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 »

Gordon Macmillan started the debate last month with a piece about the strongly conflicting views of views of two journalists on the role of social media. The piece itself and the ensuing comments raised an interesting paradox, and one which social media professionals are all too aware of. Many journalists, and indeed brands seem to fall into the ‘love’ or ‘hate’ category when it comes to social media – either thinking it has to be at the forefront of everything they do, or that it’s single-handedly destroying the essence of their industry.

People seem to get so het up about the social media question that they manage to overlook what its role actually is – to create, share and deliver content that is not bound by the traditional rules of mass media. The immediacy of this content, both in terms of time and availability, means that platforms such as Twitter, Facebook (and indeed Audioboo) provide a more direct route to people than traditional news reporting. However, this doesn’t mean that every single story should automatically be farmed out via any and every form of social media available. Content created for a newspaper, for example, may not work in a social environment, and journalists spending hours syndicating the same content across all platforms might miss crucial stories. Jack Lessonberry’s reaction to the memo, while a little wide of the mark, is understandable when you take this into consideration. Read More »

I heard Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, on Radio 4 this week talking about Wikipedia’s problem in attracting a more diverse set of editors. Typically post-graduates, nine in ten of its 36,000 volunteer contributors are male and the average age is 26. This lack of variety means the content is not as ‘culturally rich’ as it could be, she said. Read More »

Brand storytelling is a bit of a buzzword right now. You can’t read a magazine, blog or agency website without it cropping up in some form or other. I guess it’s not rocket science; people love stories. When they resonate, we connect with them, we remember them with ease and we pass them on. Looking at these potential outcomes, it’s no wonder brands and marketers are keen to understand how to create brand stories that give them these types of results. Read More »

Instagram, the app which allows you to share sepia-hued photos instantly, currently has has around 10 million users with over 250 million photos shared so there’s plenty of material to crowdsource your video from.

The Vaccines decided to give their fans the chance to be in the latest music video for the song ‘Wetsuit’. Read More »

Infographics are transforming the way we see data, shifting us away from boring, stuffy tables and towards beautiful graphics which communicate complex ideas in a clear and simple way. If you’re a real data visualisation enthusiast, get ready to drool over Visual.ly. Read More »

Wikipedia has decided its editors need to feel a little bit more valued. So it’s introducing ‘a simple experiment in appreciation’ called WikiLove. Read More »

There’s such a flurry of new applications being released all the time that it takes a lot for something to stop you in your tracks and make you say ‘ooooh, that’s clever.’

That’s what happened when I came across Forvo recently. Its mission is simple; to build up a database of all the words in the world pronounced by native speakers. Read More »

It used to be so straightforward. When the Queen got married in 1947 you listened to the live radio broadcast. When Charles and Diana wed in 1981 you watched it on the telly (on one of three channels).

Now in 2011 we are spoiled for choice in coverage of Wills and Kate’s big day. And with a third of smartphone users having downloaded royal wedding-related apps, it’s a fair bet that we’ll be following events on more than one medium – watching the ceremony on TV while posting cheeky comments on Twitter.

Here’s the coverage on offer. How will you be watching and reacting to the events? Read More »

Despite social media’s osmotic move into mainstream digital marketing strategy, there still remain a great many sceptics that still cite social media as a fad and perhaps more worryingly, something to be afraid of.

One of the biggest reasons I hear attributed to this wariness of social media is people’s fear of losing control of their brand, which is understandable if viewed from (dare I say this!) an out-dated, web 1.0 perspective. Read More »