Social media policy, ur doin it rong

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/25/ryanair-socialnetworking

Blogger finds fail on Ryanair website, blogs about it. Ryanair employee leaves comments on his blog that are fairly inflammatory. Blogger inquires if they are authentic, receives this response from Ryanair’s corporate communications (!):

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.

"Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel."

SFChronicle may shut down

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51O03Y20090225

It's hard out there for a print.

Your Ad Impressions v. Lent

Do you think anyone would give up visiting your site for Lent?

Apparently it's happening to Facebook: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123509424821028985.html

Web 2.0, UGC Fail

Restaurant review site Yelp is, apparently, now willing to bury the bad reviews of your restaurant - for a fee.

What good is user-generated content to the end user if it's censored to hide all but rave reviews?

The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.

"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."

Even worse, this article almost sounds like Yelp is doing it Mob style, moving the worst reviews to the top and trying to extort payment. Way to tank your site in the name of a business model.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/yelp_and_the_business_of_extortion_2_0/Content?oid=927491

Math Is Tough

Wow... half of marketers forgo analytics?

Marketers will continue to invest significantly in online marketing this year, but less than half (47%) actually use analytics to measure their campaigns, and one-fifth only have a ‘basic’ website, according to the sixth annual marketing survey from Alterian.

Depressing. You'd think nowadays you'd want to focus more on ROI, not less.

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/frustrated-by-difficulty-half-of-marketers-forego-analytics-7993

Mobile

Learned it from Twitter: Omniture customers in Japan log more pageviews from mobile handsets than the personal computer.

I'm a heavy browser on my phone, but still nowhere near that point.

Yahoo - GROWING search share?

...wha?

After years of steady decline, Yahoo's domestic share numbers (YHOO) had increased for five months in a row. Well, the good news continued in January, with Yahoo's share jumping a half-point to 21%, per comScore.

Google's share, meanwhile, dropped a half-point, to 63%. You don't see that every day.

http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-search-share-rises-againand-google-falls-2009-2