No, I’m not about to paint rosy scenarios. Nor am I adding a new acronym to the already murky waters of social media metrics. Neither am I a self proclaimed social media evangelist, and nor do I belong to the abundant cadres of social media experts proliferating across the world, tirelessly giving birth to newer and more veracious types of metrics to measure (and make sense) of social media performance.

But what I am definitely attempting to achieve here, is to plant a few seeds of thought in your mind on how to work with a few simple, yet elegant performance parameters in the glamorous (and cacophonic) world of social media. And that leads me to ROSS. Read More »

For those keeping track at home, the value of a Facebook fan can vary wildly— depending on who you’re asking. It has been put as high as $136 a head, to $3.60 (as I blogged last year) or well according to some it is zilch.

I like Jim Edwards from Business Insider’s take on it. He said calculating the ‘value’ of a Facebook fan to an advertiser has become the social media equivalent of asking “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

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Barack Obama’s team has moved onto Google+ adding to Twitter, blogs, Tumblr, Facebook and Foursquare as some of the social media places you can find the president of the United States as he runs for re-election in 2012.

It has taken them a little longer to arrive than you might think (Ed Miliband’s team joined in September), but the Obama social media team has clearly been having the same issue as the rest of us are having with Google+. What are we going to do there that is different to what we do elsewhere in social media? Read More »

An interesting post from another Twitter staffer who has left the company adding to a couple of recent stories, which suggest the fast expanding social network is experiencing considerable growing pains.

Recently a slew of senior staff left in quick succession including its head of marketing, Pam Kramer, and top two PR people, Sean Garrett and Lynn Fox.

This time it is an engineer who is off and in a blog post he says things are not entirely hunk dory at Twitter. Adrien Gaarf posted that while working at Twitter has been an amazing experience he said it had also been “a difficult, painful, and conflicted” one as well. Read More »

New ad for Samsung Galaxy S II shows urban scene kids with delusions of creative greatness (who are actually baristas, apparently) queuing for the latest iPhone. It goes on to show people outside the queue who already have a great phone with 4G and a big, bright screen. Read More »

This morning I noticed Google have started to try and make sense of the disorganised world of Facebook brand pages. If you punch a brand name, like say, Nike, and accompany it with Facebook, you should find something like this appears.

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Everyday we’re experiencing the internet evolve into a social ecosystem, one in which people frenetically communicate, logging on every day to share content and have discussions with friends, families and colleagues.

Even Facebook has observed that the rate its users are sharing is increasing exponentially. Mark Zuckerberg recently explained that the average Facebook user is sharing twice as much today as they did a year ago, with four billion ‘things’ being shared every month. Read More »

Is the infogaphic over? Well here’s this videographic, the first we’ve seen, that takes a look at Twitter. It looks at how and why people got into Twitter, who they follow, and how they get new followers.

There are lots of good stats here including that more than 40% of us follow Lady Gaga, which explains why she has 16.2 million followers.

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The UK is head and shoulders above its continental counterparts in mobile uptake, according to new comScore data, as 35% of UK mobile users access social networking sites on their phones, compared to the European average 23%.

Mobile social networking use in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK nearly doubled in the last year, with 55m mobile users accessing Facebook, Twitter, etc., in September alone, according to comScore’s MobiLens study. Read More »

I think everyone is being a bit mean to Google. Yeah, that’s right. I think the community of social media / digital analysts have been very rash in their assessment of Google+ and its social offering.

Google+ is the new kid in the playground and everyone knows they’ve got exceedingly rich parents; this is a back-foot start straight from the off. No one wants to focus on the functionality, no one wants to talk about where it fits and no one wants to let it find its feet. Read More »