What is influence? It’s a massive question in the world of social media. Thousands of man hours are being pumped into companies who are trying to solve the problem in the hope that one day, you’ll be able to search a category and an application will spit out exactly the 5 top influencers you need to be communicating with to push your product.
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UK social media users are among the most resistant consumers in the world towards brands invading their personal space, according to a new study, which reflects how businesses are wasting time and money trying to reach people online who, in all likelihood, probably aren’t listening.

Data revealed by TNS Digital Life found that 61% of UK consumers do not want to engage with brands in their social networks, a figure that is slightly above average (57%) from other developed markets studied. Read More »

Despite some recent success enjoyed by big brand advertisers—like Ford’s spokespuppet ‘Doug’ campaign—Facebook is forecast to capture only 6.4% of total online ad spending this year.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ford spent more than $95m promoting its ‘Doug’ campaign on TV and print, but less than 5% of that was spent on Facebook, which garnered 43,000 “likes”. Of ‘Doug’s’ Facebook fans, 61% said they were more likely to consider buying a Ford Focus, the car it was advertising. Read More »

People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs

What is user experience?

User Experience (UX) is about designing technology so that it meets the needs of users. It ensures products are efficient, easy to learn and satisfying to use. UX is a way of thinking about technology – which is what I’d like to discuss in this post – and also a set of tools for putting its principles into practice, some of which I’ll introduce in future articles. Read More »

Australian futurist Ross Dawson has come up with these sobering graphics predicting the global extinction of newspapers in the coming decade. He is predicting the extinction of newspapers in the US around 2017 and in the UK by 2019.

Iceland’s papers will also go in 2019 with Canada and Norway in 2020. On a global level some of the factors leading to the (much written of) death of print include the rise in terms of availability of mobile phones, tablet computers and e-readers; the development of high performance digital paper; and the uptake of paid content and paywalls. Read More »

Internet Week Europe is a week-long festival of events celebrating Europe’s thriving digital media industry and community.

Hoping to replicate the success of sister festival Internet Week New York, the London version will see companies such as Tweetdeck, the Guardian, Moo.com, Google, BBC, Channel 4, Penguin, New Media Age, Creative Review and key sponsor Yahoo! host events throughout the capital from 8th to 12th November 2010.

However, it’s not just the big names who can get involved. Read More »

I recently read a great blog post from AppStorm, a web focused technology blog, that identified there top 35 Facebook pages, owned and operated by some of the worlds leading brands. From reading through the blog post it offered a real insight into the potential in which Facebook can offer brands looking to generate interest in there products/services, building a strong customer network, spreading your brand message and using additional functionalities available to actually generate revenue. Read More »

Unfortunately in the wonderful world of the digital age it is simply not enough anymore to do blanket CV mail outs to potential employers, on the off chance that they have a job going. Employers are utilising the digital landscape in order to raise their profiles and they expect their prospective employees to do the same. So if you don’t know your tweets from your links then here are some top tips to help you find a job via social networking. Read More »

Most in-house PR professionals (80%) are failing to integrate digital and social media into their communications strategies, according to research. Read More »

Well, it looks like they’re going to give it a go. With display ad revenues not enough to make substantial, or indeed any, profit, according to a survey from the Association of Online Publishers, around 70% of online publishers in the newspaper, magazine or TV industries will pay for content online.

I believe that a lot of them will be heading for a fall. There are simply too many of these mass media dinosaurs providing content that is too similar and usually available for free somewhere else. But admittedly, there are some big brands here with sometimes over 200 years of audience building, so surely that will count for something?

The truth is that no one really knows but last week a paidContentUK/Harris Interactive poll showed that only 5% of people who read a news site at least once a month would pay for online access. Though if a free or discounted subscription to a printed paper were thrown in as well, that would rise to 48%. A huge leap. As a Guardian reader to has seen the price of the paper hit the £1 barrier for the first time, I find this idea is particularly appealing and as newspapers make far more money from advertising that cover price, it could be an option. Albeit surely quite a radical one.

In the Guardian last week Andrew Freeman, Harris’s senior technology, media and telecoms consultant, said that this model of combining charges together for printed and digital content is “an interesting possible picture of the future”: “The value of this type of reader, engaged with the content, and (because of the subscription structure) much more likely to be brand loyal, would be massively higher to advertisers. If newspapers can deliver this sort of model – combining the best of both media within a paid-for relationship, then the future will be more certain, but certainly different.”

Unfortunately the bad news is that “when asked the maximum amount they would be prepared to pay, respondents who read a free news site at least once a month gave us [the poll] the lowest possible amount in each category – annual subscriptions under £10, a day pass costing under £0.25 and per-article fees of between 1p and 2p”. I still believe that there are not enough newspapers readers that are loyal enough to a brand for all the current national brands to survive this change, and for those that survive this digital/print mixed subscription could be the way forward but these numbers don’t really seem strong enough to prop up the bank balance of national newspapers, especially when ad revenues will be affected by the fall in traffic that will surely come from putting up a paywall.

Moreover, yesterday in the Guardian, the same poll asks about how those payments would manifest themselves and it would seem that the preferred method of carrying out this revolution (and it really is no less than that) is by no means decided.

53% of consumers said that they would prefer a subscription of up to a year which will upset the champions of the latest media wunderkind- the micro payment. Paying a few pence per article is the method that many have put forward as something more appealing to consumer especially since Google revealed a fortnight ago that they would roll out their out system of micro payments, possibly as an extension of Google Checkout, in a document sent to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request for paid-content proposals that the association sent to several technology companies.

Freeman says, “”There’s been a lot of buzz about micro-payment recently, and some prominent players, like Google, have moved into this field, but there are massive challenges: and not just technical ones. From a simple business point of view, micropayments are disproportionately expensive to administer until you have an enormous volume and value, it just won’t be worthwhile. If consumers are going to give up their preference for single-subscription payments they can more easily check and monitor, they will need to have real confidence and trust in the brands they use. Micropayments will probably benefit only the very largest of companies.”

Not good news for all but very few large scale media owners who want to make money from content. Long established institutions will fall before a system is settled upon, that much seems certain.