Bed bugs a search problem for New York hotels

I am currently searching for hotel rooms in New York for an upcoming trip and as many people do, I search on sites like Hotels.com and Bookings.com. But I often also want to double check the reputation of the hotel by doing a regular Google search. When doing this, I soon discovered that bed bugs in hotel rooms seem to be a great worry for people who are about to travel to New York.

For many of the hotels I searched, the top suggested search terms by Google was related to bed bugs, meaning that this is one of the most used search terms.

newyorkbedbugshotel

If you are only searching one or two hotels, you might get the impression that this hotel has a problem with bed bugs. But that might not be the case at all. It may just be a general worry that travellers may have and that they want to make sure that this hotel is clean and tidy.

Hotels that have this phrase associated to them in Google Suggest should at least google it and monitor what is being said online. Sites like bedbugreports.com and bedbugregistry.com frequently pop up in the top of the search results. In case that there are inaccurate reports about your hotel on these sites, a hotel representative can contact the site and hopefully they will remove the posts.

Fashion app caught using fake LinkedIn profiles

I’m always a bit catious when someone out of the blue wants to connect with me on Facebook or LinkedIn, for example. Often when people want to network, there is some kind of common denominator, like we both now somebody, have worked for the same company or something similar. So when total strangers make friend requests, I always check them out.


I recently got two friend requests from two unlikely individuals, both good looking women working for some fashion app called Okay and with a quite decent background in the fashion industry. One had been Creative Head of Glamour Magazine and the other Vice President of Creations at People Magazine.

Impressive. But why on earth would they reach out to me of all people? Naturally is suspected foul play.

Fake LinkedIn profiles
It didn’t take much investigation to find out that these LinkedIn profiles were completely fake, as were several others from the same app company. First of all, their resumés were very short and looked a lot like each other. Then there was the obvious fact that their profile pictures were stolen, unless one of them was the identical twin of a Miss Ecuador 2012 contestant.

The photo of “Chloe Anderson” is in fact the Norwegian model Polina Barbasova.

linkedin-chloe

linkedin-polina

The photo of “Ella Cooper” is the Venezualan actress Scarlet Ortiz.

linkedin-ella

linkedin-scarlet

And the list continues. More profiles of people said to be working at Okay are in fact fake. “Addison Walter” has the picture of the Miss Ecuador contestant Carolina Aguirre.

linkedin-addison

linkedin-carolina

“Natalie Portman” who runs PR for Okay has taken “her” picture from model Veneda Budny.

Needless to say, I didn’t accept the friend requests.

Why would anyone do this on purpose, one might ask. I suspect the answer is to get in touch with online influencers who in turn would spread the word about the app in social media. But even if I now blog about the app it’s not in a positive way. A marketing strategy involving fake LinkedIn profiles was bound to backfire.

Company uses flight MH17 crash to sell life insurance

Malaysia Airlines

The world is still in shock after the news that the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 yesterday was shot down over Ukrainian airspace. Everyone onboard was killed, including some 27 Australian citizens.

Apparently someone thought that was a great opportunity to promote life insurances. The Australian life insurance company Lisa Group bought advertisements on the Google keywords “Malaysia Airlines” only a few hours after the flight crashed.

The ad copy on Google read “Is MH17 Malaysia Airlines tragedy a sign to consider life insurance?” according to Canberra Times. The ad linked to a promotion on the company site that said:

“”What a tragedy!” read a message that has since been removed.

“Up to 27 Australians were among 298 people on board a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet which was shot down over Ukraine with the loss of all on board.

“Is it another sign to consider life insurance? #PrayForMH17.”

The company said the promotion was a mistake made by an external partner and the ad was quickly removed.

Image via Wikimedia

Twitter suspends Zlatan Ibrahimovic parody account without notice

zlatan twitter account

A parody Twitter account with about 90,000 followers was suspended yesterday without warning. The account @ZIbrahomovic has been entertaining Twitter users for almost two years with funny, but fake, quotes from Swedish football icon Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The account has been up front with the fact that it is not the real Zlatan, but that hasn’t stopped several Swedish news outlets from publishing it as real quotes. SVT, the Swedish public service tv channel, once published a fake quote that said:

“If FIFA does not give me the Ballon d’Or I need to talk to Santa Claus”

And Dagens Nyheter, the largest Swedish daily, once published a quote that read:

“Ronaldo will never play in PSG. They don’t produce as much hairspray in France as he needs.”

Both fake, of course. But now the parody account has been closed down without a warning, which is a bit odd, since there are plenty of other accounts that are allowed to continue as long as they state in the Twitter bio that they are not the person or company they pretend to be.

Funny Twitter chat
The closing down of “fake Zlatan” coincides with a hilarious Twitter Q&A that the real Ibrahimovic (@ibra_official) held yesterday under the Nike campaign hashtag #daretozlatan. Whether there is a connection between the two things remains to be seen. Zlatan’s PR Manager has declined that he has asked Twitter to suspend the account.

Metro in the UK has a list of some of the great chat responses from Ibra. Read them here. If you ask me, they are a little to good to be from Zlatan himself, but then again, I’m a born skeptic…

Pepsi’s Cristiano Ronaldo stunt on Facebook backfires miserably

Pepsi Sweden put up three images on its Facebook page before the last night’s World Cup qualifying game between Sweden and Portugal. The three images portrayed Portuguese icon Cristiano Ronaldo as a voodoo doll full of needles, a doll being crushed by a Pepsi can and lying tied on a rail track.

Pepsi is a sponsor to FC Barcelona’s Leo Messi, one of Ronaldo’s main contenders for the FIFA Ballon d’Or award, and apparently someone at Pepsi found it to be a brilliant idea to mock Ronaldo on Facebook. It was not.

Pepsi Facebook Cristiano Ronaldo

Pepsi Facebook Cristiano Ronaldo

Pepsi Facebook Cristiano Ronaldo disaster

The stunt has caused outrage among Portuguese football fans who have flooded Pepsi’s Swedish Facebook page with angry comments and images of their own, mocking Pepsi. Here are a few examples:

“Shame on you! Shame on you! You’re a disrespectful and unprofessional brand and you did not manage to achieve anything positive at all with that ridiculous, non-humorous and offensive campaign. It serves you right that 10.6M people shutted you up tonight, and will stop drinking Pepsi.” Link.

Pepsi Facebook

Pepsi Ronaldo

Pepsi Ronaldo Facebook

There are also many angry comments on both the Portuguese Pepsi page as well as the global page on Facebook. And that’s the trouble with a local crisis, it often spreads to a global scale. A Portuguese anti Pepsi page has also been created and it has currently attracted more than 40,000 followers. The story has already been covered in both Swedish and Portuguese media.

Pepsi has now been forced to delete the images from Facebook and to apologize:

“We would never want to put the sport or the spirit of competition in a negative light. We regret if people were offended by the posts; they were immediately taken down. We would like to extend our apologies to all concerned.”

Mocking someone else’s idol can never be a clever way to promote your brand. Pepsi has learned that the hard way.

Ryanair crash lands in Twitter chat

In a recent survey published in Britain’s premier consumer magazine, Which?, budget airline Ryanair was voted last among 100 top brands in quality of customer service. Perhaps the airline is finally starting to realize that it needs to improve its awful reputation in order to remain competitive and make an effort not to “unnecessarily piss people off”.

“Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary told shareholders Friday his airline must improve how it treats passengers and handles complaints so that customers don’t feel pushed around by staff and unfairly imposed charges – and potentially take business to other airlines offering more than Ryanair’s budget model.”

But if Ryanair thought a Q&A session on Twitter with CEO Michael O’Leary would do any good, they failed miserably. The thing with inviting customers to a public debate is that you will not always get the responses you wish. We’ve seen a number of cases where critics have hijacked hashtags on Twitter because it’s a great opportunity to get exposure for your complaints. In a case with a brand that so many people hate, you would obviously expect that critics would take advantage of the situation. People who would otherwise have been silent, now feel there’s an excuse to voice their opinions.

Some examples under the hashtag #GrillMOL on Monday were:

“Were you born an arsehole or has it progressed throughout your life?”

“Is it company policy for your staff to be rude and unhelpful as possible?”

“Due to fly to Riga on Saturday but can’t go as my mum in law is losing her cancer battle. 388 quid to re-book seems unfair”

“Why no response for a refund request (sent reg. post) in over a month from seriously ill girl with special needs? @Ryanair #scum”

Here’s another great tweet from @AndyGilder, mocking Ryanair:

Twitter chat Ryainair Michael O'Leary

O’Leary’s history of nasty macho responses to everyone from customers to journalists and politicians has earned him the title “aviation’s most hated man”. The Twitter chat was no exception as he started out commenting female Twitter users’ avatars: “Nice pic. Phwoaaarr! MOL”, to which others responded:

@Ryanair how is it appropriate for an airline CEO to be a sexist pig?”, and: “People who fly Ryanair: do you also think this is an acceptable thing to tweet at a woman?”

A brand in trouble could make use of social media if their intent is genuine, if they are really there to listen and be prepared to change. If you open up a dialogue with critics just to mock them, prepare for disaster.

However, as is often the case, even bad publicity will get you attention and the @Ryanair Twitter account has gained nearly 2,000 new followers in the next two days. Perhaps this could be the start of something new, after all. But until the company changes its approach to customer service and to its own employees, I will not fly with Ryanair.

ryanair twitter