Marco Bertozzi: 20.12.09
Only the other week I was writing about how Real Time search would impact a brand. I talked about the fact that real time negative PR would be presented on the first page of Google listings would make life difficult both for the company and for any attempts to carry out a PPC campaign alongside it.

Well Eurostar have done a brilliant job of bringing that to life for us over the last few days. Lets face it Eurostar has had a nightmare. Trains that are sensitive to the cold, people stranded, holidays and Christmas ruined, kids with no food, blacked out trains over night, it could not get any worse..or could it?

Yes it could if the company had no communications strategy in place, right from people on the ground to Twitter moderators or websites being updated frequently, they have broken every rule going, especially in the first day or so.

Twitter is filled to the brim with negative comments and no one has been in place to respond to them which just fuels the fire, how difficult is it? Answer a couple of questions, make an announcement or two. There is no excuse for how poor they have been. They do seem to have no paid for listings against the search term Eurostar tickets so someone remembered to pull all their advertising! Even here though, was there an opportunity to have put some notices of some sort? As it is a few random companies are wasting their budgets against paid for listings for the words Eurostar.