All the Geelys on Autocade

The Geely King Kong Hatchback, one of the new entries on the Autocade website. Not that I blogged it at the time, but Geely’s multi-brand strategy in 2009 felt doomed. Earlier this year, the company retreated, and brought everything from Englon, Gleagle and Emgrand back under its parent brand again.    It wasn’t unlike Mazda’s […]

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Where the action is on social media, and it’s not Facebook

I’ve blogged several times about the bot problem that Facebook has, and this is an issue that runs alongside the click farms that operate on the website.    One of my groups has over 12,000 members, and it’s a magnet for click farm participants, who target these bigger ones. And when you look through the […]

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How many Facebook bots do you see in an evening? I count over 250

Last month, I Tweeted Facebook, asking them to raise the reporting limit for bots. Right now, you can report around 40 bot accounts before a warning box comes up asking you to slow down. If you do another 10, you are barred from reporting any more for 24 hours—even though you are trying to help […]

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Caveat emptor: Facebook’s click farm problem is worsening

Many people will remember this video, which exposed Facebook using click farms to inflate customers’ likes (I would have used Veritasium’s original, but YouTube won’t show embedding codes at the moment):   Facebook Fraud Exposed: Does Facebook Advertising Lead to Fake Likes? from Reputation911 on Vimeo      I won’t repeat what they exposed, as […]

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When referring to your Australian office might not be a smart thing to do

There are some companies that do not realize that we live in a global community.    And there are at least two who have done themselves a disservice by referring our account or enquiries to their Australian representative.    We left Rackspace in 2013 although, for most of the 11½ years we were with them, […]

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The TV and film ideas that Ireland pioneered

My friend Lou, who I enjoy winding up, just arrived in Belfast on holiday with her fiancé. I wrote on her Facebook the following slice of forgotten Irish television and film history. If I was in Belfast, I would be rapping. I pulled up to the house about seven or eight, And I yelled to […]

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Ford spoofs Cadillac with a more realistic commercial

First up, the Cadillac ELR TVC, with actor Neal McDonough boasting about the US’s consumer culture and past glories:    And now, Ford parodies it with a far more down-to-earth and realistic message about what we should be praising in the occident, starring environmental advocate Pashon Murray, who runs Detroit Dirt, a composting company:   […]

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This week it’s the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit models; what’s next for our destination marketing?

In Lucire’s publication history, more Americans than New Zealanders have read from the title. Online, that was always the case, as we started off in 1997 with a 70 per cent US readership, which has dropped to around 42 per cent with other countries catching up with web browsing over the last 16 years.   […]

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The real privacy policy

Documentaries such as Terms and Conditions May Apply (embedded here) and Doc Searls’ The Intention Economy got me thinking about our privacy policy.    We have one for our company, but how do we really use your private data? It got me thinking.    Since we’ve been online for longer than most people, we have […]

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It’s still wise to bet against Facebook

A non-peer-reviewed academic article from Princeton predicts Facebook will be toast by ’17, and Facebook has very cleverly responded using similar methodology to say that Princeton will have no students by 2021. The lack of review on the former left it wide open for the Facebook attack.    However, it’s not unwise betting against Facebook. […]

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