Headstream’s recent Social Brands 100 study highlighted the brands that have successfully become part of the ‘people’s media’. We’ve looked behind five brands that made the cut.

Whatever the size or complexity of a brand, no matter what its business model may be, a core marketing challenge remains how to use social in a compelling and authentic way.

Against such a constantly evolving terrain, though, how can brands know if their social media efforts are being effective? To that end, social brand agency Headstream set out to create a benchmark of social performance, and highlighted 100 companies that met its criteria Read More »

Penny Arcade is a popular web comic for gamers. I have friends who devote a portion of their lives to the forums. The site’s creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik were named by TIME as among the top 100 most influential people in the world. I’m paraphrasing; Google’s ad planner says “OMG! Put ads here!” of the site.

Yesterday, Penny Arcade started a bold and interesting project on Kickstarter. In a campaign called Penny Arcade Sells Out the pair are offering to remove ads from the site in exchange for crowd sourced funding.

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While the BBC has had its problems in the last year the BBC iPlayer has gone from strength to strength and been named as YouGov’s top-ranked brand for 2012 in its BrandIndex Buzz Rankings.

In the Rankings, which compare BrandIndex Buzz scores for over 850 brands in 34 categories, saw BBC iPlayer push overtake Amazon and M&S for the first time. Read More »

Worldwide publisher of Time Magazine, Kimberly Kelleher, has been named president of blogs network SAY Media, which owns XOJane, Gardenista, ReadWriteWeb, Style Bubble and Techdirt.

She takes over from Troy Young, who has chosen to leave the company.  Read More »

Facebook-commerce expectations are out of sync with most brands and the market’s capabilities.  This leads to controversial debate where some commentators see enormous growth opportunities others see huge effort for no return.

In fact, the problem is in the evolution of communication within the medium shops on Facebook only work as part of a social media strategy.

Most brands or organisations are not sufficiently evolved in their social communication to make them work and most consumers have experienced enough good communication to expect to find easy-to-use f-commerce on Facebook. Read More »