BLOGSPOT:Despite the many testimonials from around the globe on how blogging can help business, good corporate blogs from Irish firms are still thin on the ground. Step forward, then, YouGetItBack.com (YGIB), the Cork online business that helps reunite lost possessions with their owners, which began blogging in earnest this month.
YouGetItBack.com
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YGIB sells small tags that you can attach to valuable items such as your MP3 player, laptop, house keys or luggage.
If they are lost and someone finds them, they contact YGIB via a freephone telephone number or over the web and get a €20 gift. Launched in 2006, it claims a 75 per cent return rate for lost items.
To support its business, it launched a blog "all about lost and found". The blog links to news and advice related to high-profile losses (eg, the recent loss of an army laptop in a central London club that contained details of 200 soldiers and their families), displays of people's honesty (eg, a link to WalletTest.com, a site which deliberately lost 100 wallets and videotaped the results) and quirky stories about found items (eg, a post about a lost mobile phone that turned up in a sack of potatoes more than 1,500 miles away).
While the blog has a nice light touch and isn't crippled by the corporate correctness of many company blogs, it also manages to raise important issues relating to data protection.
Managing director Frank Hannigan and his team also provide helpful tips on how to prevent against accidental loss or minimise the consequences if the worst should happen.
The blog isn't perfect. For a start, there is very little personality evident as the posts are written without any attribution.
And, having come racing out of the blocks with a flurry of posts, the worry would be that whoever is responsible for the blog at YGIB might run out of steam. With so few other Irish businesses testing the blog waters, that really would be a shame.
