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 »

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 »

Facebook has chosen Morgan Stanley as the lead investment bank on its initial public offering and will file plans with the US Securities and Exchange Commission today. It is being reported that Facebook intends to raise around $5bn although that could rise to $10bn, which will value it at between $75bn and $100bn.

The appointment of Morgan Stanley means a considerably payday for the bank in what will be the biggest and most talked about IPO since Google in 2004. Read More »

We had an excellent infographic in December “What happens to your Facebook profile when you die?” and now we have a video response.

Every day we are filling the internet with portions of our lives. The data of every status update, blog post, image, video and email is floating around the internet. Have you ever wondered what happens to all that data once we pass? 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 »

We all need fans and brands need them more than most and building relationships with consumers fosters loyalty. As a result, loyalty has the potential to increase profits, but how do brands get them and how do they keep them?

What’s interesting here is that this infographic highlights how fan bases can be big and small — that it is not always about the big numbers. Read More »

That’s the question that Business Insider is asking. Google tells us that Google+ is growing very fast and that sign-ups are rocketing. We heard that in December Google+ hit 66.7m users worldwide with 2.6m in the UK. Further we heard that Google+ recorded its second-highest traffic record from users in India for that period, with 4.3 million unique visits, followed by Brazil with 3.6 million.

Last night Google told us that number has jumped to 90 million Google+ users suggesting it will break the 100 million barrier very shortly. That’s a very healthy figure and supports what Google has been saying, which is that signs-ups alone make it one of the web’s fastest growing websites, but are people regularly using it? What are the levels of engagement? Read More »

Twitter has bought a social news start-up based in Vancouver, called Summify, which, as the names suggests, creates a news feed based on the top stories your friends share on various social networks and delivers them to you in a daily summary.

It’s an incredibly useful little aggregation app that delivers a daily email of social news to your mobile or PC. It has a lot of fans out there clearly including the top guys at Twitter, who plan to use the expertise of the team behind Summify to help people connect with news. Read More »

There has been a lot of talk lately about the much vaunted ‘second screen’. It amazes me there can be so much discussion about engaging people through it, when many can’t even decide what ‘it’ is. Is it the TV, or is it the laptop/smartphone? For me, this question can’t get much simpler. The TV is a passive device. 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’.

Read More »