TheWayoftheWeb

There have been lots of examples of online backlashes recently. For instance Motrin.

Neville Hobson has a really comprehensive round-up of why it’s not good to agree to supply a major online conference with internet access which then results in an epic fail.

The only thing I’d change is that the warning came at the very first moment they had a problem supplying LeWeb08, and they should have been publicly reacting from the moment it happened. It’s already four days after the event, and attempting to defend yourself by saying a major convention for online professionals and geeks is demanding on internet resources is a bit like saying that you were surprised when you put your hand in a fire and it was really hot.

If you’ve got 1600 influential online professionals in one place it’s A: the time to really shine no matter what the budget, and B: the time to have a backup policy in place, and some emergnecy planning.

Because no matter who is actually correct, or what the actual amount of service was, the chance to impress that many people in the current economic climate is pretty rare.

Contract it with the recent shining social media reputation management example from Ford.

Funnily enough, Neville has an interview with Scott Monty, who stopped the PR disaster.

Peterborough's station on Flickr by rayparnova (CC licence)

In the current economical and environmental climate, we’re all being encouraged to use public transport, but surely there’s one essential paradox that needs to be solved first:

The more people use it, the worse the experience is.

For example, a packed train to London saw me paying to sit in the rather pretentiously named vestibule between carriages, by the toilet, with my laptop on my knees for the two minutes before the battery died and I ended up reading a warning sign for the rest of the journey.

The return journey saw me in an almost empty carriage, in a comfortable seat, with pretty quick wifi, and two plug sockets for my laptop and mobile.

There has to be some way to do something different and make the experience actually improve if I encourage friends and colleagues to join me on the train. Savings, priority for packed trains, or even something really odd, like having a fridge full of free drinks which are only accessible if two or more people both insert barcoded tickets into a machine.

I don’t have the answer, but at least I recognise the problem of trying to convince me to pay more than the cost of petrol for the same trip, and then penalising passengers if the service becomes more popular. And making travel more social and helping self-forming groups may work.