Parting the dark clouds that have surrounded the British banking sector since the beginning of this recession is not an easy thing for those trying to market them.
Cutting through the mistrust that surrounds them requires personal relationships with customers, something that many of the bigger banks had lost interest in.
Not an easy job, but one that UK internet and telephone bank First Direct is trying to tackle head-on. The bank, a subsidiary of HSBC, has no branches yet consistently proves a consumer favourite.
You may well have noticed this story over the past couple of weeks. It is about one web developer’s battle with Thomson Holidays for compensation following a disastrous holiday in Tunisia with the tour operator.
Thomson eventually capitulated after his blog gained higher search rankings for the keyword ‘Thomson Tunisia’ than their own site. This type of online consumer activism was recently mirrored in the US by Dave Carroll, who had his prized guitar damaged by United Airlines. The Canadian musician decided to post a series of YouTube protest songs until the airline properly compensated. They did, but not before his high profile stunt caused the airline’s value to plummet by ten per cent.
These two high profile episodes bring about an important question – how can brands protect themselves from the growing trend of online foot stamping? Read more →
In an extremely audacious move Squidoo has launched a new service called Brands in Public which could cause quite a few headaches for marketing departments. Squidoo plans to create hub pages about lots of brands and then populate those pages with scraped content such as blog posts, tweets, Google News, Yahoo News, Google Trends, forum posts and a whole host of other content (see example here).
Once these pages have been created Squidoo is going to allow brands to pay $400 per month for the right to add comments on them. Read more →
RT @TheDrum: Provocative Powwownow London Underground campaign evokes feminist response from commuters http://t.co/9wFAqSBA
