I recently had a bad customer service experience with Halfords, while trying to replace a car battery. The long and short of it is that they won’t replace the perfectly fine battery, for a silver calcium one that Ford specifies is the right one. I even had the receipt and still they wouldn’t budge!

Well I’ve found them on twitter @Halfords_uk and have started posting messages to them to see if anyone from customer services replies – I’m hoping the power of Twitter will come to the rescue, we shall see. Doing a quick search on Twitter reveals I’m not the only unhappy customer.

Some brands engage their customers on Twitter and some don’t, with Halfrauds it’s yet to be seen. I’m not just jumping on the band wagon here, as I know there have been plenty of cases where people have received positive feedback via Twitter as a result of being disgruntled, BT and Dell are known to be brands that respond well to complaints on Twitter, so come on Halfords it’s time to step up and make that change for the better. I’m genuinely amazed at the fact that they point blank refused to replace it. I was also due a phone call from them, which is yet to materialise.

Update: I had call from the Halfords store yesterday and got a direct message from them asking for more detail, which is something.Wwhether I get a new battery remains to be seen…

Brands on Twitter is a post from: Tamar

An Australian software company based in Sydney have the solution and have been providing Campaign Monitor to clients such as Facebook, Twitter and Ebay for 10 years.

We have recently started using Campaign Monitor to track all our email newsletters and it is proving a valuable insight for the analytics team. We can refine our send-out list by excluding addresses that have bounced and also see which links are most popular. This all helps as the stats we get are more accurate, and it keeps the boffins happy.

If your email design is looking tired or you are feeling uninspired the website also offers lots of resources and creative inspiration. You can download free design templates and refer to best practice design guidelines and they even offer a “getting started checklist” for clients who have just signed up and are complete novices.

The best thing about using Campaign Monitor is that it’s extremely easy to set up a campaign and get something sent out. The whole process is very intuitive and doesn’t make you think! Our record is about 30mins from creation to send out………this time also included testing! It will be interesting to see how Freshview improve on what is already a great tool.

Email Marketing – Campaign Monitor is a post from: Tamar

I first became aware of him about 9 years ago when he did a series for tv called "Are You Dave Gorman" where he travelled around the globe trying to find people who shared his name. An insane notion you may think but resulted, if memory serves, in somebody if not several people changing their names, just so he could reach his DG (Dave Gorman) target of….54. This was all spawned from a bet he had with his mate Danny and has since been broken, even today he still gets emails from other Dave Gorman’s…….comedy gold!

I have been following DG's blog avidly now for a good few months, an since the surge in micro blogging, I have also started following him on the big T. God! I feel like his cyber stalker, I know where he has been, what he's been eating, what he has been taking photos of (I also RSS his photos on Flickr), which is a great inspiration, as I also make pictures.

He has without doubt embraced a lot of the new technology of the day, and with his unique view on the world manages to make the mundane interesting and funny. Check out his web cam.

Some of his recent posts include observations on cycling and a pie & mash shop that now sells gravy! Sometimes he'll just post a picture for your viewing pleasure……nice!

Following his Tweets as well has allowed me to fill in the gaps between blogs. While filming trails for Genius, (hold on to your hats) he also got his bike fixed. The decision to make a banana and jam sandwich was maybe a tweet too far, sounds nasty but did make me consider trying one……….ummmm we shall see.

I have enjoyed following Mr.G so far and look forward to his next post. Hope the transition of Genius from radio to TV is a success Dave…

Adopt a Blog #24 – Dave Gorman is at war with the obvious is a post from: Tamar

How can we be sure that Twits are updating their own feeds? Well, there is a company out there that will update your feed for you hourly, daily, weekly……..for a fee off course. Twit4hire will take the pressure off by doing the hard work for you. Companies like Dell have made millions through exploiting Twitter. Perhaps in the future companies will be employing full time, in house Microblog Managers.

If like me you have several status' to update, I recently came across Ping.fm. It will update a plethora of Social Media site and micro blogs in one fell swoop, now that's got to be good………..right got to dash, my Twitter status needs refreshing.

Twitter Time is a post from: Tamar

As you may have guessed by now I'm into my music, I like to think I have a wide and varied taste and a site that gives me a regular dose of new and upcoming tunes is KCRW.com. A community service of Santa Monica College based in Southern California, it churns out playlists that are hand picked by the Dj's themselves, none of the corporate chart dictated music here. You can access them with itunes through a podcast, live streaming or direct from the site.

I'm thinking of buying a house at the moment and hoping to pick up some sort of bargain (thumbs are being firmly held) in these trying times. Once I've persuaded a finance house to lend me loads of money I will be happy, in the meantime I visit Nestoria, a property site that has web 2.0 attitude. With a Google Map mashup and links showing you where the local pubs and schools are, it provides a wealth of information for the user when looking for that perfect pad. You can view average house prices in an area and find out what percentage of an area is in good health. A quick poll shows Chiswick is at 76.2% and Rotheram is at 62%. It even shows you photos of an area, that are posted up by a photo sharing website, great stuff.

Cuteoverload is a site I go to if I need a laugh. It instantly puts a smile on my face with its often bizarre collection of animal photos. There is a worryingly large submission of cats photos at times, but proves we are a nation, if not a world of animal lovers. The trampolining dog is a wonder to behold……..bounce bounce.

The best websites in the world…ever.Vol.31 is a post from: Tamar

Surely it is time to call it a day and banish it to browser heaven? The latest browser usage stats from w3schools show it is on a steady decline and now Chrome has been up for a couple of months we can see how it is performing.

Geek out time…

Browser Stats is a post from: Tamar

One thing that makes me reluctant to upload loads of photos to Flickr or Facebook is having to tag them all manually with key words, dull, dull, dull. Not that it’s compulsory to tag pictures, but we all know it’s important to have keywords so images can be indexed and found through search.

Well, my life could be about to get a whole lot easier with ALIPR (pronounced a-lip-er) which stands for Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time. The site uses software that can train computers to recognize the content of images rather than text tags. Researchers at Penn State who developed the technology started by manually tagging 60,000 photos, they then built a statistical model to teach the computer to recognize patterns and assign the keywords to new photos that seem to contain similar elements.

According to one of the developers it’s not 100% accurate, but It works by recognising patterns in colour and texture.

Give it a go at, http://alipr.com, where you can also upload images to teach it yourself.

Image Tagging………Done! is a post from: Tamar

After a recent discussion around the hallowed tables of Tamar about rating images and videos that users send to sites, as luck would have it I came across an article on Google discussing the issue, but with an added twist.

It states, "What if you could learn not just which of your videos are hot on the site, but which specific parts of those videos are hotter than others? What if you could know exactly when viewers tend to leave your videos, or which scenes within a video they watch again and again?"

This information is now available to all YouTube video uploaders with an innovative new feature for Insight called "Hot Spots." Once logged in a graph sits beside your video showing you the peeks and troffs of where viewers have left. It works out the hotness or notness by comparing the video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.

If this was to be used in the wider world it may prove very useful for advertisers as they would be able to place specific ads just before key drop off points. Analysing the data may also result in having to edit the original video to get rid of less interesting elements

You Tube – Hot or Not is a post from: Tamar

New Media Age have just reported that Amazon in the UK is to start selling MP3’s in October.

Following the lead of the .com site it will open up the market even more, much to the delight of music labels who think that the iTunes service has a monopoly on digital downloads.

Not sure how competitive on price they are going to be but a quick look at the US site says Metallica’s new album retails at $8.99 and on itunes it’s $9.99! We shall see how this translates to £ soon.

Amazon.co.uk to open MP3 store is a post from: Tamar

Reuters have revealed that T-Mobile will be selling a mobile running Google Android by 23 September.

Google’s next ‘must have’ is an open source operating system and is expected to make a huge splash in the mobile phone market, with the search giant hoping its approach will give them dominance in the mobile OS market.

"T-Mobile and Google will be making an announcement this month in New York City," its sources said – with the date of 23 September given.

Chrome proves that the Google brand is more popular than ever. It made a huge dent in the Internet Explorer market within a week of launch, and the integration of its web-based products and services into a mobile market will be enticing for us all.

Google Android due 23 September is a post from: Tamar