ING Direct: the art of breaking bad news

The Bank of England raised the base rate from 4.75% to 5%. ING Direct decided not to follow this increase for their saving rate. As an ING Direct customer, I was of course disappointed... until I received this email:

"At ING Direct we want to offer all our customers a consistently good rate. On this occasion this means we have made the decision to maintain our ING Direct Savings Account interest rate at 4.75% AER*.

While some people may be willing to follow headline-grabbing rates, we know from talking to our customers that the majority prefer their savings to be earning consistently and want to relax knowing they don't have to constantly check Best Buy tables. "

I feel more relaxed now as I know I will be earning less but consistently so. Thank you ING.

Pontiac Motoratilife in Second Life

A cryptic title to link to the Pontiac Motoratilife blog covering the company's activities in Second Life. Jimmy Kimmel, car races and mashup DJs. Nice program.

Tags: second life, pontiac, motoratilife

Every Bond Movie Trailers

Watch trailers from every Bond movies. Courtesy of Kevin Kelly.

French more active European bloggers according to Forrester

• 3% of online Europeans blog.
• France, Italy and Spain combined = 57% of European bloggers. Germany is only 13%.
• France leads the pack with one million active bloggers (don't know how they define "active blogger").

Could not find the original survey online. Anyone?

Article in French on Journal du Net.

Be a winner, not a sinner!

This post may only appeal to Londoners who pass by Oxford Circus on their way to work or shop. One man has been a stalwart of the West-End landscape for nearly a decade: he has a megaphone and relentlessly preaches about Jesus with his famous catchphrase: "Be a winner, not a sinner" to the amusement and irritation of anyone at hearing distance. B3ta.com, a satirical online community is running an interview with London’s most famous street-preacher. While I will keep my non-beliefs to myself, I am encouraging you to read this excellent interview to discover the man behind the apparent madness. Thumbs up for B3ta.com and Phil: they both try to make the world a better place. One by making us laugh and the other by making us think.

UK's fourth largest religion, Jedi Knights demands UN recognition

In the 2001 UK Census 390,000 people listed their religion as Jedi Knight making it the fourth biggest belief in the country. Now they are delivering a protest letter to the UN for official recognition. May the force be with them.

New bus lanes in Manchester

Who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Viral here.

Blogging in Europe: Brits least aware, France rocks, blogs more trusted than television.

Research by Ipsos Mori found that only 50% of UK residents have heard of blogs compared to 90% in France, 58% in Italy, 55% in Germany and 51% in Spain. Other findings from the research:

• 30% polled consider newspaper most trusted media, 24% favoured blog, 17% television and 14% email marketing.
• 52% said they are more likely to buy a product if they have read a positive review online.
• 34% said they opted-out of buying a product because of negative reviews online.

Press release here. Article here. First read in PR Week, 10th of November.

Tags: blogs, europe

Euroblog 2007 Survey

If you are a Public Relations or Communications practitioner and working in Europe, please take part in this survey and share your opinion on the impact of weblogs and social software on public relations and communication management. All participants have the opportunity to register for a free summary of the results at the end of the survey. Survey link.

Social bookmarking services review

Article on Wired. Highest rating went to ma.gnolia (well deserved). Via Micro-Persuasion.

Tags: social bookmarking

I want a winepod for Christmas

A winepod is a state-of-the-art fermentation, pressing, and ageing personal wine making unit. It is designed like a cocoon, packed with interactive features (you can control temperature, post videos, connect with other winepod users...) and it holds 57 litres of wine (average consumption in UK is about 12 litres - 49 liters for France - so you and your friends won't run out.. of good things to say about the Winepod).

The Dark Side of Social Media

Rohit Bhargava comments on the risks for consumers to be turned off from blogs, who supposed to be genuine voices but who are increasingly tainted by "flogs" and "astroturfing". His 5 lessons:
- Be as transparent as you can
- Don't be affraid to admit you are marketing,
- Understand who your detractors are and assume they will always hate you
- Make sure you have supporters that will fight for you
- Listen, participate and respond

Add social bar on blogger.com

VideoWrap has written a nice piece of code to insert into your Blogger.com template to allow your readers to automatically bookmark to Digg, Del.icio.us, ReddIt, Slashdot, Furl, Newsvine and Yahoo. I am trying it on this blog.

The nail that stands out will be hammered down

The Internet Society of China has recommended to the government that bloggers be required to use their real names when they register blogs. CNN Technology.

Teenagers, MySpace, Google: the tale of an imperfect web

Dr. Sam Vaknin writes on how Google, MySpace, Blogspot and Wikipedia feed on each other and distort natural positioning in search engines. For example if website A has 700 incoming links from 700 different websites and website B has 700 incoming links, all of them from various pages on MySpace, website B will be ranked higher in Google's search results.

He concludes that since MySpace users are predominantly teenagers, they are the ones who control which websites feature in Google's first results, therefore control the web.

Via Steve Rubel

Tags: google, seo, wikipedia, myspace, blogspot

South Korea invents the "wifelogger"

Korean housewives are keen on blogging. They are known as "wifeloggers", earning fame and apparently US$2,000 monthly on average from their online diaries . See article on Channel News Asia (Singapore). Interesting facts about South Korea (SK):

• 2/3rd of SK's homemakers are online
• 300,000 are active bloggers
  
• Internet users in SK prefer pictures over text and videos over still photographs
• They spend an average of 47 hours online every month, highest after Israelis and Finns.
  

Tags: asia, south korea, blogs

Nissan won defamation lawsuit against French blogger

Stephanie Gonier is an ex-Nissan executive. She took parental leave and was unhappy about how she was treated when she came back. She started a blog where she recorded her story including scans of her correspondence with the company, culminating to her dismissal. Nissan took the matter to court. While the tribunal acknowledged her right to self-expression, she published personal data about her colleagues, violating their right to privacy and was accused of defamation.

Via Liberation (in French)

Tags: nissan, blogger, france

Advertising and the end of the world

Fantastic documentary from Sut Jhally that was shown in an elective at school. A video preview can be found on Youtube as well as on the Media Education Foundation website.The documentary’s main points can be found here .

Tags: advertising, jhally

Wal-marting across America

Business Week runs a feature on “fake blog” Wal-marting across America. A few years ago, many A-List bloggers woke-up up the PR world to the blogosphere with calls for transparency and genuine engagement. I learned a lot from them. Today, most comments on this story revolve around disclosing your relationships with your clients, or any parties central to the topic of your blog, disclosing being paid for blogging or sponsorship as well as lack of response from interested parties. I don’t have enough information to comment and I don’t want to (my employer is a competitor to Edelman so it will be misinterpreted) but surely we should know better by now?

Tags: wal-mart, blogosphere

Web overtakes newspapers in Europe

According to Jupiter Research, Europeans spend four hours per week online on average compared to three hours reading newspapers and magazines. France, which has the highest rate of broadband access, has the highest average number of hours spent online per week.

I tried to locate the research paper, an abstract or even the original news release on Jupiter's website but I was overwhelmed by cluttered information, poor usability and slow response time.

via Brand Republic

Tags: jupiter, media_consumption, media, europe