London 2012 has been widely described as ‘the first social media Games’ and the way in which Team GB athletes used Twitter to connect directly with their fans and increase their marketability was almost as interesting as the battles for Gold, Silver and Bronze medals.

To better understand this phenomenon, at Inferno we decided to collaborate with Leaderboarded.com on a study of the Twitter activity of all 337 Team GB athletes who used the site during the duration of the Olympic Games and ranking British Olympians on Twitter ‘popularity’, ‘largest percentage growth’ and ‘talkativeness’ threw up some fun and interesting stats. Read More »

I’m a little partial to round-up posts about the latest and greatest social media tools. I get a lot out of compiling these posts as it helps me stay on top of the best ways to to do my day job and hopefully they come in handy for you too.

This particular edition features a bunch of new social media tools you may not have heard of, as well as a couple that have been getting a bit of attention on the big blogs and review sites.

While I’d be happy to dilly dally a little longer, I’ll refrain and open these goodies up… Read More »

Twitter have announced some significant changes, being brought into to version 1.1 of their API. The most controversial of these is the setting of an effective limit on how many users a third party client can have.

The idea seemingly to encourage people to use the official apps (which, as was ironically pointed out by Josh Gruber, started life as third party apps).

This is Jobsian control freakery from Twitter. Little more than a way of the company making sure you see Tweets how they want you to see them, and more importantly see the ads they and their partners want you to see.
Twitter will also about a cap on the amount of users that third party apps can have. Read More »

No surprise to read that Barack Obama’s campaign is way out in front in terms of digital campaigning; posting nearly four times more content than Mitt Romney’s campaign, but what may raise eyebrows is that neither campaign engages in much dialogue online.

The campaigns are both tending to push their message out, as if it were mainstream media, and not taking advantage of the conversation that social media can allow with voters.

For both campaigns the “social” aspect in social media is almost absent. That is disappointing. Four years on you would have at least expected Obama’s campaign to have learnt and built on 2008 and seized the opportunity to really connect with voters digitally.

Read More »