It’s been a while since I last posted, which is pretty bad, but I have good reasons. In June I took the plunge to the dark side and left the agency world to go and work client side. I was told pretty terrible things about being on “that side” of the business, but despite all the negative pessimists out there, I joined PokerStars in late June to become their Head of Social Media. So as you can imagine, it’s been a crazy few months but I decided that I needed to get back in the game & vent a little.  Read More »

Yesterday, Google announced their latest development in their social strategy with the integration of Google+, their own social offering, into their search results. Users, who are logged into their Google+ account, will now start to see comments from the connections appearing in the search results for relevant queries.

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

To say that the future of social media belongs to the mobile will come as no surprise to most. But it is unusual to find such a significant area of opportunity gift-wrapped in inevitability; after all, there is no retro in mobile communications – the upgrade cycle is built into pay monthly contracts. OFCOM’s Communications Market Overview report last year announced that 74% of handsets sold as part of pay monthly contracts were smartphones and, each time we get to the end of our contract, we inevitably move up to the next generation of handset. This endless sequence of upgrades is driving the increased use of the mobile internet too – at the end of last year, nVision Research told us that 27% of the UK population were using the mobile web at least once a month. By 2015 this will increase to 53% and will top 70% among the under-35s. Read More »

Earlier this year we got a call from pre-revolutionary Egypt, or bearing in mind the current events in Egypt (or when you’re reading this) then it may have been pre-pre-revolutionary Egypt or pre-post revolutionary Egypt. The call was from a big family-owned corporation in Egypt that was interested in getting us to quote for putting their restaurant portfolio online.

Whilst we’ve never worked with a client in Egypt, we do have many clients in the retail leisure sector and so I asked which of our client’s had prompted the referral. Strangely, they referenced a site for a restaurant called Aqua (www.aqua.com.hk) which in the footer has a big note saying ‘Designed by Urban Monk’. What galled me about this was that not had they managed to confuse the name ‘Aardvark’ with ‘Urban Monk’ but that he thought that we would be involved in what we consider to be, the most awful of websites . Read More »

Naughty, naughty. LinkedIn has decided to opt in its 100m users to a default setting where names and images can be used for third-party advertising, taking the lead from Facebook with its habit of quietly changing privacy settings with no rush to notify users. Read More »

Without a solid strategy, forays into mobile marketing and m-commerce could do more harm than good, warns Shane Leahy, Group CEO at Oxygen8 Communications.

With the accelerating proliferation of smartphones and tablet devices, there is mounting urgency for businesses to incorporate the mobile medium into their promotional communications and sales strategies. Read More »

While we had David Cameron yesterday, and wrongly, talking about banning social media what has been far more interesting is how it has been used as a force of good, which I blogged about here and here.

Something else that has emerged is how many different police forces in the UK have used social  media during the last week to keep everyone informed of this fast moving story. We’ve seen the Metropolitan Police tweeting away, as well as the Greater Manchester Police and the police in Sussex who put out this message praising social media and rightly painting it as a force for good. Read More »

This week’s riots across the country are causing a debate among the country’s leaders about social media and if these tools are at the core of the problem. Reports that the riots were primarily organized by BlackBerry Messenger, and somewhat with Facebook and Twitter, were revealed early by news media, and politicians jumped quickly into accusations against the services.

The Wall UK Editor Gordon MacMillan has written extensively on this topic already. He shows how social media has played a role of good and evil throughout the course of the week’s events. One shining moment I love has been the Twitter organized cleanup in Clapham, that attracted a few hundred people, with brooms, who followed the hashtag  #riotcleanup. Read More »

Speaking in the House of Commons today after parliament was recalled to discuss the English riots Prime Minister, David Cameron, used part of his speech to highlight the way that social media was used by rioters. He spoke about how the government would look into seeing if it would be right to stop them if they were using social media to incite violence.

He is taking his line apparently straight from the Sun and Daily Mail, which earlier this week blamed Twitter for fuelling London’s riots. It is a worrying sign. You can not regulate the internet or ban people from social networks. It is the wrong approach entirely. Read More »

Seriously this is toilet humour…but imagine for a moment what the world would be like if everyone gave a shit? MTV did and it produced this very amusing campaign starring Twilight actress Nikki Reed who keeps a straight face throughout

It already has thousands “giving a shit about all kinds of issues from poverty to blindness and aids. Read More »