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Glastonbury for geeks, Fifty Shades, and BA baggage problems
This week sees tech and social media enthusiasts challenging the Hunter wellies brigade for their festival crown. Dubbed ‘Glastonbury for Geeks’, Europe’s biggest technology festival is hosting events around the clock, including talks on social media, creating ideas for new apps and entrepreneurship in the online world. Although not the typically muddy festival that we Brits are used to, over 10,000 festival goers are expected to attend with many camping out for the whole five days.
Fifty Shades of Grey has been grabbing column inches again this week after the cast of the upcoming blockbuster movie was announced by author E.L James on twitter. Whilst many fans (including the actors’ parents) took to social media to express their delight at the line-up, some fans shared a few choice words of disappointment via twitter. And, more than that, over 45,000 people found the time to sign an online petition protesting against the film’s casting.
Struggling to find that Tweet you know you saw a few months back? An analytics company in the U.S. has the answer. Topsy.com has indexed Twitter’s complete archive of public tweets all the way back to 2006, making searching for that illusive post a much less arduous task!
We all know social media is now a key platform for customer services – users of social platforms are more than happy to raise concerns, make a complaint and even, sometimes, say something nice about a brand. This week, it was taken to a whole new level. A disgruntled customer, fed up with how British Airways was handling an issue of a lost bag, decided to utilise Twitter’s sponsored tweet – the customer paid to have his tweet promoted. The message, which read "Don’t fly @BritishAirways. Their customer service is horrendous" was bought in order to reach a wider audience. The tweet is given higher prominence in the Twitter feed of the relevant company but also acts as a normal message and can be retweeted by others. British Airways apologised to the customer; but once again this shows the need for larger corporations (and smaller brands of course) to monitor social media and ensure customer services are ready to react, in the right way, at any time of day.
And finally, it seems the famous ‘Facebook blue’ will be making its way on to the hands of nail varnish fans across California…
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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