A report in the Wall Street Journal that says on most days “Twitter is now generating the majority of its revenue from ads shown to its users on mobile” rather than from ads on its Twitter.com website.

That is particularly good news for Twitter as cracking the mobile platform in terms of advertising is going to be increasingly important for any social network as Facebook has found to its cost. Read More »

This week saw the much anticipated buyout of the so-called ‘Facebook for the workplace’, Yammer, by Microsoft for $1bn first reported two weeks ago.

There have been suggestions that the software giant will integrate the four year old social network into its Office suite. This move comes after research from comScore revealed that email use among 12-17 year olds dropped by 24% during 2011, with an overall fall in webmail usage of 6% so it would appear that Microsoft is covering itself for the possible demise of email in the near future.

This is certainly a subject that has been discussed frequently among commentators over the past few years and as companies increasingly gravitate toward social networking alternatives, such as Yammer or self designed systems for internal communications, could we really be witnessing the death of email? Read More »

It’s the Apple iPhone’s 5th Birthday today. That’s five years and 250 million handsets sold and shows no sign of slowing up as new research shows it continues to dominate the smartphone market. Apple iPhones are owned by 19% of smartphone users compared with 15% owning an Android phone and 11% owning a Blackberry, which today announced a delay to its latest phone.

Overall, smartphone ownership has risen to a huge 45%, marking a truly significant shift in how we receive and transfer data. Equally impressive is the fact that ownership figures have nearly doubled in the last six months.

Demographic distribution of users is not that surprising – 32% of 15-34 year olds own an iPhone, with only one in four males in this age group owning an Android phone, and a slightly lower number of females owning a Blackberry.
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To be honest I was never much of a Word Magazine reader. Still I am very sad that the publishers have now called it a day.

As David Hepworth said this morning; “In the nine years since the magazine launched there have been dramatic changes in the media and the music business. These changes have made it more difficult for a small independent magazine to survive and provide its staff with a living. This hasn’t been made any easier by the economic climate of the wider world.”

I do wonder however if there is an alternative business model for the magazine and that is to ape the brilliant football magazine Blizzard. Read More »

Google+ has turned one and yesterday Google announced the progress it has made with its social platform. One year on from launch it has now signed up 250 million users and 150 million of those are active on a monthly basis.

Google is hoping that the growth will continue and to make sure that happens it has unveiled two new upgrades. They are a dedicated tablet app, for Android and iPad devices, and a service called Google+ Events, which does what it says on the tin and allows Google+ users to easily create and manage their events.

So will the team behind the social network be celebrating the anniversary with champagne or drowning their sorrows?  Read More »

Interesting study from Buddy Media looking at what and when makes for the best tweet for brands.

It looked at user engagement from more than 320 Twitter handles of the world’s biggest brands looking at how successful they were in terms of getting replies, getting retweets and engagement rate, which it defined as a combination of  @replies and retweets based on the number of followers.

The report showed Twitter engagement rates for brands are 17% higher on Saturday and Sunday compared to weekdays, but only 19% of brand tweets are published on weekends.

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Marketers love Facebook and know that they have to be there, but unfortunately for Facebook some also seem to have concluded that advertising on the social network isn’t anywhere near as necessary, according to a new survey.

This sounds like bad news for Facebook and echoes what General Motors said back in May when it said it would invest in content, but was cutting its ad budget.

At the root of that row between General Motors Global CMO Joel Ewanick, as well as other marketers, and Facebook was that the automotive firm wanted bigger and more impact ad units than the current offering. Facebook, however, was not prepared to go down that route. Read More »

Interesting long piece on Intelligent Life talking to Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, who pushes his case for keeping paywalls out.

His comments appear in the same piece as another Guardian journalist, this time phoning hacking reporter Nick Davies, gives a much gloomier take on the digital future.

I wrote earlier this week on speculation that the Guardian was planning to ditch print for digital future sooner rather than later and, quoted back in March at the Guardian Open Weekend,  Davies is extremely blunt about the future of newspapers on the web:

“In 20 years’ time there won’t be any newspapers left to do this. All these millions of hits won’t pay our salaries. The internet is killing journalism,” Davies said. Read More »

Would you like to be Twitter rich? You would probably rather be rich, but if you can’t get $1m how about a million followers?

Two creatives from the Richmond Virginia-based ad agency, the Martin Agency, have come up with a way to make that happen for one lucky person and there doesn’t appear to be any catch. Read More »

There’s definitely a lot for brands to get excited about when it comes to user-generated curation (UGC) for the good of marketing. Content marketing has become the ultimate buzzword but there is rationale behind this. It is helping to build brand affinity through a content value exchange, and luckily it’s right up consumers’ streets too.

Brands need to start finding ways to work with UGC websites because it can pay dividends in high visitor engagement levels, the Facebook connection, and monetization. Of course, everyone knows about Pinterest but there are other websites, like Wanderfly for travel enthusiasts, which are growing in popularity due to their highly social nature. Read More »