Corporations fail web marketing 101

I am not going to say that web marketing is easy, but some corporations just seem to continually shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to promoting their brand online. Or at the very least they miss some great opportunities. So here is a friday round up of poor corporate marketing, branding, and usability to boot.

The first two instances of poor marketing come from David Meerman Scott. His first post is an open letter to Warner Music about having YouTube clips of the recent Led Zeppelin concert pulled down. As he mentions, they’re getting free advertising from people promoting this video. I would suggest that they could have gone a few steps further. They could have released their own, edited, branded YouTube videos. They could have taken fan videos and embedded them on a Warner web page where users could buy Zeppelin music and merchandise. The possibilities are really limitless, how could no one at Warner have thought of any of this?

The second post from Meerman Scott is about Delta airlines. Apparently Delta messed up David’s vacation plans forcing him to cancel flight arrangements. But even after he had cancelled his flight with them, they continued to send him emails about his upcoming vacation.

Here’s a library related one. Phil Bradley noticed that Highbeam Research had a nice looking newspaper articles and archives database that he wanted to try. Problem is that they have no information about the cost of the service. I chalk this one up to a more disturbing trend of database vendors not specifying up front the costs of their services. But even most vendors I look at provide some information about who I should contact to get more information about pricing.

This one may be more of a complaint a usability, but I think these things can be related. This season, me and a friend of mine bought season tickets to the Portland Trailblazers. They have a little fan site called iamatrailblazersfan.com (probably a bad url anyway). But the website isn’t very good either. I think it’s run by the NBA, so the Trailblazers might not have much control over it. When I was signing up for the service they had password reminders and security questions like every other site. But this is a site for basketball fans, why aren’t the security questions related to basketball? How about a security question for who my favorite nba player in history is, or which team I hate the most. After submitting my information I was supposed to receive a confirmation email. And I did… About a week after submitting my request it showed up out of the blue. Just inexcusable.

I think the team would probably be better off creating a Facebook group or application. Maybe this is something I can work on if I ever get some free time. But considering all the different social networking options available on Facebook, you would think some team would figure out how to leverage it to connect with their fan base. I know there may be some limitations regarding using Facebook this way for profit, but there must be some way around it.