Newsweek has revealed the image that will grace its final print cover, before it goes digital only in 2013, as its 80-year history in print comes to an end. It has chosen to go out with a vintage photo of its old New York headquarters. Fittingly the black and white photo is accompanied by a hashtag: “#lastprintissue”. The cover brings the past and the future together on one page. The final issue follows the announcement in October that Newsweek was to close as part of cost cutting and an acknowledgement that the age of the newsweekly is at an end.

Editor in chief Tina Brown, who has edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, unveiled Newsweek’s final front cover via Twitter and posted the image along with the comment:”Bitter sweet! Wish us luck!” Read More »

Recently I took part in the Open Graph panel at the AllFacebook Conference, and found myself sitting next to Jon Morter, the guy that runs the Condescending Corporate Brand Page on Facebook.  He also started the successful campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to UK No.1 at Christmas 2009 instead of the X Factor winner.  So, yeah, he’s a bit of a revolutionary hero.  Read More »

Marketing more than ever is a science. Not only has it had to evolve into that because tough times dictate that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) need to be able to justify their efforts in monetary terms, but the playing field has become an increasingly large and competitive one. As a result, the reliance on ‘Big Data’ has never been so important to all those involved.

Today’s CMO not only has to consider traditional forms of marketing data, but also has to face up to the exponential growth of non-traditional data sources, as e-commerce grows and social and mobile channels increasingly become the norm for customers. According to Gartner, there are already more than a billion people on Facebook, 5.6 billion mobile devices in use and 14% of all economic activity is now transacted across digital resources. Read More »

Over one in eight young adults aged between 18 and 25-years-old are posting online in anger about their boss or workplace and therefore putting their jobs at risk. This is one of the findings in research from AVG as part of its Digital Diaries series, called Digital Baggage.

With the typical 20 year old now having a digital footprint that spans a decade or more this infographic looks at the type of ‘digital baggage’ young adults entering the workplace are acquiring, and whether this might adversely affect their career prospects. Read More »

I’ve been a keen Foursquare user pretty much since the start in 2009.  Like many, the idea of gaining badges and mayorships became very addictive but the novelty soon wore off and led to many people questioning the real benefits of the service.   There are only approximately 193,000 users in the U.K, significantly less, proportionately, than countries like the US which has over 10 million  users.  Having said all of that, Foursquare has had a busy 2012 and has shown some signs of ‘growing up’, not only as a service but as a company too. Read More »

Tim Berners Lee once said – “It’s difficult to imagine the power that you’re going to have when so many different sorts of data are available”. Well there aren’t many people that are more powerful than the President of the United States of America…and as Obama settles into the first month of his second term, it’s time to reflect on one of the most sophisticated, data-driven campaigns in political history and take a look at what his impressive team of digital and analytical experts are up to now. Are they keeping up the momentum?  Read More »

Nothing sparks backlash against a social media service quite like a Terms Of Service (TOS) change. Users who have already willingly given up their privacy to sign up to the services in the first place, suddenly get annoyed when companies push a little bit harder.

The latest row has engulfed Instagram. They announced a TOS change that gave them extensive rights of photos taken with the service, and the metadata linked to those services. Many users were angry, believing that it meant their carefully filtered food photos could sold to advertisers. Ultimately this backlash came back to hit Facebook too. The company is no strangers to privacy rows, and became Instagram’s parent in a $1 billion deal earlier this year.

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With the latest wave of Ipsos MORI’s Technology tracker comes something of a technology landmark to end 2012 with. Smartphone ownership rises above the 50% mark for the first time. Considering that in 2010 the figure stood at just 20% that is rather impressive.

This is of course the latest in a series of technology milestones in the 21 century. It started with mobile phone ownership reaching 50% in 2000 followed by internet access reaching the same level only a year later.  But this was the most impressive milestone in terms of internet access arguably came years later in 2006 when the majority of the population finally had broadband access. Read More »

The benefits of social media to business strategists and marketers, whether financial or cultural, have not always been clear. But with social media now the single largest source of unsolicited consumer opinions, these strategists must find new, innovative ways to analyse and monitor the opinions, perspectives and sentiments in each tweet, post, comment, and status update.  Read More »

Sunday nights Sports Personality of the Year awards were one of several television events this year which Twitter users probably couldn’t avoid; with over 322,000 tweets mentioning the awards ceremony (either by name or the #SPOTY hashtag) on the day of the awards, 280,000 during the broadcast itself, peaking at just over 6,500 tweets per minute as Bradley Wiggins was announced as this years winner.

And, as with voting events ranging from the US elections to the X-Factor final (and our own look at the Mercury Music Prize), people are looking at how data from social media can be used to create audience insights. A reasonable hypothesis might be that the members of the public who were interested enough to cast a vote would be well represented by the Twitter users interested enough to tweet about their favourite candidates. Read More »