A quick observation from earlier tonight, and a top tip if you’re posting tweets from a corporate twitter account. If you’re going to post a comment about something that’s not a normal topic for your feed make sure it’s correct.

It takes an #F1 pit crew 7 seconds to change 4 tyres and #refuel. Faster than the time it took us to uploadinstagr.am/p/KlBzeNifgU/

— Lucozade (@LucozadeUK) May 13, 2012

Don’t get me wrong, a great tweet, and I’m very jealous of the view the tweeter from Lucozade had of Lewis Hamilton’s pitstop….

….but refuelling during the race has been banned in F1 since the 2010 season, which is why their stops are now just around 7 seconds (provided the left rear wheel goes on properly).

So this post is a little ‘behind’. Shot at this year’s Virgin London Marathon Expo on the Saturday before race day on stage in the Past Party.

Virgin Active demo team

The nice people from Virgin Active UK were on stage Virgin London Marathon expo with their Demo Team.

The adidas fashion show

The legendary on-stage event from the London Marathon Expo, showing off the official souvenir clothing range (models not included with purchase).

(Unfortunately this is performance is actually one for the blooper reel, their adidas compares hadn’t made it to stage on time to introduce them!)

The nice people at the London Marathon have an interesting approach to letting you know, instead of posting you a letter or sending you an email – the print a whole magazine.

Thankfully it’s nice and easy to find the relevant bit of the magazine with the results in it…It’s the cover!

I must admit I’m relieved with the outcome!

Here’s a couple of videos that have been created to encourage men to check what’s inside their trousers for cancer. A topic that doesn’t really get enough air time in a world where men don’t really talk about what lives down there.

The most recent video is by the Male Cancer Awareness Campaign and features ‘Glamour Model’ Rhian Sugden including a slightly scary but “oh phew they’re not real” moment.

However, slightly less ‘naughty’ and featuring the lovely Rachel Stevens there’s this slightly older video from Everyman.

It’s obvious where these campaigns are targetted and I certainly think they work. Personally I think the first is a little close to the mark (we’re not all Page 3 obsessed you know).

I do get the feeling that MCAC said they wanted an EveryMan video to their creative agency but if it encourages more men to keep a regular check on things down there it can only be a good thing!

Seen lurking in the tub, He (and I’m reliably informed by Mel courtesy of the Alan Titchmarsh show he’s a ‘he’ because of the bulbous bits at the front) was escorted out of the bathroom window to go and terrorise someone else!

That’s me standing on Richard Branson’s right in the red ‘Virgin London Marathon Staff’ jacket.

I had the privilege of being in his entourage for the day watching him start the race, travel back to the finish to award trophies and on the Tube to the Virgin Money cheering zone.

So my small claim to fame – a photo of me is available to purchase on Getty (but no doubt I will be cropped out of it if it’s ever used!)

The original image is of course available to purchase here http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/112285026/Getty-Images-Sport

If you’re one of the people who’ve just goggled it and wondered why you’re looking at my website, hopefully this post will help explain.

A while ago I received a call from 0800 408 9340 asking if I would like to upgrade my Virgin Media service, with a fantastic offer that seemed a little too good to be true, so being cautious of these kinds of cold calls I decided not to take them up on the offer.

After the call I posted a tweet to @VirginMedia asking if it was genuinely their number.

@virginmedia Is this one of your outbound numbers? 0800 408 9340 - just had a call offering 2 months free XL tele is it genuine?

January 10, 2011 3:18 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@antonysimm

Antony Simm

And here’s my the response I got

@antonysimm Yep, that seems like one of ours. ST

January 10, 2011 7:57 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@virginmedia

Virgin Media

So it seems to be a genuine Virgin Media number.

My blog lists my latest tweets over there on the right, so while the above tweet was still in my feed, seems google indexed my blog.

I’ve just come back from a little winter holiday, flying out from ‘London’ Gatwick Airport. Investigating my route to the airport I did a little comparison between the Gatwick Express, and the regular Southeastern Trains. My conclusion was to book myself an offpeak open return on the Southeastern service (slightly cheaper, and almost as fast).

So I signed up to the Souteastern Trains website, and ordered my tickets, then sat patiently waiting for my email to arrive with my ticket collection reference.

The Email arrives, all seems good! Happy customer.

However, as from time to time  I have a little bit to do with sending emails from my place of work, I took a close read of everything, including the small print. I was surprised to see the email address they want me to add to my address book to avoid SPAM was xxx@xxx.co.uk!

Now don’t get me wrong, I want to make sure that my important emails don’t end up in the SPAM folder, but there’s no way I’m adding xxx@xxx.co.uk to my address book! I wasn’t aware I should be expecting those kinds of emails from Souteastern. The domain xxx.co.uk doesn’t actually belong to any particular website at time of posting, it’s one of those ‘parked’ addresses running automated ads for websites offering the sorts of things you’d associated with ‘xxx’.

I honestly don’t think this is intentional; I assume they added this email address as a place holder to be updated later. However there’s a golden rule for any pre-live development and testing that they may have forgotten when working on the email creative.

Don’t use any content or data in development and testing that you wouldn’t want to appear in live.

Irrespective of them not testing/proofreading it properly the email is live with the wrong information on it, if they’d used something info@southeasternrailway.co.uk it would still be wrong, but wouldn’t be embarrassingly wrong.

You should be able to see this yourself on any emails currently coming out from Southeastern Trains website so take a look. Screen shots of both my registration and ticket booking email are below:

I’ve reached out to Souteastern to let them know of their little error.