Japan Quake, Tsunami and PR Disasters

The massive quake that shook Japan, along with the tsunami it generated, and the potential nuclear meltdown, has both devastated a significant portion of Land of the Rising Sun and worried neighbors who sit in the Pacific Ring of Fire. While the whole situation clearly reveals the mortality of the whole human race, not everyone seems to describe it this way. There are cases when companies, well-known or obscure embrace the spotlight for wrong reasons.

Singapore’s MediaCorp made a sales push for advertisers during its extended coverage of the Japan earthquake, barely two hours after the initial tremor was recorded.

“Book your spots in the Weekday Evening News Bundle as the channel brings viewers comprehensive coverage reports on the disaster with extended versions of news bulletins tonight.”

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How To Breakup With Twitter Followers

Breaking up is hard to do? Maybe not in Twitter where followers of an account can easily remove themselves from a boring, intrusive or irrelevant accounts they follow. An Exact Target study shows the reasons how and why Twitter followers start abandoning our tweets.

More than half of Twitter users (52%) say that once content becomes repetitive or boring, it’s time to unfollow a brand, according to a report from Exact Target and CoTweet. Another popular reason (41%) for unfollowing an account is to unclog a crowded stream of tweets. While this reason makes sense — it’s hard to follow a steady stream of tweets — frequency of Twitter updates may also play a part in such disconnection effort. When someone spends the whole day updating his/her account with link dumps, conversation with followers or simply arbitrary update nobody seems to be interested, he/she is a good candidate to unfollow.

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11 Things I Hate About Twitter

1. People sending direct message (DM) after I follow them
After I follow someone, I immediately get this direct message thanking me for following him or her. I don’t think it’s necessary but anyway you’re welcome. But hey, there’s more. They could also say “Join my network at Facebook, YouTube or BlogCatalog”. Just because I followed you in Twitter means I am interested in reading your Facebook feeds. I don’t need to be your friend and follow your updates. I think everyone knows how to request to be your contact in Facebook if I want to and when I want to.

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Twitter Notification Suggestion: Add Tweet Info

If you’re a Twitter user, you should be getting a notification whenever someone follows you (unless you remove this feature in its notifications settings page). To some this email message is just an additional headache adding to the heaps of emails to reply to. But to others, it’s a way to help maintain sanity in their accounts, especially in light of the increased spam levels bombarding this microblogging platform.

Currently, the current format displays basic account information such as number of followers, following how many and number of Twitter updates. While I find this helpful I think it’s not enough to help me tag those garbage accounts that only spread spam messages, add no value and deserve outright blocking. I admit some followers are added without me getting any notifications but I assume those are spammy ones that gets flushed out anyway.

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Twitterati Trouble: 13 Twitter Updates Gone Bad

Twitter is popular. Twitter is everywhere. You can tell the world what you’re up to but a careless unsuspecting tweet could spell trouble.

Just check out the following mishaps:

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1. How to tweet yourself out of a job
   Cisco offered someone a job, and this made him think (and tweet) on weighing a fatty paycheck against commuting to San Jose and hating work.
2. Ketchum employee visiting Fedex in Memphis tweets he’ll die if he lives there
   A Fedex employee found the tweet, copied the management and the chain of command at Ketchum.
3. NBA Player becomes Twitter addict
   CV31, Milwaukee Bucks’ Charlie Villanueva gets into trouble for tweeting in a halftime break. Who can blame him? Twenty four minutes later, the Bucks beat the Boston Celtics. OK, he’ll suspend those halftime tweets.