Prime Minister David Cameron arrived in Brussels today to discuss the EU Budget with other senior political figures. It’s a difficult issue for the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party that he leads, so Cameron’s team will be keen to get his message out, especially as rumours are  now circulating that the summit has stopped without agreement. As is the way in modern politics, social media will be a key part of this.

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Journalists, businesses, sports stars, musicians are all competing for social media influence. All that’s before the rest of us try and add our expertise. This all adds to a lot of noise on social media, and it can be hard to know initially who to take seriously.

Various services like PeerIndex and Klout seek to try and help users cut through the crowd and highlight authoritative figures online. They now have a new service to compete with called PeerReach that was founded in September 2011 by Zlatan Menkovic and Nico Schoonderwoerd  and already has a database of 50 million accounts.

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This weekend boxer Ricky Hatton will return to the ring for the first time in three years, taking on Yvacheslav Senchenko in his home town of Manchester on Saturday night. When he does so, he will become the first UK athlete to compete in a major live televised sports event with his Twitter handle on his kit.

The @HitmanHatton account, whose name was changed to reflect Hatton’s boxing nickname, already has nearly 200,000 followers. However, such a major piece of promotion is sure to see his follower numbers rocket upwards.

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With branded content being a constant topic of conversation in 2012, certainly as far as the last six months were concerned, this is a timely infographic from the Content Marketing Association. It takes a look at how branded content has and is evolving.  In a year, it is estimated that a consumer has over 379,000 brand experiences; in fact on a typical journey to work the average person can expect to interact with 170 brands with all of them competing fiercely for one thing: consumer attention.

This, when taken in conjunction with media fragmentation, which is growing exponentially, means that consumer attention is an increasingly scarce resource. It means tradeoffs are made both at a conscious and subconscious level whether it is the decision to use Google or Bing, to fly BA or Virgin, or to read The Times or The Telegraph. Trade off decisions become a function of brand affiliation and the cycle turns full circle as brand affiliation is a function of the amount of engagement (attention) a brand can generate.

Because of that content is consequently becoming the conduit through which organisations can earn their customers’, whether B2C or B2B, attention. Content becomes the brands’ side of the value exchange – providing customers with interesting and relevant information in return for their time. Read More »

Twenty-three percent of the top 100 brands enable consumer outreach and engagement via mobile and social networks using phones, smartphones and tablets, according to a new report from Brand Keys.

Apple and Amazon dominate. You have to go to number 12 on the list before you are not dealing with a tech brand that has a natural fit into mobile.

The 16^th annual loyalty leaders gives the loyalty rankings for the top 100 brands out of 598 brands assessed in 83 industry categories in the 2012 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index.

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