Nokia's marketing team are idiots. They've used URL over which they have no control on an advert for one of their premium handsets.

This is the story of how I hijacked stole hacked recycled it and, in doing so, prevented Nokia from having a serious PR problem.

E7 Poster

This is advert for the new Nokia E7. It really emphasises the tweeting capabilities of the handset.

Nokia's marketing team have illustrated this by showing off a couple of tweets on the handset. One of which contains a Bit.ly short URL.

Here's the close up... it points to http://bit.ly/CYRWP

Being the curious chap that I am, I thought "Ooooh! I wonder where that'll take me? To some awesome Nokia competition page perhaps?"

So I typed it into my phone. Yup - the idiots in Nokia's marketing team didn't register the bit.ly link!

So, it was a simple matter for me to pop over to bit.ly, create a short URL pointing to this site, then customise it to say CYRWP.

Malicious Use

If I were a scallywag, I'd have pointed the URL to an Android website, or perhaps one of the less-than-stellar E7 reviews.

If I were nasty, I'd have pointed it to a malware page.

If I were a criminal genius (which I am not) I would have pointed it to a page which asked for credit-card number, email addresses, phone numbers, etc of people intetersted in buying / winning the handset.

I'm closer to scallywag than evil mastermind - so I pointed the URL to this blog post. Hopefully this page will serve as a reminder to Nokia's marketing team that you should....

Always check URLs before printing them on an advert!

Bootnote

Two other interesting things to note.

• The #hashtag in the pictured tweet isn't hyperlinked. Tsk
• The URL "CYRWP" is an anagram of "CRY WP". Are the Nokians in floods of tears over the death of Symbian and the coming rise of Windows Phone 7?