Four years is a long time in politics and it is even longer in social media. As the Republican National Congress gets underway there have already been more Tweets about this week’s gathering than during the entire week of the 2008 Republican convention.

Twitter is busy at the convention and is filing updates from its @gov Twitter Government & Politics team and has been curating the most relevant and interesting Tweets on an event page at Twitter.com/#GOP2012.

It is the kind of Twitter page we are starting to see more and more of having already seen them for the London 2012 Olympics and Nascar. Read More »

“The reason I don’t tweet as much as I used to, is because I’m sick of all the useless opinions and hate that I get daily goodbye twitter –  : ).”

On 22^nd August 2012, those words accompanied the close of the personal Twitter account of One Direction star Zayn Malik.

This is not the first time that individuals in the public eye have closed social media accounts due to malicious messages, abuse and (as it is more frequently known) ‘trolling’. Read More »

Interesting social media research from media Universal McCann London, part of its Wave 6 report, that highlights what consumers are using various social media sites for.

The research makes the point that it is important for brands to understand that consumers use a huge range of social media platforms, and that each one fulfils a very specific need.

To build knowledge or to understand a particular topic, they will turn to brand websites and forums; for fun and entertainment, social networks and Instant Messenger are considered more appropriate. Read More »

With the conventions well underway, and the respective party’s tickets officially confirmed, media brands are building up their social insights, and trying to follow the online conversation about the US election.

CNN and Facebook are collaborating for a new project called Facebook Insights. The project will monitor the real-time data on the conversations about President Obama, Vice President Biden, Respublican candidate Mitt Romney, and his Vice Presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan, on Facebook. As well as the two mega brands, the project also involves real time social curation company Mass Relevance. Read More »

The latest dip in the Groupon rollercoaster suggests that the shine of the daily deals market may well and truly have worn off, for investors at least. Last week its share price was at a new low, down 70% from its IPO price and they have continued to fall even further since. Last night they were down to just $4.37 a long way from  its $20 IPO price.

For consumers, they remain an interesting addition to the choice of shopping channels but the proliferation of sites fighting for their attention suggests that the initial novelty is waning and they’re scaling back their engagement.

But that doesn’t mean that the daily deal proposition is on borrowed time; more that this slow-down is a typical characteristic of a maturing channel – and in the same way we had to get smart as other channels matured, so we need to get smarter for shopping channels  too, and woo our customers a little more diligently. Read More »