Why national anthems require no cheerleader

I’ve never been a fan of this modern trend of anthems being sung by an official singer at sporting events. They always seem to sound so much better when the crowd belt it out in unison. As if to emphasise this point compare this shambles performed at the recent France v South Africa game with the rousing rendition of the Welsh anthem from a few years ago.

No real comparison is there? Maybe one day the people that organise these events will see sense and return things to how they should be.

Tags: anthem, rugby, singing, South Africa

Banks and ID theft

I’ve recently switched bank accounts to Alliance & Leicester and activated my card today. After it was activated the call operator tried to sell me ID theft insurance.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony of someone who it is impossible for me to verify was actually from Alliance & Leicester, and who had just secured a wide range of my personal information in order to activate my card, was now trying to sell me insurance against someone stealing my ID.

Far be it from me to advocate phishing or ID theft in anyway, but it would seem much easier to send out fake letters with a fake telephone line than it would be to set up a fake website.

At least with a website you can judge fairly accurately that the site you’re on is in fact an official one. How can you do the same with a telephone number?

Tags: banks, id theft, phishing, security

Frustrating experience with my Everton fan page

A few years ago I setup an Everton fan page on Facebook as there was no official page at that time. It proved really popular with fans and quickly grew to 20,000+ followers.

Recently Facebook have been cracking down on pages and as mine was not an official Everton authorized page my publishing rights were revoked. Finding out how to contest this decision was an incredibly difficult job, but that’s probably for another blog.

What has amazed me however was the response from Everton when this issue was put to them to see if they could help out.

Instead of seeing the potential for communicating with this large list of fans the club instead started threatening legal action for using things like the club logo and daring to use the clubs own Facebook application on the page. The only way they would help is if the page was changed to something not mentioning Everton at all.

Talk about biting your nose off to spite your face. Such a shame as football clubs are such a natural audience for social media as fans are so willing to do an awful lot of work on the clubs behalf. Sadly few clubs seem willing or able to let go of control and leverage this enormously powerful resource. A message to the clubs should surely be that the brain power of these supporters is just as important, if not more so, than the money you can extract from them.

Tags: everton, Facebook, fan pages, social media

Social media measuring

I went to a ‘measurement camp’ last week with the aim of finding out more about how social media activity can be measured. Unfortunately it didn’t really shed much light on things.

Do you go after the revenue approach to measurement, in which case it almost inevitably means last click wins? Do you look for a more PR type measurement? I’m fairly sure that headline numbers such as that of Twitter followers is useless, but what else is there?

What do people use to measure the effectiveness of their social media work?

Tags: measuring, social media