By Chris Gorell Barnes, CEO, Adjust Your Set
Follow Chris on twitter @CGorellBarnes
We have been saying here for some time that it is all very well building a fan base on Facebook, but quite another thing for a brand to interact with that fan base in a meaningful way.
This has come home to roost in the worst possible way with the recent Dr Pepper scandal of sending porn references to a fourteen year old girl in a Facebook status highjack campaign. Read More
Over the past couple of weeks there’s been quite a bit of buzz about Ben & Jerry’s dropping email in favour of social media. It stemmed from an email sent by their UK people to email subscribers, letting them know the monthly moosletter was being canned and asking recipients to fan them on Facebook. It’s not quite switching off email (they’ll use it still for special promotions) but it’s pretty close. According to the quite rightly other-side-of-the-story article, Ben & Jerry’s in Vermont isn’t following this particular herd, and will carry on regardless. Read More
Oh dear. Sarah Palin has come under fire for joining the mightily swollen ranks of those celebrities / well-knowns who manage to make mangling the English language on Twitter look as easy as eating breakfast in the morning.
Mrs Palin, who often utilises her Twitter account to interact with her 196,854 supporters, posted a message that called on Muslims to ‘refudiate’ a mosque planned as part of an Islamic cultural centre near New York’s Ground Zero. See the snapshot of the Tweet to the left there.
It’s not just Gillian McKeith who has been giving some unwitting but valuable lessons in how not to use social media. Now an historian, Orlando Figes, has agreed to pay libel damages to two other historians whose books were criticised by Figest via the Amazon review system.
Amazon: challenge of fake reviews
Figes’s case was quite extreme – not just saying that he didn’t like a book, but rubbishing the work and also mentioning how much better his own was, all while using an anonymous log in. Read More
While scanning through the various presentations from the 2010 Cannes Lions I was struck by how much digital media abounded, in particular online video and social. Digital media taking centre stage at Cannes has been on the cards for a while I know, but the trickle has most definitely turned into a flood.
With Google, Yahoo, Adobe and a range of other tech businesses attending, it must have been one of the geekiest summits to date. Some tech brands apparently realised that they are not exactly the sexiest in this space, with Yahoo! feeling the need to bring Ben Stiller along to liven up their party. Read More
In an interview with The Telegraph Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, has revealed that the location-based social service is in talks with the major search engines, hoping to strike a deal which will use Foursquare’s check-in information to enrich local search results.
The Times Online has lost two-thirds of its audience since putting up its paywall, according to Hitwise data – a figure that doesn’t tally with the doom-laden predictions of recent weeks. Read More
The latest social media campaign to create buzz in the online world came from the most unlikely of sources. Old Spice, the fragrance synonymous with the fathers and grandfathers of the world produced a great piece of interactive social media in an attempt to reinvent the brand in the public eye. Using a combination of YouTube and Twitter Old Spice produced videos in direct response to Twitter messages they received and posted them on their YouTube channel which rapidly became the most viewed in the video networks history with over 5.2m views.
Let me state it right at the beginning, I am a big fan of social media. Let me also say that for it to be truly powerful, it needs to be implemented as part of all company activities and integrated into the company’s culture.
Two items keep popping up – community building and hiring of social media specialists/community managers – that I completely disagree with and that will hinder the harnessing of the social web’s true potential. Read More
It seems a long time since the concept of social networking filled us with a sense of wonder or joy.
Facebook: rumours of new project
A few years ago it was all about how amazing it was that you’d caught up with your best friend from primary school, or could play Scrabulous with distant pals.
Now – especially when it comes to Facebook – it’s all about whether your privacy is respected and whether you’re being exploited by someone else making money from the content you’re providing. Read More
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