Belgian politics, Amazon Kindle & Product recalls

What do these have in common you might ask...

Nothing in fact. It is just that these 3 topics are pretty relevant to me for the moment.

Belgian politics:

I have been asked by Dominique Deckmyn, the editor in chief of the Standaard Online - the online edition of one of our national newspapers here in Belgium - to "cover" the elections from a social media point of view.

As from this week I am writing regular blog posts on the use or non use (or even misuse) of social media by our politicians in the context of the campaign. You can find the "Campaign blog" here but it is only available in Dutch (and the Typepad editing/formatting is not working very well...)

I must admit I am happy a real reporter is also on the job...  William Visterin, a seasoned journalist, brings the real insights to these stories and keeps me from stressing out.

So far I covered the Twitter use of several Flemish parties and discussed the social media power of Obama during his campaign.

De Standaard team has put together, with the help of a company called Nocus, a very nice overview dashboard of political social media activity in Flanders called the "Obarometer".

Would be great to have this at every election and for the whole country though...

Amazon Kindle

I just added this blog to the Amazon Kindle Publishing for Blogs service which was recently announced.

This simply means that anyone with a Kindle reader can now subscribe and read these blog posts as well.

But then I read this article on Techcrunch explaining how anyone can claim any feed or blog and publish it to the Amazon service and even earn money for it.

Incredible that they didn't include a verification process. In fact, I just claimed my blog feed but anyone out there could have done so...

Product Recall

The fire extinguishers from Pyromaster could explode...

Now I don't have any of these but imagine; you're trying to put out a fire and the thing explodes in your hand...

I received an email from one of their distributors, in this case Colruyt, alerting me of the danger and explaining me what to do in case I have one of those extinguishers.

In fact Colruyt is just relaying information from the Federal Ministry of Economy who issued the press release with all the info needed.

But if you check the Pyromaster official website you can't find any alert of information on the danger of their products.

Even when you click on the Belgian part of their website you're put through to a Dutch distributor which carries no information whatsoever about the product.

I can't understand that companies take crisis communications so lightly.

Pyromaster could make a difference here by informing their clients directly as well as via the government instances. At the minimum they should have an information page on their site.

Message to Silvia Dominguez, PR Manager of the group; update your website please and if you want to get a refresher on crisis communications and how social media can help - register here. ;-)