We looked for interesting people to follow – and not just from the world of Pest Control – but based on a variety of factors; their biographical information, location and tweet content, which are all publicly available. This search process is a manual search process and every person is looked over for appropriate content. A simple program was then used to enable a follow of the people manually selected. This has now been stopped.

In retrospect, it feels as though we may have been a bit clumsy.  Twitter really is a new way for us of communicating with people and we are bound to make mistakes along the way. While some of the feedback has been painful, it also feels valid and we have learnt from it.  We will stop following anyone who wishes us to.  Just let us know.

Once more, we want to apologise to anyone who feels it has affected them. We have learned the hard way and will be working hard to get it right.

Learning The Hard Way! is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

I thought it might be helpful to explain how we arrived at the numbers and where things went so wrong.

We had tested our new Entotherm technology on a bus and various buildings during the last three years of its development. So, when asked for a worst case scenario situation, we based our hypothesis on:

• A bus, or anything else, being left by itself in an isolated place
• With no external factors to affect the mortality rate (so the population would be left unchecked)
• Then we assumed that there is a perfect male to female ratio that allows optimal breeding numbers
• That the environment would be controlled to a constant temperature, with no extremes
• Finally, there would be a plentiful food supply to support the numbers of insects

On the above totally theoretical basis it’s possible that very high numbers of cockroaches and bed bugs/fleas could survive, although it’s clearly a worst case scenario.

Now, obviously real life is not a hypothetical model. There are loads of contributing factors that would affect any insect infestation. For example regular cleaning, people unwittingly stepping on insects and, as in real life, there is not a perfect male to female ratio! All of which means that, in our experience, it is very rare to find heavily infested buses, trains or other forms of transport in the UK. Standards will vary around the world but UK standards are very high.

The point of the story was about a new process we launched – and are very excited about – to combat bed bugs and cockroaches.

We’re really sorry that the numbers that appeared in the media were wrong and misleading and we’ve put in place a number of measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

If you are interested, the original press release can be viewed here.

Our Recent PR – A Clarification And An Apology is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

I have had 18 different job roles in my time with Rentokil, completed my Pest Control Technician’s training, learnt skills that I had previously not heard of, and travelled to places in the world that I would otherwise only have dreamed of… but more of that and some of the associated tales another time.

In 2006 Rentokil invested in the development of a web site that was to be used as the template for our sites throughout the ‘Rentokil world’. Following the successful launch of this new site in the UK in early 2006, it was “suggested” to me that I might “like” to take responsibility to roll the website out in all the other countries we operated in.

The brief seemed simple enough to a novice such as me (but little did I know):

• Take one website of +/- 100 pages and approximately 20,000 words
• Localise it for each country
• Translate it
• Launch it

Germany came first, followed by Spain and Portugal and all three built as static sites and even before they were all live we were making urgent amends to the UK site and V1.2 was born!

Part 2 of the ‘brief’ then kicked in – “Be 1^st in Google for our primary search term in the UK”. At that time we were then on the 77^th page, i.e.  approximately 770^th. 3 months later and Version 1 was in 4 countries, version 1.2 in 1 country, version 2 was under development and we were on page 60 for our primary search term in the UK.

TLAs (three letter acronyms) have become a huge part of my life; not just CMS but SEO, SEM, php, HTML (ok and a four-LA too), CSS, xml and asp are just a few of the things I now dream about.

Let me leave you with your appetites whetted for more exciting facts and figures on ‘The Life and Times of rentokil.com’ by saying that we are now predominantly No. 1 for our key search terms in the UK and many other markets we operate in, our visitor numbers are mind blowing and the success of our web sites as enquiry generation tools phenomenal.

The journey has been many things; stressful, tear jerking, exhilarating, fascinating, uplifting, joyful, depressing, painful, awful and fantastic but NEVER dull.

Developing The rentokil.com Website is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog