Lastminute.com launched FoneFood today, its mobile restaurant finder. The phone service provides details and offers from 6,000 restaurants. But as they are spread across twelve countries that inevitiably means a lot of gaps up and down the land.
News of the launch came from another new venture from lastminute.com – their social media press office. And this was more interesting to me – given that I inhabit one of FoneFood’s big gastro gaps.
The new social media press room is bursting with youthful enthusiasm and proves its right-on credentials by inhabiting a regular Blogspot blog while pulling in the lastminute Twitter feed.
We hope that the site will become a resource for bloggers and journalists, providing the tools to research and write interesting posts. If you need any information about lastminute.com then this should become a first point of call.
Sounds good, except that one of its first proper outings – today’s launch – just reads like a regular press release with a YouTube video tacked on. Apart from the obligatory quote from the head of something or other, it was woefully light on the sort of detail you really need to “write interesting posts”.
A reminder to new wave PR that you will always need substance to go with your style2.0.
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Hi Neil,
Fair points about our launch. lastminute.com labs is a pretty new team, and we’re still working out how best to communicate what we’re up to, both to the outside world and occasionally within our own organisation! Although making YouTube videos has proven to be a fun way to get the team out of the office for an afternoon. We’re planning to use http://labs.lastminute.com as our primary publishing point, and if you have suggestions I’d be happy to hear them. As the year goes on we’ll also be launching various products that are more exploratory, perhaps as smaller trials or closed betas, or maybe just open to everyone to see what happens.
Thanks,
Marko
Head of Something or Other
(much better than my real title
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