Like any marriage, the union between brands and social media has its Barack Obama success stories, and its less than stellar moments with real consequences like McDonald’s recent Happy Meal twitter hashtag idea. Moments like this inevitably raise the perennial concerns over social media control for marketers.

Media Strategies’ Social Media Brand Index places Starbucks as the most successful social brand. A company whose above-the-line activity is practically non-existent compared to their social initiatives. By contrast, Nescafe is a company with a strong heritage in traditional TV-centric broadcast campaigns, particularly for its flagship Gold Blend product, yet fails to make an impact socially at 108^th. Read More »

Bad news again from Guardian News & Media as it announced that as many as 100 jobs are to be cut, from its staff of 650, and losses of £44m — up by £6m on last year.

Amid all of this financial pain it has pushing been ahead with its digital first ‘open journalism’ strategy that has become the core of the paper’s business. Underpinning this is an old style digital land grab. A drive for the largest audience the paper can find online fuelled by expansion into the US. All this, we are told, is apparently at odds with the implementation of any kind of paywall.

We hear this even though there is mounting evidence to suggest that having a metered paywall, as that is the only variety of relevance, is the right answer for similar newspapers. Read More »

With sites like Tumblr and Pinterest , and apps such as $1 billion Instagram, blazing a trail, the visual web is rightly attracting a lot of interest.

For example, a short while ago I looked at Wavii, which aggregates topics into a visual search engine based on your Facebook interests.

There are others too though, and they are getting both users and investment. Read More »

Twitter has introduced new targeting capabilities for Promoted Tweets that allow advertisers to target ads at users in a particular region rather than sending a blanket message to all followers regardless of where they’re located.

It means advertisers can make relevant local offers to customers for the first time, which is something that has been lacking from Twitter’s Promoted Tweets ad programme since it first launched.

Until now it hasn’t been possible to target Twitter users only in the UK without hitting users in the rest of the world at the same time. Read More »