Tech blogger Robert Scoble has posted some interesting thoughts about Twitter. He suggests it has suffered from being badly run and dropped the ball in terms of innovation.

He says it needs to get back on track and seize the initiative from Google’s new social service Google+. His piece echoes others that have been written recently that argue it is Twitter rather than Facebook that could be the big loser to Google+. Read More »

Its too early to draw any conclusions, but the The New York Times, which introduced its paywall on March 28, seems to be doing well with paying subscribers.

It has racked up around 224,000 digital subscribers as of the end of the second quarter proving that its readers aren’t running for the free content hills beyond its paywall. Read More »

This post is provided by our partner the Future Foundation, the leading consumer futures business.

The power of social networking – and the important position it has come to play in so many of our lives – has given rise to an entirely new discipline within marketing: that of the influencer.

To quantify consumers’ online influence, we created an index using our nVision Global research and then used it to gain an insight into who these people really are. First, we looked at how closely a selection of variables correlated with two statements: “People often come to me for advice in general” and “I’m always telling friends/family about new products and services I’ve discovered”. The variables in question included key factors like the propensity to share links on social networking websites, the size of personal friendship networks, willingness to talk about brands, self-perception of influence and strength of attitudes towards word-of-mouth.  By conducting several stages of factor analysis, people were then categorised as low/medium/high in terms of their influence. [Creative Commons image by Felipe Bachomo]

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