What do you do if you are a famous tech entrepreneur who is on the run from allegations of murder? Start a blog, of course. John McAfee, the man behind the eponymous anti-virus software, has started a blog from Belize, where he is currently fleeing murder allegations. The website is called The Hinterland, and is at http://www.whoismcafee.com.McAfee says he is launching his blog to get his story out.
The ‘second screen’ is becoming a hugely important concept in both television and marketing. Almost every piece of ‘event television’ is now accompanied with a hashtag and people commenting live on what they are watching. Conversations around the adverts in between are just as active.
This week big American retailers and brands prepared themselves for the post Thanksgiving shopping rush, the infamous Black Friday. Many ran a selection of television adverts for the holiday season, which were in turn discussed and amplified on social media.
For example, Target sparked a lot of Twitter excitment as they included a One Direction track in their advert. The band is hugely popular on Twitter, their official account has 141,496 followers, and fans who were happy at seeing their favourite band in the advert ended up discussing Target too. The same had happened to Pepsi just days earlier! Read More
Mobile has been hailed as marketing’s Next Big Thing for at least five years. But finally, mobile really is coming into its own. The ubiquity of 3G and advent of 4G, coupled with a boom in smartphones (and, more recently, tablets), mean mobile is ready to earn its marketing stripes.
More than half of the UK’s mobile users own a smartphone, and 28 per cent of UK internet usage is via a mobile phone. But we do stuff differently on mobile phones and tablets, and marketing campaigns are starting to reflect that. We don’t put away our mobiles to watch TV, for example – a Nielsen report revealed that 78% of smartphone owners in the UK use their device while watching TV (known as ‘multi-screening’). Read More
Superstorm Sandy and President Obama’s re-election are two of the biggest stories to have dominated social media in the past few weeks. In both cases, Twitter acted as a platform from which to gain breaking news ahead of the curve, as well as the usual avenue for thought trails aired the world over. Joan Collins expressed her sheer devastation following Bloomingdale’s temporary closure during the storm, while the presidential campaign engaged voters through excessive tweeting, hash tags, liking and sharing. The increasing impact of social networking is obvious.
Yet these instances can also lead us to an interesting question. In a digital world, where newspapers and websites are constantly updated and accessed through computers, tablets and mobile phones, is social-media actively changing the way news stories unfold or is it just another avenue through which to access news? Read More
It’s the holidays and the mobile wallet is getting fat. In the US Walmart and Mattel have come up with a very cool mobile enabled virtual store marketing campaign. The brands have created a series of ground breaking virtual stories that people can look at, pick a product they want and scan the QR code that matches their chosen product into their mobile and then pay for it. It even gets delivered free to your door.
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