This past 24 hours have seen the latest Twitter storm come hurtling through the social media atmosphere, sweeping up thousands before it in a big stinky cloud of outrage and bile. Not for the first time, the catalyst for the disgust was the Daily Mail, this time an article by Samantha Brick about “the downsides to looking pretty”. Whether or not they are cynically doing this stuff on purpose (1.5 million hits on one article is pretty impressive) is open for debate, but yet again they prove the sheer monumental snowball that can be created on social media if you do enough to sufficiently create the avalanche.  Read More »

There was a time when reaching your target market with a clear message was enough to sell products. Now brands need to create campaigns that have network appeal. This means creating ideas that can be shared in multiple iterations to fit within the audience’s ever changing world. But where do these ideas come from, how do you plan them and who should be creating them? Is there a formula for creating campaigns with network appeal?

Getting people to share your brand or campaign with their network is about two things happening together. Firstly, it’s about creating an idea worth sharing. Secondly, it’s about planning the idea’s distribution. Read More »

Last week we showed why Klout not only does not measure Influence directly, and we also argued that it also does not measure social capital as Brian Solis claimed for Altimeter in a recent report.

Now, whether Klout, PeerIndex and Kred measures social capital or status (as we believe it does), most marketeers are interested in the bottom line. Are these tools a predictor of a person’s capability to influence action? Read More »

Cadbury and Twitter have put out some interesting numbers on the relaunch of Cadbury’s Wispa Gold chocolate bar, which used Twitter and its Promoted Trend product to increase positive mentions by 1,800% and drive a 25% engagement rate for the “Retweet for Sweets” promotion.

The campaign began when Cadbury saw a surge in public support across the web and social media to bring back the caramel version of Wispa, Wispa Gold, after it was temporarily discontinued. Read More »