While Starbucks wilts under the pressure of protest and public boycotts Google is  showing no such qualms as its chairman, Eric Schmidt, says that he is “very proud” of the company’s tax structure and that efforts to lower its payments to governments like Britain are just “capitalism”.

It is an interesting communications approach to take. Brazen almost. It gives the impression that Google does not care what anyone thinks of it. As the Telegraph reports Schmidt’s certainly comments risk inflaming the row over the amount of tax multinationals pay, after it emerged that Google funnelled $9.8bn (£6.07bn) of revenues from international subsidiaries into Bermuda last year in order to halve its tax bill. Read More »

Twenty-three percent of the top 100 brands enable consumer outreach and engagement via mobile and social networks using phones, smartphones and tablets, according to a new report from Brand Keys.

Apple and Amazon dominate. You have to go to number 12 on the list before you are not dealing with a tech brand that has a natural fit into mobile.

The 16^th annual loyalty leaders gives the loyalty rankings for the top 100 brands out of 598 brands assessed in 83 industry categories in the 2012 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index.

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In the last of our series of excerpts from the brand new book – Pioneers of Digital – we turn to a man that came from China to university in the US and ended up spearheading search engine research at IBM, managing 3000 developers at Yahoo! and who is now the driving force behind Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

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When will brands ever learn? Do people not use the internet and read stuff? When it comes to social media we are now at a point when we have a fat pile of case files detailing how various brands have failed at social media, but this does not apparently stop other brands copying these mistakes over and over again.

This time around it is the turn of American Apparel. It has had the bright idea of rolling out a “Hurricane Sandy Sale” ad and as you might guess has sparked something of a Twitter backlash and ensured its brand will forever be linked with the words “social media fail”.

Earlier this year it was KFC Thailand doing its best to fail on social media. While the country was watching tsunami warnings and fearing the worst the fast food firm posted a message on its official Faceook page suggesting it was some time for tasty chicken as they watched the drama unfold. Read More »

Here we go again. Last year it was Microsoft’s Bing capitalising on the #SupportJapan campaign in the wake of the earth quake and tsunami there and then we had fashion designer Kenneth Cole riding on the coattails of #Egypt.

So, Cyber Monday has been and gone – but not forgotten, unless you’re using Bing that is.

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land picked up on the fact that the site of the trade organisation that came up with the concept quite literally got lost on Bing. Read More »

High-quality content is a “competitive must” for businesses looking to up their customer acquisition figures via SEO, especially in Google’s post-Panda realm, according to the marketers at Brafton.

The following infographic shows a case study of a sales management business that increased its organic search traffic, amid Google’s Panda update, by use of frequently updated blog posts and Tweets, while also boosting its number of referring keywords by 150%.

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Everyone loves a good story. Some people read them in linear form, on pages constructed of actual paper (hey! old school!), occasionally raising a mug filled with tea towards their mouths, and making deep, guttural satisfied noises in the back of their throats.

Others consume the narrative piece-by-piece, in mini-snack form, as delicious nuggets of a character-driven plot, each bite-sized chunk squirreled away somewhere inside their phone, laptop, iPad or other carriers of media, until appetite comes calling once again. Read More »

Straight from the Kenneth Cole School of Capitalising On Human Suffering To Promote Your Brand comes Bing‘s #SupportJapan campaign, which this weekend offered to donate $1 to Japanese earthquake victims each time their original post was retweeted.

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Gather round kids, it is time for a story about search engines. In the dim and distant past there were many search engines, but now now there are only two.

Okay, so it’s a short story, but infographic shows how since Yahoo! called it quits and other players such as AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, Ask.com and AOL have faded it is now just a battle of two.  Read More »