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Last week there were two incredible lapses in judgement from brands that saw people up in arms.

Firstly, Habitat. This has been well documented and covered but to recap – Habitat’s first foray into the Twittersphere ended disastrously after some bright spark decided that leveraging key trends or hashtags on Twitter would be a great way of getting more eyeballs on their tweets.

This resulted in the likes of “#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card” being posted on their account.

The second, Perez Hilton (yes, he counts as a brand). Upon learning about the tragic death of Michael Jackson, Perez posted this on his popular gossip blog.

This resulted in uproar on social media channels and the #unfollowperez hashtag started doing the rounds.

Both Habitat and Perez received negative comment and coverage as a result of their exploits and both were swift to apologise and correct their errors – Habitat deleted the offending (and offensive) tweets, Perez removing the image.

What is interesting is not the consumer backlash – this is to be expected given the errors in judgement, at least by anyone with half a mind – but the immediate forgiveness shown to both parties by consumers.

Yes they are continuing to receive a small amount criticism and yes both cases may have causes irreparable damage to each brand but largely the apologies were met with general acceptance.

The point is, and this is something I reiterate whenever asked to give a client a social media workshop, brands in general are still learning how best to leverage social media channels and mistakes will be made (even really stupid ones). But, as long as you learn from those mistakes, make adjustments and improve then social media can continue to be an incredibly fun and powerful channel which should be leveraged.

Using your audience as your marketing moral compass is not a bad thing as long as you do listen and change direction when told to.

I doubt Habitat will make the same mistake again – although judging by their Twitter account they may have just given up altogether. And, whilst Perez probably lapped up the controversy it could have been much worse than it was and he’ll be sure to double check his sources before opening MS Paint again.

Five things you should check out before the week’s out:

1. Buzz and Snoop are teaming up for a rap duet. Sometimes the most unlikely partnerships can generate column inches
2. Kid reacts to his mum cancelling his World of Warcraft account. Never underestimate brand loyalty or consumer passion
3. Let it Ring! One of the most powerful and creative examples of communicating a road safety message I have ever seen. Previewed at Cannes Lions
4. Ever struggled to explain what Twitter is? The site’s co-founder Biz Stone provides an overview for @rbolivar’s Mum at Cannes Lions
5. Michael Jackson performing Man in the Mirror. A song by one of the greatest musicians of our time, in his prime

Have a great weekend.

Has the world gone mad….and when I say world I mean the British media?

I’m not condoning the actions of Russel Brand or Jonathan Ross, what they did went beyond an innocent prank and simply wasn’t funny, but this morning I’ve woken up the front page outrage aimed at the pair. What’s more, Gordon Brown has jumped into the furor blasting the pair, and Sky News informed me that the issue was likely to come up during Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon.

With two wars, an economic crisis, an entertaining yet globally relevant US election, Tory sleaze etc is the outrage caused by this practical joke really reflective of its severity?

I can’t help but think it’s all gone a bit to far a la Princess Di (oh no he di’n't). Perhaps Elton John should dust off his songbook.

While I’m on the point of the media: On Sky News this morning, after Noel Gallagher blamed the decline of Top of the Pops for youth crime, its newspaper critic responded – “I don’t know if it’s true but it’s a good point!”

A good point indeed, particularly if you step out of the realm of reality. As the old saying goes…why let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Rant over!

So some of you will have noticed that the old blog hasn’t been in its best state recently. Between work, a holiday and work I really haven’t had time to show it the love and tenderness it deserves. But I am still here and remarkably have found 10 minutes to myself and thought I would post a note around a topic I was discussing yesterday on Twitter – The Great Drain Robbery, or, in non-Sun speak, the fact that Starbucks has been caught wasting millions of litres of water every day.

I won’t go into the story itself, you can read it here. What is interesting though is how quickly the flames of such a potentially damaging story have been doused. Yesterday this was a front page story and appeared across a number of nationals and online publications. Today though, not a whimper. More than that though, a quick search on Google News reveals less than 30 articles. On BlogPulse and the various Twitter trend trackers the story barely raises a squeak!

I’m not going to judge Starbucks on this as I don’t know the ins and outs of the issue however given how prevalent environmental issues are within today’s media, their PR and crisis teams have to be commended for a job well done. Yesterday’s news really has become today’s fish and chip paper!

It is worth pointing out that they did get a small helping hand with Palin misquoting one of their coffee cup quotes the other day. It may not have sold lattes but it certainly deflected some of the attention off the running taps!

This is a guest post by Alex, part of Hill & Knowlton’s Digital team in the UK.

In Revolution Magazine this month Nike’s marketing director Simone Pestridge claims that “being prepared to take risks is the only way to create truly successful digital campaigns”. I couldn’t agree more. With every new business brief coming in asking for “digital” the online space is becoming more and more saturated with campaigns therefore to create cut through risks need to be taken which unfortunately for the client might not always be the cheapest.

Nike have frequently taken huge risks in their campaigns but can be said to be one of the pioneers of digital marketing campaigns; from Nike id customising shoes online to the Joga Bonito campaign (consumers were asked to submit videos of them receiving the ball from one side of the screen and passing on to the other). A recent Facebook poll has shown that Nike are associated with football then either adidas or Umbro despite their very high profile sponsorship campaigns.

I also think it’s fair to say that traditional PR campaigns need to take larger risks as well. By pushing the brand outside of their comfort zone they can gain huge results, take the latest Castrol UEFA EURO 2008 campaign. Not traditionally associated with football they took ownership of the statistics side of football (which let’s face it we all love) to great success.

I’ll leave you with the words of Simon Pestridge “Consumers are much more interested in brands that put themselves on the line”.

BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse have all signed up to a new deal with the music industry in a bid to tackle piracy online. For now this means that thousands of ISP customers suspected of sharing music will receive letters asking them to stop.

A small step in the right direction but in reality telling people to stop sharing music does nothing. People don’t do it because they don’t know it’s wrong – they do it because the music industry has seen fit to charge consumers extortionate amount of money for music over the past 25 years!

I refuse to pay for albums and singles but get around it by using the very good Napster (flat fee for unlimited listening). And with the likes of Pandora and Last.fm becoming more mainstream the music industry is fighting a losing battle.

The solution is not to wag the finger at consumers or switch their internet connection off, which is what the music industry is pushing for. The crux of the issue is that the music industry has not adapted to changing consumer needs. Why pay £15 for an album when that same amount will give me to listen to unlimited music and put it on my MP3 player. Until the music industry realise the world is very different from that of over two decade ago and change the fundamental elements of how they conduct business, people will share music.

The answer is simple: labels – make your catalogue available online and charge a flat fee to listen to it. Split a cut of the revenue amongst the artists based on whose music is being played, you can keep the rest!

See what Kid Rock has to say on the matter:

Friction.tv has today announced a two-way syndication deal with ePolitix.com to share news feeds, political analysis and online video debating (will video debating ever take off?)

According to the press release, Friction.tv has over 600,000 monthly visitors, not bad given the state of British politics. This deal is a further attempt to spice up the halls of Westminster as they continue to be eclipsed by the remarkable mud-slinging we have seen in the race for the Whitehouse.

Andy West, co-founder and Head of Partnerships and Content at
Friction.tv commented: “Although Politics is among the most heavily
debated topics on the site, we find that much goes unnoticed simply
because people are often unaware on what’s going on in Westminster.
ePolitix has always been totally focused on reporting on the UK
political agenda and so its news feeds and analysis are a great
resource for our politically hungry audience.

The aformentioned mudslinging reached new levels (or is it lows) today after The New Yorker published what it called a satirical (seriously) cartoon of Obama in full muslim dress fist-bumping his “terrorist” wife.

Whilst I commend any effort to bring British politics to the masses, unless Friction.tv releases a video of Brown and Cameron engaged in a sadomasochistic Nazi orgy, politics here will remain in the shadow of its much bigger cousin across the pond. Not that it’s right but American media are just more willing to sensationalise any aspect of their political system however minor.

In an act of unimaginable mercy, Viacom has bowed to public pressure and scaled down their request for personal information from Google/YouTube.

Google can now provide anonymous but unique identifiers about their users rather than specific IP addresses.

Good news for privacy advocates and those that scrambled manically to delete any evidence that they once watched South Park in the office.

So as I mentioned earlier I wanted to touch on the recent iPhone 3G launch which many are dubbing iPocalypse. I’ve gone with iPhocalypse (see what I did there).

So Friday, the much hyped (rightly?) iPhone 3G hit UK shores and saw the inevitable queues outside O2 stores across the country. So far so good but remarkably Apple failed to deliver on the day, the problem was not so much stock (although they ran out within hours of stores opening) but the fact that those that did manage to get hold of them couldn’t activate them due to a glitch on the iPhone website. This has largely been fixed now and the iPhone 3G can now be seen attached to ears near you.

But what damage has this done to Apple and specifically the halo sitting above the iPhone?

Well the immediate affect is very little, the iPhone is still being hailed a revolution in communication and those that have one are reaching new levels of smugness. Those without (me included) having to deal with the inevitable
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jealousy. However longer term, Apple may feel the backlash. The new must-have gadget has launched in a much more competitive market than last year and competitors such as Samsung and HTC have much stronger products that can match and beat the iPhone in the functionality department. Already many consumers are questioning whether an iPhone is the right option for them and the bad publicity will do nothing to quell their concerns.

Apple has done the right thing by getting the problem fixed as quickly as possible and then addressing the PR fall-out, but competitors will now doubt see this as an opportunity to kick Apple while their down and ensure the way back up is as hard and as long as possible.

What a week for Apple and Google!

Fresh from Viacom-gate that put the search giant at the heart of a privacy storm, Google this week was lambasted by none other than the Daily Mail for planning to roll out its Street View service in the UK. This is the extension to the widely used Google Maps that allows users to view maps at street level. Google hasn’t admitted it plans to introduce Street View to the UK but vans with “Google” splashed across them carrying 20 external cameras driving around our major cities kind of gives the game away.

What’s interesting about this is the press reaction to Street View compared with when it launched Google Maps. That launch was vaulted as further online innovation – a step in the right direction, one that will benefit millions of people.

So what’s changed? Why hasn’t Google’s face blurring technology quelled any unrest around this forthcoming launch? Well for one the Viacom story has caused people to question just how anonymous they are online, soon our personal viewing habits (legal and illegal) will be picked over by a media giant. But also it shows how consumers are becoming much more aware of how far the Internet has come. Whereas a couple of years ago we welcomed any kind of unique service that further opened up the world from the comfort of our PCs, we have now become more intrigued by the motives behind online behemoths that have all but lost their “do no evil” charm.

And it’s no bad thing…

Whilst the lawyers shouldn’t get in the way of innovation, I do think it’s important that as consumers we engage in the discussions that services like Street View throw up. If nothing else it will make Google look at how it treats the personal data we freely hand over every day. More importantly however it allows us to have a direct influence on how the online world is shaped and how it affects our offline lives. The Internet and the www is becomming more and more integrated with every aspect of our lives and we shouldn’t rely on the Googles of the world to dictate how it changes the way we work, rest and play.

Whether Street View is good or bad (personally I have no problem with it), the debate will bring the best out of Google and will ultimately benefit the people that use it.

As for Apple…well I’ll get to the iPhone launch later!