How you do claim a piece of some of the web’s most valuable real estate for your very own? Being famous helps (a little). Famous and suddenly dead helps (a lot). Having your own reality TV programme is almost a sure thing, even more so if you happen to kick the bucket.

But for the rest of us, how do we, er, influence Twitter’s trending topic list?

Here’s a great piece about Twitter’s shrewd trends algorithm by NPR, which, frustratingly enough, gives us a reasonable answer to the almighty question: Read More »

I was speaking to my good friend @RobinRobson yesterday and as usual we got onto the subjects of Twitter, small businesses, corporates, banks, retailers, UK economy and supermarkets ripping us off… it was a long call….Within that call, I made the statement to Robin that I have always and continue to believe that Twitter is a game changer for small businesses.

So why do I say That? Traditional marketing ie radio, TV, billboards, newspaper etc… is all about who has the biggest and deepest pockets. Whoever can pay for more air time, more seconds at the Superbowl, more TV advert time will usually win the game. So in the traditional marketing sense its all about how much of a marketing budget you have. Read More »

Kraft’s European vice president of marketing, Daryl Fielding, was recently quoted as saying “don’t forget customer needs in the rush to digital”, and for me this serves to highlight some of the problems that marketers face as they look at new technologies to help them deliver their messages to more and more people as effectively as possible.

It’s often far too easy to get caught up in the bright lights of digital, but marketers have to look closely at what they are doing and the “new media” channels that they are using, and ask themselves whether they are really delivering in the way that traditional media are? Yes, digital is by its very nature extremely measurable and has changed the way we look at many other media channels, but sometimes the numbers can be distracting. Read More »