Of all the head-to-heads scheduled across the Olympic and Paralympic games, which one will be the big story to come out of London 2012? Perhaps it will be the 100m face-off between Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake, or Jessica Ennis vs Tatyana Chernova in the Heptathlon, or even Oscar Pistorious vs Jerome Singleton?

Although these and many other high profile confrontations, have great importance for the athletes and spectators alike ; in my view the main event will be the confrontation between the Olympic authorities – and Social Media.

Taking nothing away from the endeavours of individual athletes, this is the main event because it may impact on the future funding and therefore the future success of the Olympic Games. More than this, the face-off between the Olympic authorities and social media, is part of a much bigger debate about censorship and freedom of speech, which is apparent across the world and in many other walks of life Read More »

It is being reported that Facebook will begin its investor roadshow for its initial public on Monday, which means that its shares should begin trading on May 18.

The roadshow will see founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg closely involved, according to sources quoted by Reuters. To date he has been mostly in the background as the IPO has progressed and did not attend an analysts’ meeting in March. Read More »

Interesting piece by Nick Bailey, a creative director at digital agency AKQA Amsterdam, on why he thinks social media isn’t really media at all.

He makes a lot of good points, but I think he is also wrong as he falls into the trap of trying to directly compared traditional media and social media and of course they are different in a great many ways. Read More »

Remember the Qantas hashtag fail? Of course, you do. The Aussie airline saw the #QantasLuxury Twitter campaign spectacularly backfire late last year.

Now it is the turn of McDonald’s which has also been on the receiving end of a Twitter hashtag fail after it launched promoted tweet campaign that sought to share positive stories about farmers who grow the fast food giant’s food. Sadly for McDonald’s this quickly turned into a major piece of #McFail as it lost control of the hashtag and off it went. 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 »

Twitter has published its #YearInReview that highlights the leading topics and hashtags of the year.

The top two hashtags demonstrate as clearly as anything the diversity and breadth of what takes place on Twitter. The top one was #egypt followed by Charlie Sheen’s #tigerblood. Is he still winning? Read More »

McDonald’s has leveraged social media to launch its new Chicken McGrill sandwich in a campaign entitled ‘Making it better, made for Singapore’ through Tribal DDB Singapore, alongside traditional media usage. Read More »

Most of the top global brands have Facebook pages but many are only in English despite having people from all over the world following them.  For most under 20 year olds in the developed world*, Facebook is a significant part of their daily routine.

As this generation grows up, Facebook will continue to be with them and if brands want to be part of their lives, they will have to address their existing and would-be followers intelligently and in their own language. Otherwise, they are in danger of missing the point like Booker prize winner J G Farrell’s Padre who didn’t see why the Bible “should have been written in Hebrew or Greek when English was the obvious language”. Read More »

A very informative video interview here for you with Rick Wion, director of social media at Mcdonald’s.

He lays out very neatly how the fast food giant runs its social media and gives some good pointers that can be applied by anyone. Read More »

This is quite amusing. McDonald’s is attempting to challenge the McJob perceptions (again) that people have about its staff with a campaign called ‘Think Again’.

Here’s how it works: you find an attractive bright graduate who is perceived to be atypical of those employed by McDonald’s and you send her out with a camera to ask the public who they think are the kind of people who work at McDonald’s? The Answers are universally derogatory. Read More »