China’s social media landscape is renowned for its complexity. As each social media platform looks to monetise faster and further than its competitors, brands are dealing with a constantly moving environment, and nailing a strategy across this can be extremely complicated.

Within this nebulous environment, brands have to learn to navigate and make use of the market size in the most efficient manner – setting quality over quantity. To help cut through the noise and complex social media structure in China, we have selected some key channels that are an essential starting place. Read More »

Travel has changed a lot from the days of the family trip and the only entertainment being “I spy” to post 9/11 and long(er) security lines. Frequent traveler or once a year family vacation – to borrow an over-used term – there’s an app for that.

Technology and more precisely mobile phones have been game changers for travel, from the early mobile days of just being able to call from anywhere to now bringing information right to you and in some cases even food to your gate. All this is making the travel experience an easier one, or at least a bit more palatable (and sometimes downright fun). Read More »

Facebook has bought Parse, the mobile-backend-as-a-service startup which has just raised $7m in funding, in what Techcrunch believes is an $85mdeal.

Parse is two years old, and is the brainchild of ex Google staff and Y Combinator graduates who decided to build a set of back-end tools that mobile developers could use, and allows developers to build cross-platform apps for iOS and Android.

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It’s something of a contentious point these days, but digital creative agencies are still, primarily, purveyors of truth.

It may often be dressed up in words like ‘engagement’, ‘shareable’ and ‘social’, but the strongest of their creative ideas still have a solid truism at the core.

So it’s interesting to consider the quote of Isaac Newton, one of history’s greatest original thinkers, that ‘Truth is the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation‘.

Hmm.

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Associated Press had its Twitter account hacked yesterday, and inaccurate tweets posted in its name caused panic and financial turmoil.

The tweets that came from the verified account declared that there had been two explosions in the White House, and that President Barack Obama had been injured.

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New research has look into the level of penetration of social networks across various countries and continents, revealing those in which the users are most engaged and listening to brands.

Not surprisingly, North Americans lead the way. Citing the Global Web Index, Synthesio found that in both the US and Canada the level of active social media users within the population was as high as 50%. Read More »

Loveflutter is a new dating website that uses social networks and Google’s knowledge graph to help you find your perfect match, and make that awkward first date just a bit less painful.

We’ve all had it – you turn up on a date with a person you’ve met on or offline, sit down, and realise you have no idea what you are going to talk about. Loveflutter seeks to end that.
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The belief of WPP’s chief executive Martin Sorrell that Twitter is more a PR medium for brands, rather than an advertising opportunity, has been widely shot down by rival agencies and social media practitioners.

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The hashtag is one of the most identifiable features of Twitter, organically produced by users to bring together information on the same topics.

It has now become a key part  of the service, with news stories, advertising campaigns and live tweeting all being based around it, and it looks like Facebook wants a piece of the action. Read More »

Ipsos Mori has released its quarterly ‘tech tracker’ report for the first quarter of 2013, and found that now 50% of British adults access social networks, with nearly half of all adults using Facebook in the last 3 months.

Tellingly, more than half of adults access social networks via a smartphone, showing how important it is for networks to perfect their mobile offering and revenue streams.

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