I was recently asked to help someone I know promote their business product on my personal Facebook page. “Just post a link to our webstore” they enthusiastically suggested. I refused. One, because I didn’t have any interest whatsoever in their product, nor did I think any of my friends would, and two, because it would look so utterly false and out-of-place on my profile that it wasn’t worth the effort. I explained to this person that I very rarely, if ever, post status updates on Facebook. So if I was going to break that habit, I was certainly not going to do so in order to flog a bunch of crap; I’d just post some song lyrics or a cat picture or something like you’re meant to.

I give my friends more respect than selling miscellaneous products to them, and besides, they would all recognise it as being completely incongruous with my usual mute Facebook behaviour. It’s this blatant, heavy-handed advertising-dressed-up-as-genuine-communication-between-friends that really irks me about social media, and it’s the cynical monetizing and hierarchisation of this concept by companies like Klout that irritates even further.

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This post is provided by our partner Headstream, the social brand agency behind the Social Brands 100.

So it’s finally happened; Facebook has filed for ‘the largest technology IPO in Wall Street history’. Everything about Facebook is immense; almost 850 million users and 2.7 billion likes and comments every day. As recently as the summer of 2008, Mark Zuckerberg was celebrating the 100 millionth user, that means 750 million people signed up in 3.5 years alone. Then there’s Twitter, hitting 500 million users any day now, not to mention Linkedin, who reported 135 million members in November 2011. Read More »

A few weeks ago I wrote a story about LinkedIn and their aggressive approach in turning their platform into Temptation Island when it came to moving jobs. My ire was drawn from all the fabulous new ways they’ve conjured up to move jobs. Clever display adverts that put my head under a fancy job title, jobs I might be interested in floating down my newsfeed and a daily digest of jobs I might like on a weekly basis, usually at my weakest on a Monday.

The post had quite a lot of interest from business owners, to recruitment consultants to, would you believe it, LinkedIn themselves. They got in touch and wanted the chance to explain their vision and why my view, though valid, might have different facets unconsidered in the original piece.

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Looking for a huge numbers of fans? Can’t wait a second longer? Then read on, this blog post is for you…

1. 1. Buy your fans
   This is definitely the easiest way to guarantee a following fast; decide how many ‘fans’ you want then simply go to any dodgy-looking site (probably via a Facebook ad) take your wallet out (remember to stick your head in the sand) et voila, success! But wait a second; by definition once you directly pay for a relationship what does that relationship become? What does it really mean? There’s a very obvious analogy here, one that doesn’t involve any love at all… Read More »

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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This month we have the second infographic produced by UK Digital Agency – Freestyle Interactive – for English Premier League clubs. With Social Media becoming increasingly influential amongst clubs and players, the Midlands based agency has promised to track the growth as well as highlight any creative examples of fan engagement. Some key ‘take aways’ include the combined leagues Facebook fans approaching 50 million, Manchester United are the only team without Twitter and Arsenal’s 360 Panorama Facebook app.

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Facebook insights. Dear oh dear. I’ve got to come out and say it – I’ve found their new and “improved” suite of analytics entirely perplexing, lacking in usefulness and extremely complex to explain, aggregate and apply to the real world.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one in the industry who has been using the old Insights page to report back successes to clients. I’ve been living in hope that they’ll never switch it off , but the time has come – the old insights page is still an option, but it’s not recording new data. I haven’t felt this down since I said goodbye to my Bebo account…

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Google has started the year by encouraging us to take more notice of our friends while simultaneously upsetting some of its other <cough> ‘friends’.

The launch of Search Plus Your World on Tuesday makes sense of some of the moves we’ve seen over the past few months, notably the creation of the Google+ network and encrypted search via SSL connections. Read More »

In the world of B2B, there is no doubt that LinkedIn is king. It’s a fantastic place to cultivate contacts, develop new ones, show off your business knowledge in a brash self-indulgent way and potentially win new business leads. It’s also been a pretty clever way of searching for jobs and it’s a  great way for a multitude of recruitment consultants to access your details and contact you for a ‘chat’.

Things were fine with LinkedIn and business. Employees went on there and pushed their personal brand by imparting their wisdom, this in turn benefited companies because those employees were acting as brand ambassadors which could help generate leads. Everyone was a winner. Read More »

A few years ago, you’d have to actually watch a football match (or listen on the radio) to get live updates from the pitch. Today, you can follow live coverage on Twitter, get your half-time analysis from a football community like footbo and bantr , discuss the result on Facebook and get the low down after the game… from the players themselves on Twitter. We did some digging into the relationship between our national obsession with football, and social media.

Footballers and their fans

Players like Cristiano Ronaldo have millions of fans following them on Twitter. This is a great way for players and fans to talk directly to each other, but it also carries a risk. The carefully crafted soundbites of a press conference can be replaced with ill-thought-out comments that often as not make it into the press. Read More »