Indeed the fruits on the covers of the kid sweet packages do seem to be awfully friendly. Simpkins describes the embrace of the lemon and line as a “carnal” encounter and added that “The lime, who I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face. ”

Haribo has explained that the wrappers have been in use in Germany since 2002. The news comes too late to help Mrs Simpkins who became do distressed that she had to sit down when her husband began a heated exchange with a shop manager over the wrappers.

What do you think? Are these fruits having sex?

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There’s now a winner and rather cleverly from Bing’s marketing team it’s a controversial winner. It’s a surreal little ditty but is it even a jingle?

Here’s Bing Goes the Internet

What do you think? A worthy winner or not?

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After a few tweets, for some misguided reason they thought that putting popular trending hashtags at the beginning of their tweet would be a good idea. This is usually done by spammers so that people searching for a popular keyword such as iphone will see their message. And so, Habitat began sending out identical tweets with hashtags such as #Apple and #iPhone at the beginning. From the looks of it, this carried on for about 8 Tweets.

Yes, it was misguided, yes it was a mistake, but it does not have to be a big marketing disaster. It is certainly not up there with Motrin or Dominos disasters.

Habitat most probably gave their account to someone who knew very little about how Twitter works. I can’t imagine the decision to spam on an Iranian election hashtag was made by anyone particularly high up or with an ounce of sense at the company.

So what has gone wrong here and how can it be fixed?

Habitat have already pulled the offending tweets. Someone has obviously realised their (or someone elses) mistake and got rid of them. This is a start, and although bloggers are noting they can still be found in Twitter Search’s cache, they’re down on page 15 where no one is going to see them.

Habitat also appear to have thrown their hands up in the air and admitted their mistake stating “it is important to us that we always listen, take on board observations and welcome constructive criticism… We will do our utmost to ensure any mistakes are never repeated.”

I think this is the best thing they can do. Everyone makes mistakes in social media, as with anything, it is the only way we can learn and progress. It also goes to show the importance of strategising your social media apporach, as it can go so easily wrong.

There are endless blogs out there that advise on how best to use Twitter but I thought I’d add my two cents:

1. It is essential that a company gives an official Twitter account to someone that is already familiar with and using the service. This would not have happened if a seasoned Twitter user, that knows the etiquette had been given control of the account.

2. Engagement is more important than broadcasting offers. Twitter should be a customer support and engagement tool first and a marketing device second.

3. Give your Twitter followers something extra. No one wants to hear offers being constantly repeated that they can read about on the brand’s website in the first place.

4. Clearly define what you want to achieve with your Twitter account. Is Twitter the right tool for your brand? Jumping on the bandwagon is not the reason for beginning to use Twitter. Can you add something extra for your cutomers by using Twitter.

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It appears as if today is not going to be a slow news day. Already it’s been reported that The Guardian has taken its newspaper out of print and onto Twitter, dangerous hummingbirds have been spotted in rural Gloucestershire (by Dr Julius Doctor) and Warner Bros have acquired the Pirate Bay. It’s April 1st and in keeping with tradition, the Internets are awash with April Fools’ day jokes.

Not only are spoof news stories spreading virally today, websites are messing with us too. YouTube have turned their videos upside down, Reddit have redesigned their homepage to resemble Digg and Google have introduced a new Gmail feature which allows you to auto respond to those attractive and strangely frequent business propositions from Nigerian princes, princesses and kings.

Google have always been keen April Fools tricksters. Last year they launched a search feature called gDay that allowed users to search into the future. They also announced a partnership with Virign called Virgle, a joint venture to go to Mars.

Big April Fools pranks have been going on for many years. The BBC pulled a spectacular April Fools stunt in 1957 when they managed to fool a large amount of the British public with a 3 minute Panorama documentary about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from spaghetti trees. The documentary was followed by numerous phonecalls from the gullible public enquiring where they could get their own spaghetti bush.

To keep up to date with the 2009 april fools jokes, you can see a comprehensive list at April Fools’ Day on the Web.

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Apparently, this blog post really riled someone at Ryanair because not long after, they rode in, guns blazing, screaming “jason! you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!” along with various other personal attacks towards Roe.

The situation escalated with trade press Travolution and Econsultancy picking up on the story. Travolution managed to get a statement from Stephen McNamara at Ryanair who claimed:

“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”.

Suddenly, the mainstream news had the perfect hook and coverage appeared in The Times and Telegraph.

While Ryanair have decided that the blogosphere is not for them and that it is not in their interest to engage with bloggers and customers online, other airlines have embraced blogging and proven that there is significant value spending time on social media engagement while still managing to keep the cost of flights down.

American domestic budget carrier Southwest Airlines are well known for their widespread use of social media. They have a online social hub called Nuts about Southwest that acts as a platform for all their social engagement channels such as blogging, flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. And while they are taking on a plethora of social media channels, they appear to be using them extremely successfully.

They’re engaging their 13,272 Twitter followers by providing customer support and requesting customer feedback while promoting special offers. Their blog has helped them gain valuable customer feedback on proposed service changes and their Facebook fan page contains over 63,000 brand advocates that are engaged in suggesting new routes and sharing photos of their travels with Southwest.

It’s not just Southwest that are at it. British Airways are busy on Twitter providing flight status updates and tipping off readers about special offers.

While Ryanair believe engaging in social media and providing cheap flights are mutually exclusive, there is evidence from other carriers to suggest otherwise and who can put a price on good customer service and brand appreciation.

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For around 40 minutes (Google’s calculations) on Saturday afternoon (GMT), or for more than 90 minutes (various users’ calculations), every search result offered by Google came up with a warning that “This site may harm your computer”.

This warning – that was displayed on all sites, even the UK’s government homepage, Wikipedia and Google itself – came up on all browsers and each local version of Google. The glitch affected Google’s organic results but the sponsored links still went directly to their landing pages. It appeared to the user as though all the sites contained some sort of malware that would install itself on your computer, but Google has come out and said that it was merely human error.

Google’s Marissa Mayer wrote on the official Google blog: “What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message ‘This site may harm your computer’ if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods.

“We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.”

While all sites temporarily came with a warning that may have diverted traffic away from them, stopbadware.org was inundated with visitors trying to find out what was wrong with their favourite sites that caused the security site to crash.

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Last month, however, Google jumped from 65.9% up to 72.1% according to a recent report by Hitwise. The jump could be Google clearing the last few hurdles as it jumps towards a complete monopoly of the search engine marketplace.

According to the Hitwise report, all of the other search engines have seen their market share fall in the last 12 months with the deserters it seems moving to Google. Yahoo dropped from 20.9% to 17.8%, while Microsoft and Ask dropped 7% and 4% respectively.

With Google dominating the search market, more and more businesses will increase their AdWords spend in an effort to reach customers. With customers regularly moving over to Google, the AdWords marketplace will become even more crowded, increasing the cost of advertising on Google.

The big question remains on whether any of the search engines have a chance to at least compete with Google. 2008 was an exciting year for search with the launch of several new engines, and the near merger of Google and Yahoo and 2009 looks likely to be just as exciting.

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Microsoft has revealed that it has detected attacks against IE 7.0, but has said that the underlying vulnerability is present in all versions. The company is working on an emergency patch but because hackers found out about the flaw before Microsoft there have been reports of between 6000 and 10,000 websites being compromised.

So far, the majority of the attacks have been on Chinese websites with criminals looking to steal passwords for computer games before selling them on.

While Internet Explorer is the default browser for most computers, experts have suggested that IE users look elsewhere for a was to surf the net; Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari are not thought to be vulnerable to the identified flaw.

The advice comes just days after Microsoft released its biggest batch of fixes in five years – attending to 28 bugs, including 23 critical vulnerabilities. They are currently looking into the issue and hope to release a fix outside their monthly updates. Microsoft is recommending users follow the “Protect Your Computer” guidelines that include enabling a firewall, making sure software is up to date and installing anti-virus and anti-spyware programmes.

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Oleg Teterin, president of Russian mobile ad firm Superfone claimed that he was not planning on chasing down individual users of the emoticon: “I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder”.

Teterin claimed that “Companies will be sent legal warnings if they use the symbol without his permission”.

It is unclear as to whether he plans to punctuate said letters with his new trademark.

Mr Teterin points out that companies wanting to use the emoticon can obtain an annual license: “It won’t cost that much” he said, “tens of thousands of dollars” causing some companies to feel

Teterin is not just stopping at he believes that , and look like his trademark and therefore could also be owned by him.

The BBC report that Alexander Malis, from the firm Vympelkom, plans to get back at Teterin by trademarking brackets.

Surprisingly, this is not the first time such a case has emerged in Russia. In 2005 a Russian man sued Siemens for using luckily, Siemens’ appeal was upheld.

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As of yet Google has not created a separate section for magazines and searches are currently performed through the Google book search.

As this is still a new feature, Google has only scanned a few publication and some of the most popular have yet to be added. Top of the wish list will be Time magazine, but considering Google’s image deal with the company it is likely we will be able to see some back issues soon.

According to the Google blog, magazine articles will soon be appearing in search results although this is something to happen in the future. Some of the most popular magazines to be archived include Men’s Health, the New York magazine and Popular Science. The magazine search currently features issues from as far back as 1872 to as recently as October 2008.

This new addition to Google’s archive of information could be very useful, particularly for researching a topic, and their inclusion in the SERPs will make things more interesting.

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