From Tom Watson’s intern, to Ed Miliband’s “Blackbusters tweet”, to Anthony Weiner’s weiner we are getting increasingly used to political slip-ups in social media. However, it is celebrities we really need to worry about, as they encourage their adoring fans to do all sorts of thins mad, bad, and sometimes outright dangerous things via social networks (usually Twitter).
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How cool is this? I dream of one touch pizza. We’ve all been there – empty fridge, bare cupboards and no desire to trudge down to the shops after a hard day’s work. Pizza companies have come up with plenty of easy ways to order a Margherita, from texts to websites – but Red Tomato Pizza has bested them all with a Bluetooth fridge magnet that’ll order up your favourite slice with one click. Read More »

Once seen by many as a mere blip on the landscape when it came to influence, bloggers are now looming large on the stakeholder landscape and they are becoming increasingly prominent as this area of the social web matures.

As part of our What’s Next series of events we were keen to find out from bloggers where they see the future of blogging so we played host to the London Bloggers Meet Up.  Read More »

The Econ0mist has proven itself incredibly successful on Facebook and very adept at engaging people on the social network. Testament to that is its passing the one million fans mark.

The one million strong milestone highlights not only how well it has done, but also how much bigger it is on Facebook when compared to its rivals. It has more than twice as  many fans as Time and the Wall Street Journal for instance. Read More »

In the run up to Apple’s 36th birthday, it was founded on April Fools’ Day in 1976, Unruly Media has put together a ranking of the most-shared Apple videos of all time.

We’ve pulled together the top 15 here with most created by TBWA\Media Arts Lab. There are  a lot of iPhone 4 ads, but there are also some classics here too including “1984″ and “Think different”. Read More »

Weeks after its initial release the Kony 2012 video, from the small campaigning organisation Invisible Children, which aims to bring Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony to justice for crimes against humanity, still tops the viral charts and has now racked up more than 86 million views, but can it happen again?

Invisible Children co-founder Bobby Bailey, who left the charity in 2009, has created another film that focuses on the mothers of the child soldiers who are often too scared to return home because of reprisal fears. Read More »

As Facebook announces advertising for mobile and brand pages change to the new Timelines format, how can marketers make the most of these changes?

At the end of February, Facebook announced big plans for its mobile platform. It’s unsurprising that Facebook is keen to make the most of its mobile platform, as more than 450 million people use Facebook Mobile on a monthly basis. More importantly, mobile is outgrowing desktop use on the social network by two-to-one. As such, Facebook has planned a variety of mobile-centric product announcements this year. Not least, was the news that the Timeline-friendly format already available for users’ profiles would now be available for mobile brand pages, and companies will now be able to advertise in mobile news feeds through Sponsored Stories. These game-changing trends mean that marketers have a great opportunity to reach users on their smart phones in 2012. Read More »

Is just listening enough or should brands be using their findings to communicate to those they are listening to?

Brands and business are facing a variety of challenges in entering the world of social media – an industry designed for the consumer. So how can the consumer be sympathetic toward their difficulties, when all they see are companies such as Coca Cola asking them to ‘Like’ or ‘Retweet’ their latest viral of a man banging a drum produced by Calvin Harris? What’s the relevance of this and why do consumers need to interact on their level?

It’s simple to ascertain that brands are trying to create awareness within sub cultures so they can appeal to the masses. This is what they know and how they are used to engaging the mass consumer audiences. Read More »

This post is provided by our partner Headstream, the social brand agency behind the Social Brands 100.

Mobile network Giffgaff, it could be argued, was born social.  It’s a fully independent network run in part by its community. Members are rewarded for contributing to customer service, product development and growing the community, receiving rewards in the form of airtime, cash or a charitable donation. Giffgaff was one of the top 5 brands in last year’s Social Brands 100, and number 1 amongst telecoms brands. We spoke to CRM Manager Claire Kavanagh about how social has moved on since then.

Q: What are the most significant changes you’ve seen in social over the last year?  Can you tell us a little about what you’re doing differently or have you found an approach that is working for you? Read More »

It’s not a major surprise that UK consumers are spending huge proportions of their spare time online. According to Experian Hitwise data UK Internet users made 2.2 billion visits to search engines in February 2012 and this figure continues to grow.

What’s interesting to us as marketers, however, is the back story. When we delve deeper we can see that consumer behaviour is changing in reaction to the booming quantity of content available to them. Read More »