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 »

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 »

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 »

Would you be surprised to learn that the top brand in this list of 15 on Twitter is…Twitter itself? No, of course not, but what’s interesting here is that outside of tech firms McDonalds is there at number five. It also scores very higly on Facebook.

The data comes from HootSuite and as well as the top brands it also includes topics, hashtags and holiday topics on Twitter in the past year. Read More »

A new sporting Twitter record was set on Sunday as reaction to 80-yard overtime touchdown pass by the Denver Broncos quarterback, Tim Tebow, hit 9,420 tweets per second.

The touchdown, which was scored in overtime, by the Denver Broncos player, led his team to victory and an upset against the Pittsburgh Steelers — although it failed to displace Japan in the number one spot. Read More »

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 »

Vincent Kompany: inspire him on Twitter

The football world has a chequered history when it comes to social media, from Joey Barton’s rants on Twitter to Rio Ferdinand’s eloquent rebuttal of Sepp Blatter’s “there’s no racism in football”.

Now Manchester City is taking its chances on Twitter with a competition it is running ahead of Sunday’s FA Cup clash with Manchester United.

Read More »

Miista: Cheaper with a Tweet campaign

Like me, you might’ve thought that the purpose of Klout was to generate mystified tweets from people confused as to why an algorithm has deemed them to be influential about subjects they’ve never mentioned on Twitter.

In fact, being influential on Klout can get you a load of freebies, and now (until January 13 or stocks run out) it can also help everyone get a discount on some shoes, thanks to a new social media campaign. Read More »

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 »