All 1 entries tagged Yahoo Geocities

Yahoo! Closing! Everywhere! Complaints & Viral Marketing.

Writing about web page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

I was checking around my blogs to find that the family twin to this running on uk.360.yahoo.com had been closed down.

They still offered the chance to back-up and move elsewhere with sore paid options or to migrate it over to a Yahoo Profile which I did.
I found that the resulting page had a very unfriendly URL was not as good as the old 360 Blog and all links etc were done through wizards.
The result of this was that I can connect to Google’s Picasso photos but not to the Yahoo owned Flickr that I pay money to for the Pro account. (This was already connected to the account but how do I make this visible?) I was not going to Blog about this but the same day I got a cry for help from the supporter of Frances the Cockatoo as Yahoo!’s Geocities sites were also being closed down. Where can I get free hosting? Well I gave 2 Google options; Blogger and Sites, sites.google.com though Microsoft has real options too.

Yahoo is in a poor position and are clearly attempting to monetise their large active base but as I have been discovering just how valuable individual complaints and rants are to avoid some of the worst excesses of customer service. Mostly I try to be constructive on this Blog but consistently it is the Virgin Media complaints line and British Gas problems that deliver the most visitors! I have started to search for ‘problems’ and ‘complaints’ before buying from a new source. Follow the link to this blog entry.

There is no doubt bad news travels faster. Complaints read more real than glowing praise. Sometimes too much ‘news’ can be depressing as Charlie Brooker of Newswipe related on Rossie’s show today.

But we have all been on the end of bad corporate customer relations so we are uplifted by someone who gets back at a huge company.
Especially if they do it in a funny way like Dave Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars video on Youtube. With over 4 million hits Dave does not need another link from me. Click to expand the Youtube stats to see the growth of a viral campaign. The biggest groups of viewers are all male from 35 to 65, more bad news for United Airlines.

But it is not bad news for everyone the Guitar Flight case company CaseXtreme.com has been promoting their videos of Guitars being attacked with hammers, thrown off roofs, etc. to demonstrate they are baggage handler proof.

Robert McGonigle : 25 Jul 2009 17:45 |  Tags: Yahoo Yahoo 360 Yahoo Geocities Yahoo Profile |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem