ClickZ has bagged a copy of an email from the Twitter sales team to prospective advertisers, which sheds light on how much the social network is pricing followers at.

The memo says cost-per-follower (CPF) rates for Promoted Accounts run at between $2.50 and $4 while cost-per-engagement (CPE) for Promoted Tweets rates are priced at from $0.75 to $2.50 (“engagement” refers to clicks, favourites, retweets and replies). Read More »

A report out today ranks the social media performance of the world’s most valuable brands. It puts Google as overall clear leader with Disney, Apple, Starbucks, Blackberry and Coca-Cola as runners-up.

The report also names and shames the bottom five social performers from the top 50 most valuable brands: Marlboro, Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and China Mobile all score poorly.  Others trailing behing include Gillette, IBM and Visa. Read More »

Often the reaction to social media is one of immediate defensiveness as it no doubt threatens “traditional” media with its trackability and threatens the ever-elusive “brand health” with its loud, wild, open environments of communities you didn’t create.

Of course the opposite reaction is the dive-straight-in-but-we’re-not-sure-why approach of embracing every channel. We’ve seen this dichotomy manifest itself in two ways in CMO’s, “I just want to retire before I have to learn this crap,” or, “Get me a Twitter account by 2pm because I read people are on that now.” Read More »

The shocking news is in folks. Despite ministers and sections of the media pointing the gnarly finger of blame at social media during the riots in London and elsewhere in England it was not at fault.

The study by the University of Manchester looked at 2.4 million tweets from the time of the riots and found that politicians and others were wrong to claim the Twitter played an important role in inciting and organising the disturbances. Read More »