Former Oasis guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher says celebrities have wrecked Twitter by using it to try and sell to people.

He has a bit of a point. A fair few celebs do like to endorse, but fear not people the singer whose new single ‘AKA… What A Life!’ came out earlier this month (the acoustic version below is excellent) won’t be doing any hawking of his upcoming album in these social media parts as despite his vocal thoughts on the microblogging service he isn’t on Twitter although his brother Liam with 312,000 followers is. Read More »

One of social media’s greatest benefits to brands is the ability to scale up customer engagement for value creation. The most intimate and valuable type of interaction was until recently facilitated mostly by one on one engagements that demanded extensive human resources and expenditures. Now, powered by digital platforms, engagement reaches scale. Engagement via social media has more to offer than recruiting customers and driving sales.

It can help extend the customer life-time by creating loyalty, as well as optimise it by turning customers into advocates and enjoy additional leads and sales. And –finally, but potentially most importantly, engagement through social media can generate insights from customers, which can lead to better products and services. Read More »

Facebook users woke up in the middle of last week to find a slew of new changes when they logged-in to the site.

As with most changes made to the Facebook platform, the initial adjustment period has resulted in a wide range of opinions offered online. This should not be a surprise. With so many noticeable differences, things can quickly become overwhelming not only for users but also for marketers. Read More »

The Obama campaign is making great use of blogs to bring the voice of its supporters to life about why they are supporting the campaign and donating to help get Barack Obama re-elected next year.

The campaign is blogging some of the reasons why 552,462 people have so far donated in its first three months to raise more than $86m with an average donation of $69. Read More »

Everyone loves a good story. Some people read them in linear form, on pages constructed of actual paper (hey! old school!), occasionally raising a mug filled with tea towards their mouths, and making deep, guttural satisfied noises in the back of their throats.

Others consume the narrative piece-by-piece, in mini-snack form, as delicious nuggets of a character-driven plot, each bite-sized chunk squirreled away somewhere inside their phone, laptop, iPad or other carriers of media, until appetite comes calling once again. Read More »

Lord Sugar promised a Twitter first with the arrival of his new book and he delivered it as he staged what was dubbed the world’s first live Twitter book signing to launch ‘The Way I See It: Rants, Revelations and Rules for Life’.

The hashtag trended worldwide in the number one spot over 20 hours; saw around 350,000 tweets with the hashtag #thewayiseeit over the course of 24 hours; and over 2,500 rants directly to Lord Sugar. Read More »

Seven months ago I reported Google was taking aim and Adobe and IBM with the launch a paid-for enterprise analytics tool, which would compete directly with Omniture and CoreMetrics.

Indications from the web are that this tool will be rolled out later today. Read More »

I had a really interesting meeting at Google yesterday afternoon about Google+ and the role it can play for brands. Here were my key take-outs from the meeting. Read More »

With news that Twitter was last week was rolling out its first Promoted Trends campaign in the UK with Sky, following the news earlier in the summer that it planned to roll out Promoted Tweets in users timelines, many have been wondering how much this will all ad up to in terms of revenues?

Well the answer is in according to a report from eMarketer which is projecting that Twitter’s global advertising revenues will treble in 2011 to an estimated $139.5m up from $45m last year. Read More »

Facebook’s F8 conference threw up some interesting updates. While some of these in theory only apply to individuals rather than brand pages, if Facebook follows its usual form, they’ll be introduced to branded pages soon.

The most interesting (in my view) changes that brands should start thinking about sponsored stories and now apps are getting much more social. Read More »