Women are quietly shaping the world of social media by using it, running it, and reporting on it. So on International Women’s Day it seemed apt to highlight a few women blazing a social trail in various ways. Read More »

Yesterday (7^th March 2012) the Advertising Standards Agency announced that it has decided not to uphold the complaints about the recent high profile Twitter marketing campaign for Snickers.

I’m sure most of you are aware of the back story of how Snickers, through its parent company Mars, arranged for five celebrities to make humorous but rather incongruous tweets in quick succession. Their initial tweets made no reference to Snickers, but contained content that you would never expect from that particular celebrity, and which therefore piqued followers’ interest and made some wonder whether the celebrity’s Twitter account had been hacked. Read More »

Interesting piece on the ‘Who’s the Mummy’ blog raising the question of how PR firms can get blogger outreach so badly wrong. It is one of the most important bits of social and digital PR and it can reap great results if done well, but you only have to talk to a few people to know that many agencies are not very good at it.

As Sally of Who’s the Mummy writes often PR agencies simply get the approach entirely wrong because they don’t have a strategy or an idea of what the conversation they should be having with bloggers is. Read More »

Facebook has admitted that as many as 5% to 6% of the accounts on its social network are fictitious or duplicates. That means more than 40 million of its 845m monthly active users are fake. Facebook gave the details yesterday as it updated Wall Street and filed an amendment to its IPO and added a further 25 banking firms to its roster of underwriters, including Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank, according to the FT .

It highlights one of the growing issues for all social media firms and that is of spam, which afflicts both Facebook and Twitter where at times it can see rife. Yesterday was a case in point as spammers flooded the FT’s media conference hashtag driving some users away. Read More »