Wow, it’s July already! Here’s what’s interesting in today’s feeds…
As Brittany reported over the weekend, Google blogger Lauren Turner made a faux pas, when she added her personal opinions to an official Google blog post. After a weekend blogstorm (that’s two weekends in a row we’ve had one), Turner posted a clarification (although no apology)…
Well, I’ve learned a few things since I posted on Friday. For one thing, even though this is a new blog, we have readers! That’s a good thing. Not so good is that some readers thought the opinion I expressed about the movie Sicko was actually Google’s opinion. It’s easy to understand why it might have seemed that way, because after all, this is a corporate blog. So that was my mistake — I understand why it caused some confusion.
With a nation-wide Federal election coming up this year, we thought we’d track Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s online reputation and find out what’s being said about him online.
We tracked online references of both Howard and the opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, over a three week period, and the results are not looking so good for the PM.
Though most of online references come from news sites, and are mostly neutral, the more freely expressive bloggers sometimes had quite nasty things to say about John Howard, and there were not many on his side at all.
Rudd, on the other hand, though he had his fair share of nasty comments, actually had more backers than critics. This is a particularly positive response for Australia, where a common attitude, particularly from the younger generations, towards politicians is fairly negative (there were, in fact, quite a few bloggers with that opinion).
With 16 months until the 2008 Presidential election, we thought it would be interesting to conduct a study of the search engine reputation of current candidates. We examined the first 20 results on Google and Yahoo for the ten Republicans and eight Democrats to see who had the best and worst online reputation.
The results were startling, with only three candidates fully in control of their search engine reputation. Who were they? How did Hillary and Barack fair?
I won’t spoil the surprise, so head over to the 2008 Presidential Election Candidate Reputation Study for the breakdown.
One of the hottest marketing trends of late is to get your customers to create your next ad campaign for you. It worked for Doritos and their Super Bowl ad contest, but sometimes it can backfire, as Chevy can attest to.
Malibu Caribbean Rum is the latest big brand to get its reputation slightly singed when their YouTube video contest backfired. Malibu asked for video entries, offered a $25k prize and even had Efren Ramirez of “Napoleon Dynamite” help with the judging.
Unfortunately, when the winner was declared, some entrants cried fowl, suggesting that contest was rigged.
It seems like its been planned for a best part of a decade but today finally saw Tony Blair hand over the keys to Ten Downing Street to Gordon Brown. This of course gives us the perfect opportunity to have a quick look into how well Brown and his spin doctors are getting on in the social media space.
Youtube – not surprisingly there are plenty of clips of the new PM delivering speeches on the video sharing site. Most tend to be straight forward footage of Gordon delivering the oratory, but it’s the comments where it gets nasty. If you think some of the digg comments can get mean its worth seeing the bile spilled on this video though there does seem to be a few supporters of GB helping fight his corner. Still better to let the discussion take place; even if it isn’t entirely flattering. The nose picking clip is a little cringe-worthy though. 2/5
If you’re reading this post on Monday morning, boy did you miss a flare-up over the weekend. I don’t even know where to begin!
The summary is something like this. Some well known bloggers provided quotes for Microsoft ads run by Federated Media. Valleywag jumped on the opportunity to question the ethics of said bloggers. Some bloggers, such as Om Malik, apologized, while others stood their ground. Federated Media’s John Battelle apparently tried to explain his actions and apologize, which annoyed the heck out of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.
There’s so much more to this story, but it’s Sunday evening and, well, it would take a huge post to summarize everything. I’ve not read every detail, but here’s what I’m thinking.
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