Archive for March, 2010

YouTube homepage is down…

Oh my! It has finally happened. Forget the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse! YOUTUBE ISN’T WORKING!

Or is it?

Amid mass hysteria about the video sharing site going down, it does not seemed to have occured to anyone to try clicking a link in YouTube. If they did, they would realise that it appears that only the homepage is not working.

My Tweetdeck nearly exploded when I added the search term ‘YouTube’. It took over 15 minutes before people realised the truth and started tweeting about.

I will follow up with blog talking about the impact of this within the next few days…

And the winner is…

I find myself once again perplexed. I really must stop this inconvenient habit of being surprised by things that don’t warrant it because, working in social media, anything can happen and if I continue to be surprised, I may very well end up in an early grave with a head stone that reads:

“Here Lies Will. RIS”

I want you to try something for me. I want you to stop reading and think about what might have been the most talked about sport in social media during the winter Olympics… Aaaaaand go!!!

Did you do it? What did you come up with? Snowboarding? Ski cross? Hockey perhaps?! Well my friends, you would be wrong. The sport that created the most buzz in social media during the winter Olympics was… (drum roll)…

3… 2… 1…

Curling!

Yes folks, in a recent study done and presented by Attentio at I-COM in Lisbon, it would seem that curling was the most talked about sport during the 2010 winter Olympics. Therein lies the source of my surprise.

Digging a little deeper, I found that I was not alone. It seems that the majority of buzz created online was by people who were actually themselves surprised to be watching it. How interesting. The people that where driving the popularity of this broom filled, kettle pushing sport are the very ones who didn’t want and hadn’t planned to be watching it in the first place.

I call this the “Big Brother Live” syndrome. The art of watching something whilst, at the same time thinking “Why am I doing this? This is valuable time I will never get back”.

What this means is that people are very often surprised as to what is popular in social media and it can give very interesting insights into what people are thinking and talking about.  This is of particular interest to companies that think they have their finger on the pulse when the truth may be that they don’t.

Oh well, while I think about this little dilemma, I’m off to watch ‘Something for the Weekend’ on BBC. Believe me, there is nothing better than listening to Tim Lovejoy for switching off the mind and slipping into a philosophically induced coma. Try it.!

The Bizarre Barclays Bank Blog

Wow. I am truly stunned. Whilst sitting here and trying to figure out what to blog about, I was thinking about my bank. It then dawned on me that perhaps this would be a great topic to cover in a blog. I thought ‘I will write about the banking industry and their trends in social media’.

My intentions were good but I got side tracked. And no, not in the way that a twenty-something year old male would usually be distracted by the Internet but by the fact that, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many tweets I sifted through, I could not find one person, not ONE who had anything positive to say about Barclays. That has to be some kind of record!!

“How do I get hold of Barclays UK CEO am being ripped off and fobbed off”

“Getting seriously peed off with Barclays. A DD went out yesterday, there was plenty of money in for it & all was fine. Now they are saying..”

“This is because it took Barclays 6 months to give me access to the account and then they forgot to give me all info I needed to quote!”

“Tried ringing Barclays Local Business Manager mobile for York and am now talking to Darlington! Second lot of millions of security checks”

“Dear Barclays, when I ring the local business manager in York please could you put the call through to York and not via India,”

This is just a few of the posts that I looked at and they all fall within a half hour window. Now, I can understand that banks are not the most popular institutions at the moment but this is a worrying trend. How is it that in every other industry, if people feel that companies are not listening or reacting to them, they go elsewhere but with banks, this doesn’t seem to be happening? There doesn’t seem to be an upsurge of people keeping their money under their mattresses or going to ‘Dave the happy smiley money lenderer guy.

I also decided to check the Barclays website to see if they advertise any of their social media strategies (do they have a Twitter account, Facebook etc..) and there is nothing. I also did a search for Barclays on Facebook and could only find one group, which is private.

Don’t believe me? Try it yourselves. Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in any bank name. You will get similar results for NatWest and Lloyds to name but a couple.

Why is there such a divide between banks and their customers? Why are customers accepting it? Why are most banks ignoring it?

Whilst pondering this, I will phone my local bank manager and ask…. Oh, wait!

* In my next post, I will try and uncover what banks are actually doing about it if anything. In the meantime, if you have any news regarding this, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.