Financial organisations have to operate under strict regulations, even on social media. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA ), which replaced the FSA on 1st April, has made it clear that financial organisations have to communicate in a way that is clear, fair and not misleading, irrespective of the channel used. (April also saw American regulator, the SEC, issue fresh guidance permitting companies to post earnings and investment updates on social media channels.)

As more people turn to social media to communicate with companies, financial organisations such as banks, insurers and investment firms are finding creative ways to attract fans and followers, and engage them enough to keep them coming back for more. Read More »

Pinterest has announced some updates and redesigns to the site that it hopes will  make the digital notice board easier to use and should make it more useful to brands as well.

What’s been most interesting about these changes is that the updates were crowdsourced. Pinterest put an updated design to a group of users, and made changes based on their recommendations. Feature additions were also based on user feedback.  Read More »

In services like Pinterest, Flickr, and Instagram (not to mention Facebook and Twitter,) photos have become a critical frontier in the battle for web dominance, particularly in the social  space.

While Instagram is dominating in mobile, an  interesting war is raging between Yahoo’s Flickr, and  online pinboard Pinterest. They may different style services, but fundamental comparisons can be made, and are very revealing about the directions the web is going in.
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If 2011 and 2012 were about first experimenting and then putting a social-media strategy into play, this year has to be about starting to think what is working and what is not. It is also about realising that you don’t have to try everything, and, more to the point, that you can’t do everything, as that brings with it another set of problems. Read More »

With Twitter recently given an official valuation of $9bn now there are reports that Pinterest, which has yet to make much in the way of revenue, is seeking to raise new financing that would see it valued at between $2bn and $2.5bn, according to the Wall Street Journal. Read More »

Pinterest has revamped its activity feed and launched a new “News” tool that is designed to make content easier to find on the picture-based social media notice board.  You will now be able to view “your News” on the left side of your home feed and in the News tab on your profile.

It will also include board invitations, but it will not include likes or new followers. Not clear why they are not included, but you can still receive notifications about likes and new followers through your emails.  Read More »

London based start up Publicate has today come out of Alpha and into Beta, and announced itself to the world with a web tv series. Publicate allows users to build Pinterest style collections, but from any media across the web. The service is also connected to a variety of social networks, so that users can easily share their collections with friends and followers. I got to test Publicate earlier in the development process, and what I really liked was the range of media that could be compiled within the service.

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Interesting post on the Harvard Business Review blog that makes the case for not spreading yourself too thin when it comes to social media. While some argue that brands need to keep up and be represented on a variety of social platforms in practice this can prove challenging. Even if you consider only the biggest social networks that still means you having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram. You could add Foursquare to that — some do seem to think that it will have a good year. Read More »

2012 was a big year for social media so as we move full steam ahead into 2013, and all the predictions it has brought, now is the perfect time to look back at the past year of social and see exactly what kind of year the past 12 months proved to be for the main players.  This infographic from Pardot takes a look at Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook (no Instagram) and gives them each an end of year school report card in terms of growth, users and ROI. Read More »

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has a problem on her hands. Two out of three of Yahoo’s biggest sources of traffic, namely email and search, are declining rapidly, according to new private ComScore numbers reported by AllThingsD. That only leaves its prime location homepage as one major area that is growing. Considering Mayer’s goal is to take Yahoo back to its roots “as a consumer internet company” that could prove to be a huge problem. Read More »