Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mobile UK more willing to pay for online content than ever

Traditional media owners are set to profit from multiscreen viewing and smartphone ownership if the right pricing models are adopted, is the rather heartening message from a KPMG study this month. In the advisory firm’s Media And Entertainment Barometer study, the decades old assumption that people have become too accustomed to free content online to start paying, is challenged. Read More »

Boyce Avenue – social media killed the record company

Boyce Avenue performed a classic acoustic set at the Music Matters conference last week in Singapore and wowed those who had never seen them (like me!) despite having ONE BILLION views on YouTube.

 

 

 

 

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The Future of Gaming

Last week Microsoft launched the Xbox One. It not only integrates TV, Internet and gaming, but will also measure your heartbeat, recognises your voice, and has social incorporated throughout. Xbox sees the future of gaming to be home console entertainment, the best way to fight off the trend of mobile and social gaming.

There is an argument to say that mobile and social is where the future of gaming is as 70% of casual gamers are young women, who have a disposable income or control the family wallet. You can see why many companies are focusing their attentions here. In fact one of the fastest growing gaming companies is Supercell which focuses on mobile gamers and attracts 8.5 million daily players who play their games an average of ten times per day. Read More »

Futureproofing your SEO strategy

Over the past two years Google has taken control of the SEO industry and successfully devalued or penalised a lot of the lower quality practices that plenty of sites used to take advantage of.

When the Panda update was launched in 2011 it put an end to sites thinking that they could churn out loads of content but this didn’t affect too many legitimate websites who really cared about content. Read More »

How Innovation Builds Consumer Trust

Historically, trust has been an important social commodity and today, this is certainly the case for brands. Without trust how can you hope to be loved? According to the Edelman trust report there are five key areas that a brand must focus on to become trusted: engagement, integrity, products and services, purpose and operations. I wanted to take a deeper look at the technology playing a key part in each of these areas. Read More »

Twitter ties TV and tweets together with ad targeting system

Twitter is targeting TV advertisers with a new system that will identify people who are tweeting about a brand’s ads.

Called TV ad targeting on Twitter, and developed followings its acquisition of social TV analytics firm Bluefin Labs, it is designed to help marketers extend and enhance their TV ad campaigns.

Initially available only in select areas in the US, advertisers will be able to see which Twitter users have been exposed to their ads on TV and target them with Promoted Tweets. Read More »

Five steps to making email mobile friendly

Despite predictions of the demise of email, figures from the Radicati Group show that there were around 2.1 billion emails users in 2012, with the number set to grow beyond 2.8 billion in the next four years.

But while email is here to stay and growing rapidly, the way in which users are accessing those emails is changing. Read More »

Brand advocacy programmes: Six things to consider before you start

Who do you trust more to recommend a product to you, someone within your social circle, or the person paid to market the product?

It’s not a hard question to answer, and that’s why recruiting third-party brand advocates is one of the hottest topics in marketing right now. Read More »

A demographic portrait of Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook users

A useful study here from the ‘Pew Research Center’ taking a look at the demographic make-up of US social media users across Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook. No data on LinkedIn of Google+, but great stats all the same.

It is no surprise how fast Twitter user numbers have grown, Pew says they have doubled since November 2010 and now has around 500 million in total with around 200 million who are active, but Pinterest is almost on a par with the percentage of internet users using it service.

Pinterest remains heavily skewed to women, it is also “whiter” and its users are better educated. Instagram also has more women users, as does Facebook. Twitter is the only network where there are more men (although LinkedIn if it were included would lead in this category). Read More »

Forget the ‘Store of the Future’; brands need to think about the store of tomorrow

Forget the ‘Store of the Future’; brands need to think about the store of tomorrowTechnological innovations are everywhere, and while we may hear about a number of fascinating new developments, few will actually truly define the future of retail. Considering the changing landscape, technology is irrelevant if you don’t first understand both the behaviours and motivations of consumers in a hyper-connected, multi-channel world.

The rise of ecommerce has made shopper marketing an increasingly complex field, particularly when it comes to measurement and subsequently, selecting the right technology to legitimately improve a proposition in a cost-effective way. Any new implementation is only useful if it solves a need; whether that is improving efficiency, fostering loyalty or reducing barriers to purchase. Read More »