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 Lesson #63: Treat your customers like thieves and you will get, in most cases, a negative reaction Poor EA Games, not content with creating the biggest games franchise of all time with The Sims and making millions in the process they decide that their bulging wallets just weren't bulging enough. They have recently released their latest "must-have" game, Spore, with a new DRM system that means people that buy the game can only install it three times before the game locks and it can't be used. Wait it gets better... ...now, this could be a brilliant ploy to sell more games but then a glitch with EA's registration system means gamers were struggling to authorise their copy of Spore and ended up using up their three installations and locking the game. The decision by EA games to treat all their (loyal) fans as software pirates has resulted in a flurry of negative reviews and uproar amongst the gaming community. In one fell swoop, EA has turned the most eagerly anticipated game of 2008 into one of the worst. Can I suggest next time EA skip the formalities of online registration and simply take fingerprints and DNA swabs at point-of-sale.

Just read the latest post in Influential Marketing in amazement! Part of Visa's sponsorship at the Olympics includes payment exclusivity at the games' venues. I have recently seen an increase in business decisions being made without any consideration for how it affects the customer experience. This is by no means a new trend! National Rail introducing voice recognition to its train information hotline a couple of years ago is another example of how businesses forgo the experience of their customers and lose focus on the bigger picture. In this case, they may save some money on phone operators but won't make anything if people stop calling! Twitter is fast going down the same path. First stopping the SMS service to UK customers and the limiting the number of people you can follow. Sure, Twitter may stop haemorrhaging money for a week or so but it means nothing if people stop using it all together. No matter how short-term a business decision is, if it affects customers then the ill-will created will last a lifetime.

Just come across HowSociable? - a cracking web tool that allows you to easily measure your brand visibility. Hat tip to Paul Stallard.

Following my post on the demise of the Airline industry, the Guardian has reported on the new "Live" advertising campaign launched by British Airways. The tagline is "Terminal 5 is working" - you know there are problems when your key message to your customers is our product/service ain't broke. But, I'll admit they have been quite clever by using the advertising as a customer information channel to communicate general statistics about the terminal in real-time such as flight punctuality, baggage arrival times etc. A nice idea and should go some way to heal the damage caused by the disastrous opening. The only potential issue however is it's all very well saying things are 100% but it only takes on delayed flight to put a sour taste in the mouth of your customers. And, the very last thing you need after spending the night on the cold floor at arrivals is an advert saying all's well in the world and we have the stats to prove it.

I recently had to get a new passport so took a trip down to the post office with applications in hand and was promptly turned away. Why? I was smiling in my photograph. Whilst I laughed at the situation at the time it struck me later how the airline industry and those connected with it have systematically taken every aspect of joy out of air-travel - even down to the humble passport photo. Ever since American Airlines saved $40,000 a year by removing a single olive from every in-flight salad back in 1987 the airlines have been on a course of reducing costs and maximising profits even at the expense of their image and reputation. The commoditisation of the industry spawned budget flying with the likes of Ryanair of Easyjet and the "frills" of air-travel have ever since been taken away from travellers. This is all very well when we're paying a tenner to get halfway around the world but as oil and gas prices continue to rise the air fares go up and the aforementioned image and reputation comes back into play. From the Terminal Five fiasco to the recent Quantas crash, airlines are struggling to manage their reputation and image. They're ...

The AmIHotorNot of brands, Superbrands, has today announced its top brands in the UK and Google has knocked Microsoft off of top spot. Sony is the other tech brand to edge into the top 10 as the sector dominated the overall list. It will be interesting to see how the growing privacy debate affects the public's affection for the search engine over the next 12 months! But for now they're sitting pretty... The top 10 looks like this... 1. Google 2. Microsoft 3. Mercedes-Benz 4. BBC 5. British Airways 6. Royal Doulton 7. BMW 8. Bosch 9. Nike 10. Sony

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 <br/><!--<br/> /* Style Definitions */<br/> p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal<br/> {mso-style-parent:"";<br/> margin:0cm;<br/> margin-bottom:.0001pt;<br/> mso-pagination:widow-orphan;<br/> font-size:12.0pt;<br/> font-family:"Times New Roman";<br/> mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}<br/>@page Section1<br/> {size:612.0pt 792.0pt;<br/> margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt;<br/> mso-header-margin:36.0pt;<br/> mso-footer-margin:36.0pt;<br/> mso-paper-source:0;}<br/>div.Section1<br/> {page:Section1;}<br/>--> jealousy. However longer term, Apple may feel the backlash. The ...

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 ...