News International’s experiment with a non-penetrable paywall around websites for The Times and Sunday Times has been a failure, while the rise of Mail Online has been the “world success story”, according to former Guardian leader, Tim Brooks. Read More »

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the fifth in the series of Google Firestarters events for planners and digital media folk.  Cory Doctorow, the renowned science fiction novelist, journalist, technology activist, and co-editor of Boing Boing was on intense, rapid fire, glorious form. I began with every intention of  tweeting ironic witticisms from the event but was so drawn in by his manic and impassioned delivery that it was impossible to do anything but listen intently for fear of missing something. Read More »

The word ‘curator’ derives from the Latin curare meaning ‘take care’, and is commonly used in the context of cultural institutions; galleries, museums etc.

Over the course of the last year or so the term was increasingly used in conjunction with digital marketing, particularly social media-based campaigns. For fast-paced, content-driven comms planning, agencies would talk of acting as the ‘curator’ for the brand. In other words, deciding what content, stories, reactions, conversations and touchpoints to release at precisely the right time.

Now I think it can apply to the very nature of one’s digital identity itself.

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It has been said before that Twitter is turning us all into journalists as we retweet and share the news.

Enter an interesting post on Nieman Labs about a study looking at how politically engaged Twitter users have begun to display journalistic behaviour and how they help shape it as a news source. Read More »

A Twitter infographic here from Yell looking at how consumers increasingly like to interact with businesses on the social network.

It’s a little basic, but it serves as a great reminder of the growing importance that the microblogging network has when it comes to customer service. Read More »

Facebook is finally launching an App Store of its own. The store is currently in beta testing, but the idea is for something similar to the Apple or Google app stores. It will provide a place to promote and discover new social apps and is due to go live in the coming weeks.

Significantly as well as helping us all find new Facebook apps it will also allow developers to charge users for downloading apps for the first time. Read More »

Many professional services are finding the digital era very challenging, and personally speaking the digital revolution presents a bit of a conundrum to me…

On the one hand, I absolutely love what the digital revolution has done. Take smartphones – what these things are capable of is truly breath-taking.  Every gadget I ever dreamt of owning as a pre-digital kid all rolled into one sleek, cool, pocket-sized slab of usefulness. Read More »