Happy Foursquare Day 2012

It's April 16, 2012 if you are a Foursquare user, you might be aware of today is Foursquare day! It's a bit geeky as the square of four is sixteen hence April 16 was set as Foursquare Day.

There are a lot of Foursquare meet up around the world and last year Foursquare celebrate it with a Foursquare Day badge. This year will be the same, if you check in via the app you will get Foursquare Day 2012 badge.

In addition, if you are also a Untappd user (social beer drinking app), make sure you check in a brew with the location check in via Foursquare, you will see a surprise from your badge collection.

Happy #4sqDay !

Crisis Management: Social Media can save or destroy your brand

On a beautiful Easter Monday morning, I was not able to accessing Internet via my mobile nor making any calls due to a service outage, which I found out later on during the day.

Once I suspect the problem is on the carrier side, immediately I hop on my carrier's (SmarTone HK) web portal and Social Media Channels and hope to dig up some info about what's going on. Unfortunately I was not able to find anything regarding on the service status, instead I got posts about their promotions which was posted before the Easter holiday.

While I was surfing the net and seeking for answers, I saw a lot of postings from various Social Media channels that subscribers were complaining and it just gone viral. Throughout the day there seems to be no response from carrier's end on their official Social Media Channels (Facebook and Twitter)

In this digital age, computers, Internet and Social Media already become part of our life. If a person would like to know more about a specific brand they will go online and search for the brand. Brand's portal used to be the communication channel to customer but that's old schooled and a one way communications.

With the raise of Social Media, digital communications become more personal and instead of a one way communications, it's now a dialog (both ways). People will express their opinion or engage brand via the brand's Social Media profile. In another hand Brand can also utilize these channels to communicate or made announcement via their Social Media profile or identity.

Using SmarTone service outage as an example, the Brand itself should had made the announcement on their Social Media Profile and let their subscribers knows that the service was experiencing outage and keep updating the situation so subscribers have an idea how things are. Instead the Brand choose not to do anything and hence angry subscribers were complaining online via Social Media, which easily gone viral and hence leave a very bad reputation of the Brand.

Social Media can easily be a life saver for Crisis Management, Brands should always monitor their Brand existence online so the Brand can be aware of any negative comments or feedback and take immediate and proper actions.

In addition Brand should also take time to reply comments and communicate with their audience via each Social Media channel hence audience feels they are being hear by the Brand.

Social Media is a double edged sword which can benefit Brands if you utilize it on the right way, mean while it can also act as a viral platform that hurts your Brand BIG time if you didn't handle it well. Proceed with caution!

SmarTone announced their press release on Facebook
not till 24 hrs after the outage, why not earlier?  

The Press Release was not even on @SmarTone_HK twitter page 

Never just copy code out from any site off on the Internet

Back in the days when you are in College, remember the professor are always able to pull out students whom are copying work from each other? You may wonder how the professor do it. The answer is simple, coz there are always trails or indication of copycat. People whom copy work from each other will always result having the same / similar mistake.

Normally I do not pay too much attention to my blog analytics, I only look into certain things here and there. Recently Google Analytics had rolled out new social report and hence from my Dashboard I'm able to see a Social Action panel, which look something like below.

At first I was a bit surprise, how comes there are some Arabic Characters from my Social Action and I had to admit I didn't pay any attention to this due to busy schedule. Instead of looking into things I just went straight to my Analytics Reports to observe some general traffic info.

Earlier today I finally got sometime and would like to update some settings and clean up some code from my blog, then I start digging up abnormal stats within my analytics data.

When I look deeper into the Social Report from Google Analytics I found out a funky URL that's not even within my domain. That's how I found out someone in somewhere is doing something they should not be doing. Copying codes directly from one site to theirs without updating some important information.

The next thing I did was to look up this link and take a look at this site. It links to an article page of an Egyptian Wheel Weekly News site, within the article I see something very familiar and that's the addthis sharing widget that I had on my blog.

A quick peek into the coding and I found out something very very interesting.

Code Snippets from the other site

Above is a code snippets of AddThis Sharing buttons configuration from that site. First few lines basically declares which social sharing buttons to be displayed and the line begin with var addthis_config is where the addthis configuration being set. 

AddThis has a feature that allows user to hook up the service with Google Analytics, which can be very useful, the funky part from the above snippets is where the number begins with "UA-". That number is an unique ID for a Profile under Google Analytics account and that number look very very familiar. 

A quick comparison to my blog's and I found out someone had been copying code from my blog. 

Another quick peek to this site Google Analytics declaration code, I am even more sure some programmers simply snag the code out from my blog and didn't bother to change some important information, the Google Analytics ID that hooks up to AddThis. 

Comparing the Google Analytics ID from above, I know something went wrong

The Problem: Since my Google Analytics ID was hooked up to another site's Addthis code, that means all addthis social data from the other site is now ported to my Google Analytics traffic data and hence my data is tempered 

In another hand, the other party also missing a lot of their social data and will find out their Google Analytics data did not match up with their AddThis analytics data. 

Once I found out the above I immediately fire off an email to their general info@ email and hopefully someone will look into the problem and patch it up. 

Personally am not against anyone copying code from my blog (provided I did some customization on it),  however if you do copy it, ensure you change the code to proper values instead of leaving a mess like this. One interesting I found out, there are always trail to find out someone is copying things from one another. What I hope is this is the only sole case and hopefully it will not happen to anyone anymore!