Today is a big day for Twitter. It has launched its advertising API and that means significant changes both for Twitter and its advertisers. For the first time, marketers can now easily create and manage ad campaigns and buy them through third parties.

Significantly, that allows a major increase in scale for Twitter’s advertising business and its ability to generate revenues, which are expected to rise from $350m (£230m) last year, to around $1bn (£658m) by 2014. Read More »

It’s happened to almost everyone. You go to a blog – say, to find a trick in Excel – then suddenly, you hear loud audio. You desperately scan the page to mute whatever is making the noise, scrolling down and find a video player embedded there, autoplaying a video you did not intend to watch, often with a VAST standard pre-roll ad in front of it. Read More »

When it comes to recent social media disasters, there are no shortage of examples.

Back in November, I did a fairly comprehensive run through of the social media fails in 2012, which included a prestigious roll call of brands such as Waitrose, McDonalds, Gap and Qantas – these household names, and many more, had all suffered from a social media fail.

So far in 2013, we’ve seen less ill advised campaigns, but more high profile disasters of a different kind. This week, the Burger King Twitter account was hacked by an unknown internet vigilante who posted a series of controversial (and clearly inaccurate) tweets, including one that stated the fast food giant had been bought by its main rival, McDonalds. The hackers, obviously pleased with the furore they had caused, then moved swiftly on to Jeep’s Twitter account, which last night was displaying a Cadillac logo. Read More »

Swiftkey has in the space of just a couple of years become one of the best selling apps on the Android platforms. It installs a keyboard on your phone that can be linked to Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and blogs, then uses natural language technology to predict which word you are going to type next .

Up until now whole words could be added with a single tap, which improves the speed of typing, but  today the company has launched Swiftkey 4, known as Swiftkey Flow, which introduces gesture typing.

Read More »

The BRIT Awards 2013 is almost upon us again and tonight we will find out who has picked the Damien Hirst designed prizes in what has  been a stellar year for British music. Amazingly it is the 33rd year of the BRIT Awards, which take place later this evening at London’s O2 Arena, hosted for the fourth time by Gavin & Stacey star James Corden.

While we won’t know the winners for a while yet if the public decided the outcome of the 2013 BRIT Awards these would be the winners according to the volume of positive social media mentions across Twitter, Facebook and blogs.  Read More »