Baden-Powell was spot on when he demanded his Scouts ‘Be Prepared’. I was reminded of that listening to Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 today. He had a 10 minute slot featuring the website Freecycle. This is a clever idea that’s rapidly spreading around the world – it’s like eBay but money never changes hands. If you have something you want to give away to someone in your local area you just post it on the site. And if you want something, again you just ask for it.

It was a really good bit of publicity on the show. There seemed to be no negative feedback from callers, pretty rare for the Vine show. It made me want to head straight over to the website – and that was where the problems started. First of all, despite three Freecycle representatives being on the show, there was no consistant website address given out.

And then when they did manage to work out what it was, the increased demand crashed the site so even Jeremy couldn’t get on!

I appreciate this is a voluntary website, but it’s a big site – and if they keep attracting publicity like this, they need to be on top of all the details.

What they should have done was this: 1) Agreed what the single website address was in advance (!). 2) Ensure Jeremy Vine’s producer gave him the website address, and then mentioned it themselves two or three times at appropriate places. 3) Ensure the servers were ready… Radio 2 has nearly 13 million listeners a week… that’s a huge potential audience heading to your site.