I don’t have a Tesco Clubcard and I’m not a part of Boots Advantage. I don’t have a Starbuck’s card. I’m not even part of the Ikea Family.  I’m just not a loyalty programme sort of person.

My shopping is generally online where I can sift for bargains, compare sales and per unit prices and generally not be tempted by chocolate at the checkout.  I will click through to Gilt from a link that my sister posts on Facebook and I have even impulse-purchased a holiday online – not a danger I would face in your average checkout lane.  Rather than Hilton Honors or Nectar, I’m more likely to belong to Amazon Prime, have an Ocado delivery pass or to go through the quirky things on offer daily on Groupon. Read More »

So this morning I went to create an account Pinterest, the new and very pretty virtual pinboard site that, like, EVERYONE is talking about. And oh no! They’re doing that thing where you can only sign up using your Facebook or Twitter login details. Like This Is My Jam. and Quora. And countless other new applications.

I mentioned on Twitter how much I dislike being forced to do this and had a flood of replies from people saying the same thing – along with the odd one saying well actually it’s quite a reasonable thing to do. So I thought I’d open it up to the group… Read More »

Would you buy your social media influence?

If you are feeling lonely on Twitter, with only a handful of followers, or not feeling enough fans like you on Facebook, you could consider buying more friends. There are various services out there offering to get you thousands of fans with prices going up to $4,000 for 10,000 fans.

How much would you pay to increase your social network influence? And who would you buy? Read More »

Orange Film Pulse: wisdom of crowds

Mobile phone network Orange is taking another step in its bid to ‘own’ film marketing by collating all the opinions about new films from Twitter, Facebook, film blogs and so on, and putting it all in one place.

Orange Film Pulse uses tweets, Facebook comments, blogs and even reviews from actual film critics to generate a score out of 100 for every film, using a special algorithm. Read More »

Greenpeace appears to have stirred the wrath of some car enthusiasts in the process of taking Volkswagen to task over its deletion of negative comments on Facebook as part of its long running Star Wars themed campaign targeting the car firm.

The environmental charity is mobilising supporters and encouraging them to question Volkswagen’s environmental policies on social media channels – particularly the carmaker’s own Facebook pages. When VW did not respond to these comments and then deleted them, Greenpeace declared it to be a ‘social media fail’.

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Facebook insights. Dear oh dear. I’ve got to come out and say it – I’ve found their new and “improved” suite of analytics entirely perplexing, lacking in usefulness and extremely complex to explain, aggregate and apply to the real world.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in the industry who has been using the old Insights page to report back successes to clients. I’ve been living in hope that they’ll never switch it off , but the time has come – the old insights page is still an option, but it’s not recording new data. I haven’t felt this down since I said goodbye to my Bebo account…

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The 70,000-strong army of volunteers who will be helping the London 2012 Olympic Games to run smoothly have been told that they mustn’t mention details of their location, their role or any backstage information about athletes, celebrities or “dignitaries” on social media.

Considering the nature of social media on sites like Twitter and Facebook is to share precisely that information the London Olympics organisers appear to be issuing rather optimistic social media guidelines for volunteers. Read More »

It’s been a year of highs and lows for football clubs on Social Media, we’ve seen everything from player’s Twitter accounts being hacked, managers banning Social Media and Tweets getting players into serious trouble. Yet, we’ve also seen Manchester United break the 20 million Facebook fans mark, Manchester City continue to come up with creative fan engagement strategies and even the advent of the “Social Media Stadium“. Read More »

As Little Mix beat out Marcus Collins in Sunday’s night’s X Factor finale, predicted by social media, viewers turned towards Twitter in equal measure with the show’s judges when they decided how to vote.

A new study by digital agency Carat reveals an interesting trend with X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing viewers—specifically, that their trust has shifted away from traditional media influencers towards non-traditional media, such as Twitter and Facebook.

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Trying to explain Social Media is a bit like trying to describe what an elephant to someone who has never seen one.  It encompasses technologies, humanities (psychology and sociology in particular), but is also critical to marketing and business strategies.  If you are new to the industry, it can feel overwhelming and hard to distinguish signal from noise.

I am by no means an expert in the field.  I started my career as an academic researching into the role of trust in Wikipedia’s success, then spent a few years in Yahoo! which provided me with a fantastic, global perspective on managing and designing for communities of scale.  Currently at IPC Media we have over 50 brands for us to experiment and learn from.   I’ve found that hands-on experience is still the best way to learn.  Here I’m sharing with you my top tips that I wish I knew before I started my career: Read More »