The New York Times has splashed out on Promoted Tweets to capitalise on the amazing success that election blogger Nate Silver has had in predicting the US Presidential election results. The FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver’s Political Calculus blog accounted for around 20% of the New York Times’s visitors the day before the election giving instant worldwide fame to the former baseball turned political statistician who the paper signed up in 2010.

Considering that the New York Times is one of the world’s biggest websites with more than 570 million page views in September 2012 that is a huge achievement and reflective of the social media sensation that Silver has become. Read More »

More on the soaring growth of Instagram today, following talk of its ‘Superstorm Sandy Citizen Journalism moment’, with research from Simply Measured that reveals more than half of the world’s top brands or 54% are using the photo sharing network to engage consumers.

Earlier this year it looked at how brands are adopting Instagram and now three months later that is paying off with sizable month-over-month growth.

Since August brands including Starbucks, Burberry, Nike, Gucci and Audi have gained over a million new followers. Add to that MTV which has become the first brand to hit the one million follower milestone. Read More »

Those smart people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think they can predict what will trend on Twitter, and there findings could have significant consequences both for Twitter and those working in digital advertising.

A professor and his student think they can estimate with 95% accuracy what Trending Topics you will be seeing on Twitter during any given day.
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We had another Twitter moment this morning or rather the Church of England did as it and Number 10 used Twitter to jointly announce the appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. It’s a big moment in British life and the fact that Downing Street and the C of E turned to Twitter seems fairly significant as it tweeted: “Downing Street is pleased to announce the appointment of Justin Welby as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury”.

Looking back ten years when the last Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was appointed there was no Twitter. No social media. In the intervening years there has been a communications revolution and some actual revolutions that used Twitter and other social sites and tools to organise and overthrow governments. Read More »

The US election reached a frenetic climax this week, with the two main candidates leaving a huge digital footprint in their wake. From ubiquitous search-and-display advertising to virally seeded videos and social-media trends, an estimated 12% of a collective $8bn campaign spend (or $960m) has been poured into digital over the past few months.

As any technologically minded cynic will tell you, messages of empathy and conviction were crafted with greater relevancy than ever to carefully segmented audiences. For instance, micro-targeting enabled Obama’s team to direct radio ads to specific mining communities in Ohio. New data points from Facebook meant both parties were able to reach subsets of their millions of page fans with assurances on the policies that mattered most to them. Read More »