In what will be one of the most hotly fought Oscar best film contests in years Twitter has unveiled its Oscars Index, which is available at oscars.twitter.com, to help movie fans track the buzz and the social conversation. The Index reflects the sentiment of Tweets about nominees who this year include the likes of  Quentin Tarantino for ‘Django Unchained’, Tom Hooper for ‘Les Miserables’, Ang Lee’s for ‘Life of Pi’ , Ben Affleck for ‘Argo’, Kathryn Bigelow for the Osama bin Laden drama ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the Steven Spielberg directed, and  Daniel Day-Lewis starring, drama Lincoln. Read More »

The London 2012 Olympics, Euro 2012 and The Super Bowl were all great examples of how fans are using social media to follow live events and share the moment. However, what’s also clear is that some sports stars and teams are using social media far more effectively than others. Sadly, there are also quite a few sports stars who would be best advised to steer clear of Twitter.  This infographic from Eventility, which helps sports clubs to organise themselves online, does a good job of highlighting the winners and losers in this relationship. Read More »

Most brands have learnt how to reach consumers and build advocacy through social media, but to drive sales they need to set up the right online purchase routes relevant to their specific business. And digitally intelligent brands have realised that Likes, Followers, and +1s shouldn’t be the primary KPI for measuring social media campaign success.

Measurement is set to become more sophisticated in 2013, and the industry benchmark for measurement will shift from community growth to revenue and profit through social media.  Here, I predict five purchase routes brands will increasingly be looking to set up this year to drive sales. Read More »

For many organisations, social represents one of the most drastic changes in communications since the advent of email. Savvy businesses now effectively use the power of social to interact with their customer bases, prospect for new business, deliver services and obtain customer and market insights. Indeed, this shift in communication has led many large enterprises to employ teams of social experts, tasked with monitoring the social airwaves at all hours and in multiple languages.

Traditionally, the financial services sector is one of the earliest to adopt new technologies, especially those that can be deployed enterprise-wide. The likes of contactless payments, commercial mobile payment offerings, cloud-based solutions and data analytics have been embraced and adopted ahead of the curve – however, the adoption of social has been markedly slower. Read More »

Ebay recently decided to stop advertising inside its own apps claiming that “they didn’t need the money” and that it was “spoiling the user experience”. Now there’s a brand that are ahead of the game and realise that the short term benefit of quick revenues could outweigh the long term benefits of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Many brands and media agencies seem to think that a mobile marketing strategy just involves advertising. I have news from them, it’s unlikely that it actually includes much if any mobile advertising. Mobile is more sophisticated than that.

Read More »