Category Archives: social media

Jul 05 2010
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social media, social networking

What’s all this noise about?

Social media is often met with scepticism when you’re trying to entice a client into their brand interaction world online. The majority don’t want to poke their head above the parapet for fear of being shot down in flames by their consumers, but really it’s not that scary if you approach it in a sensible way.

Start with monitoring what people say about your brand, you can subscribe to services such as Brandwatch to do this. Companies like this will gather data from all different types of blogs including micro blogs like twitter, plus larger blogs like WordPress and Blogger. It will also gather information on your mentions from video and image sites like YouTube and Flickr plus social networks and news sites to name but a few.

Once collected the data is cleansed and analysed for you. By subscribing to a brand monitoring service you will be able to filter through all the online noise and establish who is saying what about your brand including what they’re saying, where they’re saying it and how often. Is it positive or negative? Are other people responding?

By understanding the platform of social interaction surrounding your brand you will be better placed to engage in a considered and appropriate way.

If you’re still not sure most services such as Brandwatch offer a free trial or demo so have  look around and see who’s talking about you.

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Jun 09 2010
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Interesting stuff, Interesting things on the vine, Mobile, social media, social networking

Foursquare: The Facts

Foursquare was founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai.

Foursquare is a location-based social networking website and game.

Foursquare is built primarily for smart phones.

Foursquare has more than 600,000 people checking in at this moment in time.

Foursquare grew more than 10% during one conference (SXSW). That hasn’t been done since Twitter.

Foursquare employ 16 people. The square root of 4 is 16… See what they did there?

If you want to know more, check out their blog.

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May 05 2010
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Client questions answered, Media, social media, social networking

Is social media right for my brand?

I get asked this A LOT!

Today was no exception. Social media has fundamentally altered online marketing by opening up the way that consumers can share information, create information and ultimately therefore, add or take, value from that information.

Your brand is no longer in your control online, the conversation is happening but the question clients are afraid to answer is whether they should be a part if it…

The hype that surrounds social media can make it difficult to distinguish which factors will effectively integrate into your overall strategy, but with the right strategy in place it can revolutionise how you communicate with your consumers.

The key to success is the approach. Setting up a Twitter page or Facebook page and asking people to follow your brand or ‘like’ you won’t work. To effectively cut through all the noise your brand needs an informed social media strategy.

Carefully considered insights, best practice case studies and real-time monitoring of your brands buzz will help inform how to implement the most effective social media activity in line with your wider marketing plan. With ongoing monitoring of the conversations sparked online you can then build upon this to inform your brand decisions moving forwards, this information has proved invaluable to thousands of brands already.

I will say again though it does need to be planned, failure to effectively target your consumers can leave you open to ridicule across the web, so I guess my answer is; Social Media can be right for your brand if planned and implemented in line with a relevant and considered strategy. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon for the sake of it.

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Apr 30 2010
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Search, social media, social networking

What does Facebook publish about you and your friends?

Facebook privacy has been a hot topic for a while now, it’s certainly something I get asked a lot about by those not too familiar with the privacy settings.

Because the settings are too ‘hidden’ or difficult to understand for a vast amount of users, the result is a lot of personal information being publicly available which some users might not want air.

Coupled with the fact that Facebook aren’t particularly forthcoming with how to use the privacy settings it’s no wonder there’s still nervousness around a social network that equals the 4th biggest country in the world.

So if you really want to find out what people can publicly see then here’s a handy tool to help you. This tool requests all data from Facebook’s new api to see what information is available, you simply enter your Facebook username, name, email address or a related keyword and it will display all the information  publicly available.

Be warned you might be suprised at just how much is broadcast…

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Apr 30 2010
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social media, social networking

Wave 4 is on the horizon

Microsoft have announced the arrival of the latest version of Windows Live Messenger “Wave 4”.

It’s the latest way to collaborate all your social networks, video chats, photo sharing and cloud integration (similar to Facebook Connect) plus it offers integration with other websites so you can share your thoughts with your friends wherever in the virtual world they are.

Video chat comes in HD, the navigation is tabbed and easier to use – meaning multiple flashing windows are a thing of the past – plus it’s available for download for the Windows Phone 7 and iPhone. The beta version should be launched this summer. If you can’t wait that long to find out more the watch this video.


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Apr 22 2010
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Interesting stuff, social media, social networking

Pandora marries Facebook

Soooo…the top online radio service and the world’s largest and most successful social network have solidified a plan for domination of the virtual world.

It seems that you can share music with your friends with no catch (really?) and integrate your Pandora and Facebook accounts without a real-time irritating update of what you’re listening to (really… really?). Pandora pay the license, facebook opens it up…

There are countless other similar music services but if you do the basic math, Pandora + Facebook = bloody easy way to get the music/ life balance.

Following on from my earlier post (which didn’t quite work thanks to the lack of ‘Like’ widgets for WordPress) Facebook will include ‘Like’ buttons which users can embed on other websites, by doing this Pandora can then provide you with the most update musical trends based on what you ‘Like’. Easy peasy.

It’s early days but I guess we’ll find out soon enough whether this genius partnering will come to fruition.

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