Yes, we are all on Facebook. We all on Facebook so much so that I regularly communicate with my mother, sisters, cousins and even grandfather that way. For a lot of my friends and far-flung family, having an email address is almost silly now, as we interact regularly through status updates and photo comments. (For everything else, we have BBM, but that is another story).

With what seems like a zillion connections and not very much time, I’ve optimised my news feed to weed out those pesky Facebook game requests. It was Mafia Wars and Farmville requests, but now it seems to be all Cityville and updates on everyone’s Words with Friends scores. It sometimes feels like I am the only one not playing, but some of our recent research has shown that just over a quarter of those who use Facebook from a computer in the UK are playing Facebook games. While it isn’t everyone, it’s still a huge number of people.
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86% of adults in the UK belong to at least one loyalty programme, but how is it different for social media users? New ICM research uncovers just how online bargain-hunting isn’t killing offline loyalty programmes.

I used to have a boss with an amazing knack for sidling up to the desk of a junior researcher late on a Friday afternoon to ask, “How are you fixed?”.

This meant one thing: a flash poll or fast-turnaround survey put into the field that day and reported back to the client as soon as it was done. A flash poll in those days, for me, was the first sign that a client was in trouble. Some crisis had hit and we needed to dive in to understand how much people knew, how much they were affected by that knowledge and how to fix any damage to the brand or bottom line. We joked that we needed a big red button to push to set off a siren so that everyone would know that it was going to be a long night or two. Read more »

First there was Gmail…then Google Talk… and Wave… and Buzz… and now Android and G+. In fact, Google has been a part of the way that we communicate with our connections, both personal and professional, since the beta release of Gmail for which we all desperately wanted invites.  (Although, not being on Gmail until Spring 2004, I was a bit late clambering onto that particular band wagon.)

Google is one of the most phenomenal triumphs that the communications world has ever seen.  It has been so successful in PR terms that it has become a generic verb like Hoover, Xerox and Kleenex before it.  There’s no question that Android looks to be a major contender in the mobile OS war with 200 million world wide activations. Read more »