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 »

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday boosting online sales further this year many UK consumers took to Amazon taking advantage of the bargains.

Amazon is famed for its excellent customer service, social reviews platform and all round positive customer experience. However our recent Testify Live study has revealed a worrying Social CRM trend that threatens to tarnish Amazons’ good name in their most lucrative period of the year. Read More »

Facebook has just published some fascinating lists looking at what millions of people have posted on Facebook during 2011. They call it “memology” and it takes the pulse of Facebook’s 800 million strong global community. Charlie Sheen captured people’s attention in March, when his trademark “winning,” “tiger blood” and “goddesses” memes took off. Later that month, military operations got underway in Libya, prompting a surge in status updates mentioning “Libya” and “Gaddafi.”

The marriage of Kate Middleton and Prince William dominated the conversation in April and days later it was  the death of Osama bin Laden, which became the most talked about event on Facebook for 2011. On May 1, almost 10 percent of all status updates in English mentioned news of his death. On a lighter note 2011 was also the year of “lms” and “tbh” went viral. Read More »

Just 14% of senior marketers in the UK indicate that their company has a fully integrated social media strategy, according to new data, while a majority of companies are either in their infancy or have no integration strategy at all.

The InSites Consulting study shows that in spite of low integration, social media adoption is high among UK companies, as about 70% have a Facebook page and 62% use Twitter. Read More »

As Twitter continues to look back over 2011 it has released a timeline charting the top Tweets Per Second (TPS) of 2011.

It is a list of the news as it happened, the live events and breaking news, and how millions of us came together to watch and share in real time via Twitter. Read More »

It is widely predicted that demand for streaming video will increase twenty fold in the next five years. From catching up on your favourite show on the BBC’s iPlayer, watching Telegraph TV or simply downloading a 30-second clip accompanying the day’s top news story, video on demand is everywhere.

A lot of effort and investment goes into producing that great music video or news clip. If, however, the video stream is not available, you end up with “dead air.” If the stream buffers repeatedly and users have to wait too long or too often, the result is poor customer experience and they leave. Read More »

For years, marketers have been aimlessly chasing fans on Facebook, but it’s time to step up and start driving real business results, a report by Forrester Research has advised.

A few weeks ago, I asked this question, effectively launching the first stage of The CRAPPs (Communicative Relations Awards from PR Professionals), a light-hearted PR awards scheme launched in 2010 to celebrate the often-fractious relationship between journalists and the public relations industry.

Well, I just wanted to quickly blog to tell you that the ten most nominated names in each category have been announced, in categories such as ‘The ‘most likely to tell you to sling your hook’ award and ‘Least twattish Twitterer – the must follow journo’ (with a separate category for ‘must-follow PR’). Read More »

Justin Bieber appears to own Twitter as his 15.1 million followers made sure he leads this top ten trending topics on Twitter 2011 list.

Although hats off to One Direction, the 2010 X Factor runners up make an appearance here as too. That’s like six degrees of Kevin Bacon via Twitter.

Although the boys are not anywhere near as popular as Women’s football, which as we already know sent Twitter soaring earlier this year and makes sure that the sport is in the overall number two spot. Read More »