SEO Gone Mad? News Sites Jumping On Tragic Amy Winehouse Death For Hits

Since this weekend’s news of singer Amy Winehouse’s tragic death, I have seen a lot of tribute articles praising the singer and her talents.

Stylist compiled a lookback at Amy through her short 27 year life in the shape of a photo gallery, and Vogue put together an article highlighting the fashion world’s tributes to the “style icon”.  Both publications featured Amy in their pages and on their sites countless times over the past few years, and have every relevance to her.

I was therefore shocked when I saw a friend tweet the Huffington Post article ‘Amy Winehouse’s Untimely Death Is a Wake Up Call For Small Business Owners’, with the words ‘N.B this is not a joke’. Even when I clicked on the article I thought it would lead to a mock blog post or maybe even some sort of spam. But no, it was a real article written in all seriousness by ‘award winning entrepreneur & marketer’  Tricia Fox. Disgusting.

The insensitive and pointless Huffington Post article

The article (which I am not going to link to as that would just help their cause) explains how small business owners need to take care of themselves if they are going to be successful, as they are the product. Fox writes, “Whether you are a popstar, plumber or a business consultant, the same rules still apply”.

As a freelance social media consultant, I am technically a small business owner and I have to say – this article added no value whatsoever. It is pretty damn obvious that if I want to be successful I shouldn’t be living a party lifestyle like Amy Winehouse. The article appears to blame the ‘brand’ of Amy Winehouse for her downfall and fails to mention that her much-documented and painful battle with alcohol and class A drugs had anything to do with it.

After reading some of the reactions on Twitter to this article, I came across other websites doing the same. Sam England details Mashable jumping on the bandwagon in his blog post ‘How tech blog Mashable used Amy Winehouse death as linkbait for pageviews’.

Mashable have apparently been losing traffic and has also been criticised lately for a lack of original content, but does that mean the ‘social media news and web tips’ hub has a right to suddenly cover entertainment news just because it’s trending on Twitter? I don’t think so.

Martin Belam tweeted: “What $news_SEO_term can teach us about $my_vertical” is very common formula.”

I understand that websites will want to write about big news stories and trending topics, but before they do they should really consider if it is relevant to their audience and website first.

Before any of you criticise me for doing just the same thing, I just wanted to make it clear I wrote this blog post out of disgust, not for hits.

Dominos Hackney Appalling Service But Will Social Media Compensate?

Yesterday during a social media training session I ran, the topic moved on to brands using social media for customer service. There are plenty of brands out there doing it, and doing it well. These include British Gas, BT, and Go To Meeting.

But what about super brands, with global presences – how good are they at customer service through social media? Well the opportunity arose yesterday for me to try it out.

After recently reading a post about Dominos Pizza by James Whatley, I was inspired to order some last night purely for the ease and simplicity of it. After watching my order status change from ‘Being prepared’ to ‘in Oven’ to ‘Delivery’  I was surprised when after an hour our pizza still hadn’t arrived. I am not going into detail but after 2 phone calls to the Mare Street branch of Dominos Pizza in Hackney, and 2 and a half hours (yep!) later – still no pizza. I have walked up to central Hackney in 15 minutes before. Surely on a scooter it takes about 5 minutes?

I want my pizza!

This is when I decided to take to my Twitter account to see what was going on. I noticed that in very small print at the bottom of the menu, Dominos has a London Twitter account.

In the meantime my boyfriend filled out an official complaint form online, which no doubt is sitting in a full inbox somewhere in the USA.

Finally after 3 hours our pizza arrived, with no apology and no complimentary Ben & Jerry’s (which I was really hoping for!). It was cold. I am definitely going to think twice before using them again.

Last night, two hours after my first tweet to Dominos which isn’t bad, I received a tweet asking for my details. Needless to say there was no clear apology here, and they inappropriately added kisses to the tweet.

I have sent them our address, but have not heard anything yet. I wonder what is going to happen? Will keep you posted.

*Update 23/7/11*

We have been offered the same order again, for free. Hmmm would have preferred a refund.

*Update 26/7/11*

Since writing this blog post, and it being circulated over Twitter, we received a call from the manager of the Hackney branch. He offered us the same order again, for free. I wasn’t 100% satisfied with this (as you can see in my comment below) as I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use Dominos again. However since then, we have received tweets from Dominos UK and Donimos London and an email from their Marketing team apologising and offering a full refund. Great to see a quick response from Dominos and they acted openly and honestly about their mistakes. I think they compensated!

 Photo courtesy of Twitter and Ben Sutherland/Flickr

Paperchase Vs the independent artist

Twitter went crazy this morning, and stationary giants Paperchase became a trending topic. Not just in the UK – but Worldwide.

Instantly, I thought it would be to do with Valentine’s Day. Perhaps a trendy, must-have card. Or an amazing in-store promotion.

Unfortunately, it turns out Paperchase had allegedly been naughty and plagiarised a small independent artist, by using very similar designs to hers on some bags.

She contacted them, and claims not to have had a response, so blogged about it.

This blog post was picked up by bestselling science fiction author Neil Gaiman, who has 1,462,152 followers on Twitter. As you can guess, before long people were RTing the message, expressing their shock and anger about the story.

Paperchase later issued a response, which would have never happened had it not been for Twitter. They said: “It is worrying that such an allegation can create such reaction”.

Econsultancy said:

“It’s clear that the world has changed. There is simply nowhere for companies to hide: do something wrong or embarrassing, and internet users will respond rapidly to expose the corporate scandal in a matter of minutes. “

This may be worrying for Paperchase, but similar campaigns on Twitter have brought information into the public which otherwise would never have been known, like Trafigura.

Powerful stuff.