Interesting slice of research here from media agency MindShare that claims despite his reputation as a pioneer of social media campaigning, which we covered extensively last week, President Barack Obama could be influencing fewer voters through social networks than his Republican rival Mitt Romney.

On back of a tough week for Romney when he slipped in the polls following Hurricane Sandy, the results of the survey could provide some good news for the Presidential hopeful despite more reports saying Obama is likely to narrowly win.

The Mindshare study says that while President Obama clearly has many more followers on Twitter and Facebook, Republican voters are more active on social media. Read More »

A newspaper brand’s reach in the digital age has never been clearer following the second release of the National Readership Survey’s Print and Digital Data (NRS PADD) and some data crunchers at UM London.

To help make sense of the NRS PADD findings for the period July 2011 to June 2012, and to analyse the impact for UK advertisers, media agency UM has created a great infographic.

Have you ever been to a farm and smelt milk recently squirted out of a cow?

Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about online content again. Bear with me.

According to Ofcom, 12-15 year olds now spend as much time online as they do watching TV. Well, yes. Only — hold on — that’s a total of 35 hours a week, or an average of five hours a day. Hmm. The equivalent of 1900-midnight every day, at least? No consoles, no hanging out with friends? Hmm, how do they fit it all in? The reality is, they don’t.  Read More »

In the last of our series of excerpts from the brand new book – Pioneers of Digital – we turn to a man that came from China to university in the US and ended up spearheading search engine research at IBM, managing 3000 developers at Yahoo! and who is now the driving force behind Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Read More »

Instagram had a very good Superstorm Sandy. The network was swamped with images as users uploaded as many as ten pictures per second. Overall hundreds of thousands have been uploaded to Instagram in the past week documenting the storm and the damage it has done to New York and other areas of the east coast of the United States.

It has placed the photo-sharing network at the heart of the coverage of the storm, giving it some has said its “citizen journalism moment”, and highlighted Instagram’s growing success.

This growth that has taken it from 30 million to 100 million uses this year has been closely watched by rivals. None more so than Twitter which is said to be close to launching photo filters of its own to compete with the Facebook owned service.

Read More »

This  ’Social Media Statistics and Facts 2012′ infographic is packed with statistics and facts of all major social media platform including – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube as well as blogging.

There are some surprising stats here. For instance links about sex are shared on Facebook more than any other type. That comes as a real surprise.

It highlights the growing immensity of Instagram with as many as five million imges uploaded daily.  And to confirm that little is changing with Pinterest when it comes to the gender split with more than 90% of its Facebook fans being women. Read More »