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 :-)

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.”

Companies in most cases have from many digital assets that they can play with when communication their message online, simple things as annual reports in PDF’s and Power Point presentations can be optimized and made visible through either own sites and/or such services as Slide Share.

Images from the last product launch can play an essential role on Google Image search and manuals in word can lower the load on support. Not forgetting social media such as Facebook, Twitter, the Company blog, Digg and Sphinn to mention few.

Implementing Digital Asset Optimization helps the search engines notice all your online content and everything from file names to meta-tags and HTML files to PDF files and Image labelling through Google Webmaster tools plays a role when it comes to holistic usage of the Internet as a marketing and communication channel.

I will be talking about this topic a the upcoming SES San Francisco.

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!

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.

Just came from a session at the SES called Black hat/White hat “Unconferenced” hosted by Matt McGowan, Publisher & head of U.S. Incisive Media and Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, SES/Search Engine Watch and ClickZ (believe they are merging). Everyone that came to this session was offered a white hat or a black hat to wear, in my case I got the black.

Not that I am a black hat in the sense that I use under the radar none ethical tactics when marketing online, nobe more because that the size of the black hat fitted my head better. Great session that taught me black hats have bigger heads than white hats or that Matt and Mike did not order enough hats for people with big heads, either way fantastic session and great fun!

I was recently traveling on the US, speaking at the SES in NY. My eight year old daughter asked me to buy her a pair of shoes, to be exact Apple Bottoms. As I went to Footlocker to buy them I realized that they did not carry them anymore so I decided to Google and see what came up.

First when I searched Footlockers internal search nothing came up and as I have learned through the years Internal search on big sites can by quite faulty so I tested if Google found something but no results. But what happened was that JD Sports came up as a PPC result. JD was most likely not targeting me as I was in the US at the time with my Icelandic keyboard. But as I was searching on Google UK JD came up, with a nice ad saying

Apple Bottom at JD
Get the new line of Apple Bottoms
Women’s ware quick and easy at JD!

When I saw the add I tough to myself well if I cannot buy it in the US I might as well when I am next over to London. But when I clicked on the ad I got nothing, that is I got a page saying “Sorry, we have not been able match anything to your search” it was not a 404 page it was a search result page with no results. Still not sure where to buy the Apple Bottoms for my daughter.

Firstly what is a big site? Is it 10.000 pages or 100.000 or even 100.000? My experience is that sites that more than 10 .000 to 15.000 pages start to show the same symptoms, the main problem in most cases is the WCMS (web content management system), how it is used to manage the sites content.

This can be how templates are designed to show and possibly reuse content. Little problems within sites that contain millions of pages can occur again and again and grow from being a minor glitch in being a huge disaster that prevents search visibility.So planning ahead can be really helpful when managing a large site. In most cases Google problem is either too much of the same content or to little access to it.  Google as the other crawlers should only be allowed to index valuable pages with legitimate none duplicate content.

So what does that mean? Well if we look at the “too much” of the content problem, better known as duplicate content, this is in most cases because it is being reused again and again and again and …. This leads to Google either demoting the site, parts of it or even taking it out completely.

To find if there is a problem it´s in all cases good to put Google Webmaster tools on the site and Yahoo Site Explorer. When the site has been verified you will start to see all kinds of data such as crawler errors, what keywords the site us found under but not getting clicks through and more.

Although very basic this should get you going in identifying crawler issues that will eventually lead to visibility issues on the search engines.

Last year Microsoft and Google told about their partnership with Facebook and recently Yahoo! and Twitter started their cooperation. This will add to Yahoo! services by allowing Yahoo members to access their personal Twitter accounts across the portal’s online properties like Yahoo! mail, Flickr etc. Yahoo! has been known for it’s stable audience and brands using Twitter should benefit from that.