The BlackBerry messenger crash that lasted for three days attracted a lot criticism on the social media. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter were replete with customer complaints and queries for resolution of the issue.

Millions of BlackBerry users worldwide were left in the dark with prolonged interruptions of their messaging service – the BBM and email capabilities. The problem spread from Europe to Latin America, Africa, Middle East, India and also to North America. The server problems had originated at Research in Motion (RIM)’s UK data center on Monday, October 10.

Research in Motion did release a statement blaming a “core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure” but said nothing further on the continued problems.

Almost everyone from high-roller business men to celebrities posted their frustrations and made “Dear BlackBerry…” a trending topic on social networking sites, especially Twitter.  In such a scenario one would naturally expect a company of RIM’s stature to react and placate the fuming consumers. This was important as most of them threatened to switch smartphones. The timing could not have been worse as Apple’s iOS5 and iPhone 4S are unveiled in the same week and both got very positive reviews from industry experts. Such developments along with the diminishing sales of BlackBerry phones in the last two months were really bad signs for the once all-mighty RIM.

However, despite the strong criticism, RIM’s Twitter page remained relatively quiet and posted barely two tweets in three days. RIM’s founder – Mike Lazaridis – has recently apologized to the BlackBerry community and posted a video message on Thursday that says, “We know we’ve let many of you down. You expect more from us. I expect more from us”.

The problem has been resolved finally but the apathy with which RIM dealt with the issue did tarnish its reputation. There is one thing that the inclusion of social media on crises management has taught businesses – honesty and speed are the keys to success. There has to be response to every bad or good news that concerns the organization. This is all the more important when the problem has such as huge magnitude. In the case of RIM, the BBM crash impacted the users in five continents.

Probably some people including the executives and managers at RIM thought that the problem was less than what the people were describing on social networking sites. But the fact is that millions of users (both corporate and personal) WERE affected. It was not as trivial as a ‘messenger service’ not working. There were users who could not access the Internet, send or receive emails and access data on their phones. It was good on part of Research in Motion to resolve the issue in 3 days but it was its responsibility to be more proactive in reacting to the posts on social media.

Blackberry failed to deal with their blackout crises because of its inability to understand the potential of social media for a business. The message that finally came from Mike Lazaridis on Twitter was expected a little earlier to say the least.

Better luck next time :-)

Speaking at SES NYnext week  on Social Media and Gulltaggen Oslo on the 12th of April on Multilingual Internet Marketing. Both events have some fantastic speakers and I am looking forward taking part. At the SES in New York I am speaking on a session called “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly” with Mel Carson, Microsoft Advertising Community Manager, Microsoft Advertising and Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group. The session is being moderated by Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR.

The Session Description:

“RT this. Take social media to the boardroom! Social media continues to spread its wings with the advent of Google Social Search, Bing, Twitter Search and Yahoo’s Twitter-like moves. With the demise of traditional media outlets and the rise of search and social, PR firms have also gotten a big lift and muscled in on the territory once ruled by advertising agencies. Time to eighty-six the anachronistic press kits and media lists and hand over the keyword rich online status updates and Twitter feeds. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear firsthand from online PR/social media pros that bridge the best of both worlds while influencing SEO via Profiles, Fans, Tweets, Friends and Follows.”

In Norway I am speaking at Gulltagged (The Golden Tag), this is THE biggest event in Norway and I am sure it is one of the biggest (if not the boggest) on Nordic countries. There I am speaking with great speakers like Avinash Kaushik and Brian Eisenberg. Inluding me, Avinash and Eisenberg there are some 15 to 20 more.

My session is called “Multilingual International Internet Marketing and Comms” and with me I have a guest lecturer from First House in Norway, Mr. Nils Apeland.

The Session Description:

“Approaching foreign markets is not as easy as ABC and understanding that your target markets have different cultures and ways of looking at web sites make it so a general approach is not likely to get you full impact of your online campaign.

Kristjan Mar specializes in multilingual internet marketing and has worked with organizations ranging from very small companies to some of the largest in the world ranging from house hold travel brands like HostelBookers and Orbitz to banks and pharmaceutical companies such as Actavis and Santander using everything from social media networks to PPC and everything between.

He will talk about online marketing and public relations in a multilingual environment and illustrate his point using case studies, site audits and best practices based on over 10 years’ consulting experience.

Expect to walk away full of ideas and knowledge with hands on tips to amend your international marketing efforts.”

I will be speaking at SES London and New York on a session called Search, PR and the Social Butterfly with a good friend of mine Mel Carson, Microsoft Advertising Community Manager at Microsoft Advertising.

“RT this. Take social media to the boardroom! Social media continues to spread its wings with the advent of Google Social Search, Bing, Twitter Search and Yahoo’s Twitter-like moves. With the demise of traditional media outlets and the rise of search and social, PR firms have also gotten a big lift and muscled in on the territory once ruled by advertising agencies. Time to eighty-six the anachronistic press kits and media lists and hand over the keyword rich online status updates and Twitter feeds. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear firsthand from online PR/social media pros that bridge the best of both worlds while influencing SEO via Profiles, Fans, Tweets, Friends and Follows.”

Anne Kennedy founder of the US based Beyond Ink will be speaking next Wednesday on Social Media Marketing, focusing on Facebook. Other speakers are Gisli Brynjolfsson from design agency Hvitahusid and Sindri Bergman from Digital and Sons. This is a morning session that lasts from 08:30 to 10:10. Session moderator is Kristjan Mar Hauksson from Nordic eMarketing. The event is held in cooperation between Nordic eMarketing and Hvitahusid and is to address social media tactics and strategies, both locally and Internationally. The event is by invitation only and there are limited seats.

I recently found this fantastic tool called Social Mention, a real time search platform.

Been playing around with it and found it to be really useful for several things but mostly to get a feel for the general buzz out there. The tools is limited when it comes to other languages out-side of English, but I am sure that it will be fixed as the tool develops.

I have tested their alert services and they work great take what Google does with their alerts little further adding sites and mentions that Google does not include. Their alert are however limited to only one delivery per day, while Google is quite dynamic and delivers material as it happens.

Verdict: Great tool, worth using and best of all it is free!

According to MSN Twitter traffic is 55% men, 23.02% of the traffic comes from users aged 18 – 24 with 18 and younger at around 23%. The age group 50+ counts for around 16% of Twitter traffic and by the looks of it users belonging to the older demographics are starting to use Twitter more and more.

Traffic to Twitter seems to be balancing as the USA now counts for 30.5% of traffic according to Alexa with India at 8.4% coming second and Japan third with around 8.1%. According to MSN those searching online for the keyword “twitter” seem to match the user behaviour above with about 56% of searcher being male and 23% aged 18 – 24.

After being elected the Mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland opened up a Facebook account to report his daily activites. This week he published a video mixing together a Rick Astley and Nirvana video. It seems that Facebook does not like the Mayors mix of the two songs or Rick Astley is a special favourite of Facebook. It looks as Jon Gnarr needs to open up a new account and start from scratch.

Sheryl Sandberg COO of Facebook gave a speech at the Consumer 360 conference claiming that Facebook could survive without email. She said “”In consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today, and the latest figures say that only 11% of teenagers email daily. So email (I can’t imagine life without it) is probably going away. So what do teenagers do? They SMS and increasingly they use social networking.”

The question is Could Facebook Even Survive Without Email?

Are marketers closing the database of human intention and reaching the holy grail of marketing, with 100% transparency of the users, the people they are targeting? This evolution can be traced back to 2001 when Google opened Google Zeitgest and with that we could see and understand better the searcher and use that data to help us get better results. Microsoft opened their MSN AdLab tool and with that the dimension of age and gender was added to the equation.

Then entered the world of social media and the applications and tools that came with it and now with opt in “Check-in” applications so now the gap has been closed from the purchase and onsite analytics, to the query, from there to the social graph like who I am and who I know. From there we have the status update though micro-blogging , what am I doing and now with the help mobile phones “where am I”.

The “Check-in” is a statement of “here I am what do you have to offer?”

In August 2009 Google famously changed their algorithm and how they value current events, but different from the 2003 Florida update this change to how they value content  and display search results seamed to roll out rather peacefully and in some cases unnoticed.

I have been monitoring how this has changed the search engine and it seems that the Google Caffeine update is to putting growing prominence on real-time search within search results. Specifically on Twitter and other real-time communication tools.

This might explain a post on Search Engine Land that the Caffeine update really had not been rolled out fully and is slowly being implemented throughout Google’s data centres.

But what did this update incorporate? First and foremost it was Google keeping their competitors away, there was a lot of buzz about Twitter’s real-time search options and Microsoft had just rolled out their “decision making search engine” Bing. Real-time search was the thing and Google needed to come out with an update and that they did.

Google had some years back introduced their Google Universal search, were they mixed together various results on their organic results pages, when searching on a topic you could find various channels such as web, blog, news, shop, PPC, image and video being mixed together. What Google did with the Caffeine update was to take this even further and put more emphasis on current events and blend them with the more tradition results in a kind of a “ticker style” where things happened in a more dynamic way.

What they also did with this update was to take the emphasis slightly of inbound links (still very important) and put on good copy, other things we have noticed but I am not sure if we can directly relate to this update is the emphasis on URL’s, that is the text between the www and the .TLD/ccTLD.

According to this update two companies in the same industry, let’s say car rental, one has an URL with their brand in it such as www.alp.is has a handicap when compared with a car rental URL like www.carrentals.is.

Having car rental in the URL gives the later URL more chance of visibility, one more box ticked in how Google values that URL. My research has however shown that Google has a limit on how it values the URL so something like “verycheaprentalcarsreykjavik.is” are likely to rise a spam alert, prompting a Google rep to manually review the site for spam tactics or even worse Google just demoting the site or even removing it from it’s index.

There is a massive opportunity for marketers to look pass their traditional emphasis on their own site but also to use Twitter, blogs, online press releases and other channels that can provide an alternative option to visibility based on how Google now places emphasis on current events.