More on Ryanair and social media reputation comes from this post by Joanna Higgins on bnet.com.

As well as her take on the whole blogging response from the world's rudest airline, she reports on the Kaizo Advocacy Index, latest version released for Winter. They review online reputation, and measure 20 brands across 4 sectors - food, airline, software and mobile - against how they fair in social media platforms. Lots of talk here of the influence of both Twitter and Facebook (although I'm pretty sceptical about both to be honest).

There's an overview presentation below:

Kaizo Advocacy Index Winter 2009

View more presentations from guest542bc4.

Useful reading before you buy a phone or travel on an airline. Or buy ERP software for millions (I wish our IS&T teams had read this....!)

This is similar to the work we do here at Rio Tinto on a monthly basis (service provided by the guys at Market Sentinel), and it's a useful weathervane on how the world is perceiving your communications efforts.

Twittering in a corporate world

Well, we've just dipped our well manicured corporate toes in the dimly lit pool of microblogging, by signing up for an account on Twitter.

I'm not yet sure of the business value of this. Yes, it's an interesting platform for p2p comms, and I've even heard it holds some value for those b2c.

However I wait to see whether we get much out of it. It's success depends on who else has signed up on the site, and our stakeholders - hedge fund managers, NGOs, business journos and the like - are not reknowned for their early adoption of social media. (OK, by now it's not really early adoption, but you know what I mean...)

If the chickens aren't in the yard, there's no point scattering the corn.

People looking for a job on our student or graduate placements schemes may very well come across us though, so that's a good thing. Mind you, it's a difficult thing trying not to come across as "getting on down with the cool kids". That's not really a core brand value for a mining company such as ours, trust me.

We'll see how we go over the next few months. And who knows, getting our feet wet may well prove to have some payback. (Probably more so than stretching this particular metaphor).

Blog searching terms

Unfortunately, spam bloggers have started picking up copy either from our website or from emailed press releases and using it in the padding text on their blogs, to drive traffic.

How annoying is that!

Thankfully Technorati and Google blog search tend to drop the sploggers pretty quickly, but it's started to skew our analytics and metrics here at work.

What to do about a splog? One thing you can do is report. The site Fight Splog has a number of other alternatives, including reporting them to Google AdSense, and reporting to StopSplog.com, a listing service.

Interestingly, the US government is taking the issue of spam seriously. They're holding a Spam Summit in July 2007, however as details seem to be sketchy I'm not exactly holding my breath on this one.

Thankfully for us, many of the Rio Tinto splogs seems to have died a death, so we're lucky in not having to handle this as a significant ongoing issue. Who knows why? Maybe the traffic directed to them on the back of relevant key words from our site wasn't good enough, maybe they got deleted and have started randomly picking up copy from other people's sites. I think it may havebeen triggered by a surge in our search engine traffic around take over rumours a while back.

I'm just glad it's as much of an issue for us at the moment, though no doubt it'll happen again.

May you live in interesting times

Interesting times for us at the moment. Lots of rumour and analyst suggestions (they're gambling that we may be bought by another large mining company, BHP Billiton, or even by private equity) over the past week have led to a lots of movement in our share price.

Most interesting was the blog coverage. Financial and investment blogs seem to be breeding like rabbits, but many of them simply cut and paste the stories they read elsewhere (or RSS feed them... ) , unfortunately often without thinking how accurate the source story might be.
From Technorati - posts that contain "Rio Tinto" per day for the last 30 days...



Popular amongst the "cut and pasters" seems to be press releases from Reuters and Bloomberg. Understandable, as they are probably bit better thought through than many others, but I can't really see the point. I don't see the blogger adding any value, and there is no personal opinion or voice to the stories.

Trade shows

Just back from Internet World 2007 in Earl's Court. There are days I wonder why I bother with these events - full of sales people who seem to be more interested in looking at your name badge (busy working out the "company name x job title = budgetary control = purchase /15% = my personal commission [optional licking of lips and rubbing of hands]" equation).

Interesting to see some of our existing suppliers there, and worrying to see so little technical innovation. More worrying than any of that though was the truly horrible sight of consultants, agencies and vendors trying to talk up the hype around web 2.0. Seriously, look... over there, on the horizon - those sails over there... that's the ship leaving port. Some of the seminars were pretty relevant, giving guidance to webmasters on how to incorporate some of the social stuff, how to build trust etc. However some of the tat on offer was truly shocking (pretty much anything with "next generation" or "2.0" in the title kinda missed the boat *points at horizon again*).

I'm not sure what I was most uncomfortable with - that digital professionals aren't familiar with the basics of this stuff yet (and can kinda see through all the hype), or that companies are still lazily bandwagonning (see "portals" in about 1999) and looking at social networking content as almost a replacement for innovation and new ideas. I would have thought we'd moved on a lot and people would want to see real world examples for UGC and ways to use online social networks, other than trying to surreptitiously "blog-flog" the latest gadget/pizza/car.

YouTube

We've just launched our new channel on YouTube. We've uploaded a whole load of our corporate videos here, including a lot around our work in local communities.



It looks like we're the first company in the FTSE100 to have a channel on YouTube. At first glance it might seem a bit odd - after all, why on earth would a large corporate go and get a channel on a website that's seems to be populated by 14 year olds mucking around with camera phones?

If you dig around the site, more and more issues-based content (videos, opinion pieces and the like) is being uploaded, and it's this that's of interest to us. Increasingly people with opinions about mining are putting content up and tagging it - and now so are we. One of the important ways of engaging stakeholders is to also allow them to see our point of view. They can choose to disagree with us if they like, but at least YouTube gives us the opportunity to present our position.