returns related searches done by others and throws up keywords  in a form of a Wonder Wheel.

The benefits of Google Search Options are numerous. For most it could increase findability of forum discussions therefore driving more forum usage. Secondly, it could contribute to the burgeoning of user generated reviews and ratings and make it easy to find best ranked reviews on product and services.

For PRs and brands on the other hand, this could simply spell a new opportunity to listen and track conversations on forums and review sites whilst it could potentially offer new avenues to increase organic traffic.

Further to the point, eConsultancy has a great article in which it explains the implications of these changes for marketers and advertisers, whereas the Telegraph has a slightly user centric write up with a complete howto guide.

Wadds has also written about Google’s decision to ease some of its keyword restrictions.

April 1st, 2009 by Speed Budapest (Matt)

News-jacking case study: desktop research

Initiative:

News-jack for business communications provider ntl:Telewest Business to target Twitter’s third birthday and an announcement by analyst house, Gartner

Approach:

  • Carried out research in advance to find out how many large technology companies in the UK and the US have embraced Twitter for business communications
  • Used Twitter to pre-pitch the results of the study to a few key journalists
  • Pitched the story the following day to journalists and bloggers, and tweeted about the research with a link to the press release just three times
  • Followed up with journalists who hadn’t covered the story the next day to flag a press release released by Gartner that morning highlight 4 ways that enterprises can use Twitter

Results:

  • More than 150 clicks on the link to the press release, and three retweets
  • More than 35 pieces of coverage, including two pieces in the national press
  • Dozens of tweets commenting on the research, and linking to articles about it

Coverage:

Twitter’s potential overlooked by UK technology companies, says report, The Daily Telegraph
4 out of 5 UK tech companies aren’t using Twitter. So what’s the excuse?
, Econsultancy
UK’s leading tech firms fail to grasp Twitter potential, Brand Republic
Enterprises turning to Twitter, says Gartner, IT Pro
Top UK firms slow on Twitter take-up, VNU Net