There has been a fair amount of coverage in the news recently about the reliability of Tripadvisor and the amount of twaddle talked on Twitter.

The negative publicity about Tripadvisor shook me to my very core. I very rarely book any hotel ever without feverishly reading the reviews and analysing the stats on Tripadvisor first. I’m what Alan Sugar would describe as a “Steady Eddie” – I’m risk averse. If I’m going to be spending money on a holiday and staying in a hotel then I need to be reassured that it is clean, comfortable, safe and conveniently located.

The reason that I was so distressed by the news is because I regularly leave impartial, factual reviews on the site myself. I like to think that somewhere out there, a Cautious Carole is booking her room safe in the knowledge that my words have put her mind at rest and that’s one less thing to worry about with the whole traumatic experience of travelling.

But if recent reports in the media are to be taken with the hysteria they demand, then nearly every review is either written (in one underhand way or another) by the hotel owners themselves or, on the flipside, by somebody with a grudge that wants to destroy a hotel’s good name simply because they weren’t given a free upgrade to a honeymoon suite. Or it could just be a rival hotelier trying to put his competitors out of business.

The difficulty facing social media is that the more people are using it, the more potential it has to bring in (or take away) new business for brands and therefore the higher the stake for the brand owners and the higher the temptation to influence what is being said about them in a clandestine way.

If genuine users start to suspect that a site is too heavily influenced with fake reviews they will eventually vote with their feet and look for an alternative that has not yet been compromised.

Personally, my experience of Tripadvisor has been very good to date so it is still in my list of “trusted brands” – unlike certain orange-themed “budget” airlines I could mention. If my reviews are genuine I like to believe that the majority of others are too – although it’s probably fair to say you are more likely to leave a review if you have either a fantastic or an awful experience and less likely to if it was just run of the mill.

Now onto Twitter: I have to confess I still don’t really get it.

Loads of my friends use it and preach its brilliance. Maybe I’m just a Luddite, but I really don’t feel the need to know that Cheryl Cole is going to the shops. Or not having a fling with MC Harvey.

There must be benefits – otherwise millions of people wouldn’t be using it. I’m pretty sure that when this blog is posted a tweet is set to automatically go out from WordPress to notify people, so I suppose that could be useful if anyone is actually interested in reading it. But being more of a glass half empty kind of person I’m always more aware of the pitfalls. Stewart Lee, the comedian, demonstrated one of these in a monologue a few years ago when he spoke about Ironik, the rapper:

“He was a tweeter and one Saturday last November, he twatted, which is the past tense of tweet. Ironik twatted that he’d bought a new diamond necklace and he twatted that he was on his way to Southend to do a gig, and then he twatted that he was on his way back to London, and then he got mugged outside his house. And now Ironik understands the meaning – if not the spelling - of his name.”

More recently, there was a case in the news last week about a guy called Leigh Van Bryan who inadvertently spoilt his (and his travelling companion’s) holiday to Hollywood before it had even begun when he was arrested at LAX and subsequently denied access to the USA. He was considered a potential threat by the Department of Homeland Security when he posted a tweet to his friends saying he was going to “dig up Marilyn Monroe and destroy America”… which, of course, he clearly wasn’t.

In the old days it was just so much more effort to be stopped from flying or barred from entering America. You had to literally walk up to a security official at an airport and joke with them you were carrying a bomb or something. Now though, when you share a tweet with your mates you better beware of the fallout, because the powers that be are watching and they don’t always have a sense of humour.

I’ll finish with some stats I read in Friday’s Metro:

Tweeters say that only 36 per cent of the tweets they receive are of any interest, about 25 per cent are actively disliked and the rest are instantly forgotten.

There are a few points of advice for tweeters here. I, however, will be choosing to ignore them altogether. I feel so much safer that way.

I thought I’d heard it all when it comes to companies trying new channels to publicise their brands, but it seems I was wrong.

British advertisers are clearly missing a trick, as last week I read that in Germany you can sponsor weather fronts in a scheme that the meteorological institute has been running since 2002 called “Adopt a Vortex”.

Unfortunately, the problem with weather systems is that they can sometimes be slightly more temperamental than you initially anticipated – as BMW recently found out.  “Cold Front Cooper”, which advertising agency Sassenbach named after the open-air Mini Cooper (citing it as a “wind- and weather-proof idea”), has been blamed for hundreds of deaths throughout Europe – and shows no sign of letting up.

Perhaps if the Mini Cooper’s target market was geared slightly more towards gun-totting, bad-ass gangsters it would seem more appropriate – but I think it’s unlikely that they are going to be winning too much new business from people who are aspiring to be “The New Ronnie Kray” – or maybe even just Derek Branning from Eastenders.

However, it gave me a brainwave for other new untapped marketing opportunities:  why not sponsor disasters – both natural and manmade? The amount of media coverage generated by these can be phenomenal. Here are a few ideas for brands wanting to win new business in the face of human misery:

• Hurricane Topseal Roof Replacement
• Flood Wetline Eco Dinghy
• Drought Evian
• BAE Systems Gulf War

I’m off to the patents office to register my idea now. Next stop Dragon’s Den.

There is no doubt that music changes the way we feel, and the way that we look at things. The beautiful girl on the tube looks 10 times more beautiful with Tarrus Riley – She’s Royal in your ears. So what effect does music in advertising have on consumers’ moods, attitudes, and behaviours?

My role as a New Business Manager has taught me a great deal about how we are marketed to. From research, to strategy, through to delivery of marketing campaigns, and more importantly the depths to which brands will go to tap into our emotions.

Over the past 5 years I have seen a growing interest in “emotional advertising” with recent trends in brands looking at things like behavioural economics at the research stage, which includes looking at the emotional factors in the consumer’s buying decisions.

Music has long been a huge factor in guiding emotional decisions in advertising, and these days it’s almost impossible to turn on the TV and not witness the marriage of music and commerce.

There have been many studies and theories on the emotional effect music has on our purchasing decisions, but perhaps one of the most popular papers on the the effects of music in advertising was Gerald J. Gorn’s experiment (Gorn, 1982). He paired a light blue or a beige coloured pen (neutral stimulus) with both well-liked and disliked music (unconditioned stimulus). 79% of the subjects chose the pen with music they liked – a conditioned reaction.

Music also enhances the recall for a product, even if the emotion evoked by the advert is hatred. Take Go Compare for example, it drives me insane but the brand is burned into my brain whether I like it or not.

Equally, a massive number of car advertisements we now see are 90% music. An inspiring piece of music is sometimes all it takes to stimulate us to feel something toward a car and associate it with a better way of life. An American advert for Honda Odyssey I came across does just that, and although I don’t have a driving license nor in fact any kids to need a people carrier, I can see how this ad would evoke a positive emotion with parents wanting life to be this serene when driving their kids about.

The emotional stimulus aside, products advertised are identified much quicker with a certain piece of music. In some cases it’s the music alone that makes the brand identifiable. Take Bach’s Air on a G String for example… Cigar?