Celebrities including the lovely Lisa Kudrow of ‘Friends’ fame, Alyssa Milano and Denise Richards of ‘Starship Trooper’ and Charlie Sheen fame have told AP what they like to tweet about.

Some like to set their followers a challenge while Kudrow talks about tweeting as her character @drfionawallice character in The Web Therapy show while Richards says she likes to use Twitter to dispell the odd rumour such as the one that she was “roasting Charlie”. Apparently this does not refer to the oven. Read More »

Having beefed up its communications team Twitter is on the hunt for a PR agency and is said to be in talks with a mix of large and small agencies with offices in New York, Ad Age reports.

The move follows the appointment of Sean Garrett, Twitter’s VP of communications, who joined Twitter last year. He is overseeing the search. Read More »

Sci-fi fans will recall this scene from 2002 film Minority Report: John Anderton walks through a mall, and as his retina is repeatedly scanned, 3-D posters sell their products and services directly to him by name. I recall thinking at the time that that reality (the film is set in 2054) really was a distant one but the headlines about facial recognition technology over the last few months have forced me to seriously reconsider my initial conclusion. Read More »

PETA, which is no stranger to attention grabbing campaigns (PETA ‘Baby P’ ad banned by ASA) or using sex to raise awareness (NBC refuses to sexually explicit PETA ad), is upping ante with its latest headlining grabbing idea: the launch of a XXX porn site designed to raise awareness of veganism.

And yes it will be putting actual adult content online, which is something it knows a little about having previously put adult stars Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey in a campaign talking about sex. Read More »

In my previous post I suggested that too many brands use social media marketing in a tactical rather than strategic way. Now I want to look at how social media can serve best when strategically leveraged to create customer value.

One of McKinsey’s frameworks for improving customer benefits suggests three areas of concentration: functional, process and relationship. Social media, as a mechanism to create customer value, can touch upon all three of these pillars and, by harnessing digital platforms and new ways of interacting with consumers, brands can create more value and as a result, willingness to pay. Read More »

It’s 2020. You’re standing in the Design Museum, musing over a new exhibition. You’re enjoying a cup of Intracoffecino (it’s a sort of reduced sugar, increased caffeine number, available intravenously, pumped directly into the side of your neck; it’s so the thing) and you’re doing the ‘gallery walk’ (i.e. bolt upright, furrowed brow, stepping softly heels first, one hand folded behind your back), homing in on the installation called ‘Websites as They Were’.

Your brow furrows a notch tighter as you read the little placard that hangs as a wafer-thin shard of light above a MacBook Pro. ‘The late 2000s saw many websites built around concepts with the IA addressed as an afterthought’. Read More »

The battle for the top spot in the Premier League of Facebook fan pages looks to be won before the season has really got going. With over 18 million fans, Manchester United are sitting clear at the top. The next closest rival is Arsenal with a respectable 7.3 million fans.

At this early stage, Chelsea and Liverpool are in with a shot for second place with a respectable 6.9 million and 6.85 million fans respectively. Read More »

Wow this one is a corker. Whoever gave this the go ahead or dreamed it up? After being hit by a social media wave of protest Nivea has pulled a print ad for its “Give a Damn Campaign” for obvious reasons. Its has clear racist overtones. Take a look.

In the ad (below), a buff young, clean shaven, black man is seen, throwing away his former Rastafarian head accompanied by the line “Re-Civilize Yourself”. It might as well say get off crack cocaine and leave those gang bangers behind. I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but that is how it is playing online. Read More »

Drawing a line between the traditional web and the social web is increasingly irrelevant.  The new web is the social web.  Much of the driving force behind internet usage right now is the desire to interact and share with others, and to gain a tailored experience that’s relevant. Increasingly, more and more of what we do, write or post is no longer private; and to an extent we’re re-thinking our position in terms of what actually needs to be private. Read More »

What is the number one question people are always asking on Twitter? Yes you got it why did you unfollow me? Some great suggestions of why this might ahve happened to you in this Psychology of Twitter infographic. Apparently it is because you tweet way too much.

There are some great stats here and questions in here such as how many updates a day constitutes over sharing? A real social media crime. You look at some professioanl social media types and you just want to say please be quiet and stop inserting the word ME into your tweets.  What else? The best way to get someone to, is of course, to RT, but what are best and worst things to RT? Some good suggestions here, enjoy. Read More »