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BA, YouTube, TripAdvisor and Sir Tom Stoppard
January is almost over but if you’re still suffering from the winter blues, why not take five, grab a cuppa and catch up on the latest goings-on online this week with the Siren Communications social media round up…
British Airways joined Google’s social networking site, Google+ this week. The airline is the latest brand to launch a profile joining O2, the Daily Mail Online and hotel group Mr and Mrs Smith. The social media offering is slowly growing in popularity with just over 90 million users.
Online travel review forum TripAdvisor has launched a new ‘Management Dashboard’ analytics tool designed to help hotels and accommodation providers measure their performance against competitors. The TripAdvisor Management Dashboard will be free to use for all registered users.
One hour of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every second – that’s a decade of video every single day – just seven years after it was created. Visitors to the site spend around 15 minutes a day watching footage and there are 4 billion page viewers a day proving it as a key online and social media tool for businesses across the globe.
Fast food giant McDonalds was also under fire this week after the brand’s creation of the #McDStories hashtag turned sour. Rather than tweeting positive stories about the burger chain, Twitter users used the opportunity to share their McDonald’s horror stories with the rest of the world including food poisoning and fingernails found in burgers.
An Indonesian man has been arrested for saying that god is not real on Facebook. Alexander Aan, 31, was attacked by an angry mob and may now lose his job as a civil servant because of the posting as Atheism is illegal in Indonesia.
And finally, British treasure and playwright Sir Tom Stoppard said this week that he does not have ‘a computer, nor a Twitter machine’ – breath of fresh air or behind the times? You decide!
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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