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Here’s a round-up of the things that impressed us, sparked our curiosity, and made us laugh last week.

The thing we most want.

The trusty mouse and keyboard combo have served us well for the past few decades, but it seems our dreams of Minority Report style gesturing are finally a reality.

http://leapmotion.com/

An innovative use of a QR code (just when we all thought they were dead)

The same technology, used in an interesting and innovative way. When empty, the glass looks like it’s etched with a fancy pattern. Once filled with the black stuff, it becomes a useable QR code which is fully integrated with social channels.

http://www.psfk.com/2012/05/guiness-qr-code-pint-glass.html

An immersive 360 degree experience, on YouTube.

Whilst you might not appreciate the music, it’s hard to deny the 360 degree, multiple camera-angled views available on some of 02 Academy’s live music videos aren’t impressive. It’s great to see the evolution of YouTube as a platform.

http://www.youtube.com/o2academytv

Yet another incredible Google Doodle.

Google continue to impress with their doodles, and this one’s up there with the best (including our Freddie Mercury doodle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe0gIFxYhrk though we may be biased…) It celebrates the birthday of Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog Synthesizer. We possibly enjoyed this a bit too much in the office…

http://www.google.com/doodles/robert-moogs-78th-birthday

A song dedicated to the Facebook IPO. Yes, really.

Amongst the bombardment of IPO articles, news and rumours, it’s nice to take a step back and enjoy some absolutely ridiculous musical nonsense.

Yesterday, we launched ‘FoodBeats‘, an online music tool for Lurpak® in partnership with Last.fm. And what better way to celebrate than use the tool just how we intended – by creating some culinary delights and listening to some tunes!

As we’re not fortunate enough to have an oven (microwaves really don’t count), we bought in a variety of ingredients, and challenged the office to make the perfect sandwich.

What did we learn from the experience? Well, it’s pretty difficult to prevent a free-for-all when you’ve got 60+ people trying to make themselves a sandwich. But most of all, FoodBeats really is great for providing the soundtrack to your cooking (or sandwich making) experience. Thanks to Last.fm, some pretty awesome tunes came up on the playlist. No more butter-covered fingers all over the laptop keys as you search for a track!

While we’re on the topic of conferences, it seems like a good time to mention that our director Lloyd is also due to appear at this year’s Social Media World Forum next week.

The event is one of the highlights of the digital marketing calendar, so we’re very pleased to be a part of it. Speaking on the topic of ‘Social TV’, and the opportunities offered to marketers by the rise in internet connectivity among today’s audience, Lloyd will be explaining how to bridge that increasingly important gap between the worlds of television and digital. Important stuff in these fast-moving times…

Representatives from LG, Orange, Zeebox and Samsung will also be appearing to give their input on the subject, making this an all-star cast of speakers that’s not to be missed. There might even be free cake.*

The event itself takes place on Tuesday 27th March at Kensington Olympia, and Lloyd will be speaking at 9:40am.

To book a ticket or find out more details, simply click here.

Come along. You never know, you might just learn something…

*Free cake not guaranteed.

A few weeks ago we lifted the lid on some notable hashtag disasters that went down on Twitter over the past couple of months. As embarrassing as these were for the brands involved, by and large they were caused by internet naivety rather than genuine poor customer service, and as such the lasting damage was little more than a spot of wounded pride…. And the odd irreverent blog post.

Recently, however, there have been a spate of far more serious lapses in twit-judgement – ones that have generated real anger and resentment towards the brands in question and will take a lot longer to erase from internet memory. These episodes involve a brand being willfully obstinate and refusing to engage with the public over points of grievance, all ending in disastrous results…

The first instance involves the major gym operator LA Fitness, who recently found themselves at the centre of a public relations nightmare after The Guardian publicised the story of one of the gym’s former members who had fallen on hard times.

The member in question was a woman eight months pregnant, who had just moved to a house 12 miles away from the gym and whose husband had just been made redundant. The couple had been members of the gym for six years, but with the change in circumstances they simply couldn’t afford to maintain their payments. LA Fitness didn’t accept the excuse, and demanded a cancellation fee of £360 (even after much haranguing by the Guardian).

The result? The full force of the newspaper’s readership attacking LA Fitness publicly on Twitter, along with a campaign for existing members to cancel their membership as protest. Eventually the company relented, but not after untold amounts of damage to their public image and lost membership revenue. Not a good look for their social media team…

The second two instances are remarkably similar, which would suggest brands aren’t learning from each other’s mistakes. Within the space of a month, both H&M and Claire’s Accessories were accused of plagiarism over products sold in their stores. In both cases the companies feigned ignorance, with Claire’s going one step further and making the shocking decision to go on full media blackout. Needless to say, this did not help their situation.

The result? Again, a torrent of incredibly public abuse and complaints leveled at each brand for all to see on Twitter, not to mention coverage of the situation in untold national newspapers and media outlets. H&M eventually acknowledged their wrongdoing and agreed to a profit-sharing deal with the artist in question. The Claire’s Accessories debate is ongoing…

So what can brands learn from the online spills of these three companies? Above all, that in this modern age of digital conversation and increasingly transparent communication, good customer service must remain a priority. One disgruntled user can very quickly become an army of righteous indignation, and there is no telling how far things might spiral out of control if handled badly.

As a brand, your reputation is paramount; strip that away and your are simply trading air. With that in mind, keep your friends close, and your Twitter followers closer!

Twitter is great. It allows us (among other things) to keep up to date with the latest news, watch events unfold in real time and pass comment on them for the whole world to see. For brands it’s an invaluable resource, providing them with the means to easily converse with fans, generate buzz around their products and potentially reach whole new markets simply by word of mouth.

So far, so good. Until, of course, it all goes horribly, horribly wrong…

Recently there have been a few high profile examples of Twitter backfiring on brands – moments where the angry teeth of the internet are bared in all their grizzly glory, leaving social media teams wishing the earth would swallow them whole. But as these brands found out, when something goes wrong on Twitter there’s no getting away from it, it’s there for everyone to see.

The majority of Twitter-related brand jams are the result of a poorly conceived hashtag. In the mind of the brand it’s easy to see why starting a personalized hashtag might seem like a good idea; if it begins trending then that’s some of the best publicity the internet has to offer – all for next to no money. However, when looking through those rose-tinted spectacles it’s easy to overlook one very key factor: as a brand, you don’t get to dictate how the Twittersphere uses your hashtag.

Take the recent debacle surrounding Qantas Airways, for example. The Australian airline recently fell foul of its own #QantasLuxury hashtag in spectacular form, after it was hijacked by irate Twitter users looking to vent anger about its poor customer service and spate of grounded planes. The same later happened to McDonald’s, whose #McDStories tag was overrun with unsavoury anecdotes from unhappy customers and brand-baiting animal rights activists alike. Finally, in the wake of their spectacular collapse of service at the end of last year, Blackberry recently found itself on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse after it invited users to #bebold, and share their thoughts via Twitter.

The main problem in all three of these cases is that the brands allowed themselves to forget one of the golden rules of the internet: any skeletons in your closet can (and often will) come back to haunt you. In each instance it resulted in a profoundly embarrassing (and above all public) episode, and one that had to be openly acknowledged as a failure of marketing strategy.

Of course, that’s not to say brand hashtags always fail. Click here to see a rundown of some of the more successful ones nominated for an award at the SHORTY social media awards this year.

With this in mind, our advice to anyone considering the hashtag route of viral marketing would be to think long and hard before providing the internet with its own, unmoderated soapbox to voice opinion on your brand.

In the right circumstances it can work wonders, but get it wrong and you might just find yourself pushed off it…