It must be pretty uncomfortable at Facebook Towers at the moment. The share price halving in four months must have been worry enough. But potentially more damaging from a long-term business perspective are the recent revelations about “fake profiles”.

Rory Cellan-Jones’s excellent investigative piece  is a good place to start. The BBC’s technology correspondent didn’t bother with rumour and conjecture but instead created a commercial account for “virtual bagels” himself. His report was alarming enough for Facebook, but seems to have been just the iceberg of a wider problem which Facebook seem to have acknowledged themselves by purging vast swathes of fake accounts after reports that over 8% of profiles were fake. Read More »

Some traditional marketers have long been sceptical of the potential of Facebook ads and Likes. Today, a report from BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan Jones suggests that companies may indeed be wasting their money on Facebook ads, and having their egos inflated by spam Likes that will provide no boost to business.

It is worrying news for Facebook, which is preparing to release their first figures since IPO later this month. The story comes on the heels of other reports questioning the value of advertising on Facebook. Last month we published a story that said some marketers had concluded that advertising on Facebook wasn’t necessary. Read More »

With Propeller PR’s expertise in the media and tech media space, we’ve partnered with PR software provider Cision to reveal our ‘Tech Influence 25′ list. Rory Cellan-Jones, technology correspondent for the BBC tops the list.

He’s closely followed by Charles Arthur, technology editor for The Guardian, and Mark Prigg, science & technology editor for the Evening Standard. Read More »

Back in March, I wrote this piece looking at the ownership issues around Twitter profiles used for professional purposes. I noted that sensible consensus seemed to be that a personal feed (with no inclusion of a company or brand name) is owned entirely by the individual behind it, whilst a corporate feed (with no inclusion of an employee name) is owned entirely by the organisation to which it makes reference.

However, the post raised the issue of Twitter profiles that combine both employee and employer names. At the time, I mentioned that the account of the BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent, Laura Kuenssberg, was the perfect example of this – @BBCLauraK. What would happen, I asked, if she left the BBC for a rival media outlet? Would the BBC keep her Twitter account and reassign to her successor, or would she be permitted to take it with her? Read More »