Wembely

This (apparently from the Everton official club shop) really made me laugh, and you can see if you look at the reflection close enough that it's clearly not been Photoshopped.Indicative of how often Everton goes to 'Wembely'?

The birdman of Wythenshawe

I had the pleasure of spending yesterday with our social media 'tweam' in Wythenshawe (Manchester) as we work to grow our customer care presence in this area, which has been really well received by our customers.

One initiative we have been doing in Virgin Media for a while is a programme we call 'Acts of Random Kindness' where we do something to make a customer smile and cheer up their day if we get the opportunity to do so, and the tweam had a great example recently which I just had to share.

A customer tweeted this to @richardbranson (we keep an eye on tweets to him to pick up any from our customers):I don't see the issue myself, as it's suitably cheep!

The tweam then entered the banter, with Katie and the customer exchanging the following:
Katie's really on the ball and she wasn't flapping!

Following this and sensing the opportunity to make a customer smile, Jim from the tweam reached out to have the customer send some details in:
Once we had the customer details, the tweam sent out a little gift for Mr Darcy (great name for a parrot by the way - don't put me up in front of the beak!):
The customer (and parrot?) engagement seemed to be well received in response, proof positive that the team weren't winging it:
Apologies for the appalling puns. It's Friday afternoon and any opperchuntiy for a smile on an amusing brand engagement story can't be passed up :-)

Hussain Bolt

Chances are many people have seen our new TV advertising with Olympic athlete and world's fastest man Usain Bolt that debuted at the weekend to support the speed doubling programme we announced last week, which I've been working on for some time and am very excited by:
To support the advertising we also have cardboard cutouts of the man himself popping up around our offices, and from the one in our head office in Hook he seems to also like his TiVo:
One of the funniest things I have seen for some time though is an e-mail that went out from our local charity champions in the same office:
You might want to click on it for a larger version, but I've also zoomed in on the key part of the note that has caused much mirth:
At a guess it's probably safe to assume that whoever wrote that note wasn't in the ballot for 100m finals day tickets at London 2012!

Fernando Torres - any advance on a fiver?

I was in Kingston (upon-Thames that is, not Jamaica) on Saturday and I wandered past the Chelsea FC shop, where this very much amused me:I know he's been a great signing ... for Liverpool ... but surely he's worth a bit more than a fiver?

@virginmedia - 100k strong and growing!

Our social media customer care team have come a long way since December 2008 when I posted the first tweet from @virginmedia (or at least I did once we got the name off the user at the time!) ... in fact so far that they've just posted their 100,000th tweet:We're also on the cusp of 30k followers on Twitter (and we're also on Facebook) so why not give the team a follow and shout out if they can help at all?

Great work to Billy, Pete M, Sam, Michael, Pete S, Kyle, Ian, Dan, Sue and Shaun ... and for all the new joiners about to come on board and help us make it even better :)