January, 2009

I occasionally share Great Quotes on my blog and got a link from John Howarth this week to a set of great quotes and images from Dean Shareski (@shareski)

Check ‘em out

I periodically review what search terms bring people to my blog and it continues to surprise me that a search for I’m A PC Stickers is pretty high up the list. I can only conclude people are looking for advice on ways to remove these things from their PC :)

Seriously…for years I have said that stickers are one of the most effective and viral social objects so if you are looking for an I’m A PC sticker leave your name here in the comments. I’m trying to see if there really is demand for these things and if so, whether I can help get them dropped from helicopters or something similar.

Oh and if you’re in London this Monday night (Feb 2nd) I may have a few of these things to hand out at The Burlington Arms

That’s right, there will be no beta 2 for Windows 7 – it’ll go direct from here to Release Candidate (RC). As Joe Wilcox noted, our Windows 7 chief Steven Sinofsky posted this on the Engineering Windows 7 blog last night

The next milestone for the development of Windows 7 is the Release Candidate or 'RC'. Historically the Release Candidate has signalled 'we're pretty close and we want people to start testing the release, especially because all the features are done.' As we have said before, with Windows 7 we chose a slightly different approach which we were clear up front about and are all now experiencing together and out in the open

For those not used to all this alpha, beta, RC jargon lets just cut to the chase. Windows 7 even in beta 1 form is looking pretty solid so the leap direct to RC means we’re closing in quickly on RTM. Oh….that means Release to Manufacture and signals a large party in Redmond….and elsewhere :) …and then on to GA (General Availability) which means you can go to a shop and buy a PC with Windows 7 on.

Wallace and Gromit had the treatment by Harvey Nicks and now Morph is having a makeover courtesy of Esquire magazine. Tony Hart would be proud…RIP.

Is the new domain squatting technique to grab a well known brand name and wait for them to come offering cash to give it up? Well, that’s a theory I wanted to look in to after reading Erik J. Heels notes that 93 of the top 100 global brands aren’t in control of their brand names on Twitter

I decided to do some investigating using the UK Superbands list. I picked out the Top 50, worked on the most likely version of their name on Twitter (using the current brand domain name such as TheAA.com for AA).

The result is below and I think we can draw some interesting thoughts from this but no hard conclusions

• The vast majority of UK brand have no control of their brand name on Twitter. Should they care? I think so but they clearly don’t
• Only two three brands appear to truly own their Twitter brand in this list – Tate Galleries and BA with the latter being a US owned account BA’s UK arm now has a Twitter feed. The BBC recently claimed theirs hence updated below
• Though I have listed many that seemingly aren’t under ownership of the brand as having squatter status, that’s no slight against the owners most of who are legit
• There are clear cases in here of Twitter domain squatting with email addresses should the brand owner be keen to secure the account
• I’m not implying there is any financial gain for this process – though we have seen that in the past with web domain squatting.
• Statistically, 94% of UK brands don’t own their Twitter account

In an era where brand is increasingly important, can these household names afford to have their brand “owned” by someone else in the increasingly popular world of Twitter where Word of Mouth rules? Or is Twitter not the place for a brand to engage with it’s customers?

Erik has done a lot more work on this than I have time for but check the list below to see how badly our so called UK top brands fare.