With all the social media and influence measurement tools available today, the communications sector should be understanding more about what makes us happy and productive, and what motivates us to participate in social conversations.

Unfortunately, the reverse seems to be true.  Understanding about what makes an authentic engagement, and what constitutes a satisfied and committed social community is as unclear as ever[1]. And the reason for this comes down to a misunderstanding of the differences between insights and inference. Read More »

The topic of PR and SEO is one which continues to fascinate me. Why is it that so many PR agencies have been slow to exploit this field, estimated to be worth £500m per year?

For this reason I ran a rough Survey Monkey study of UK PRs during May 2012 and, although it garnered 100 entries, the responses were interesting, especially as a quarter (23 people) took the time to fill the optional comments box. Read More »

Today Facebook debuts on the Nasdaq stock market in the US at $38 a share and will be valued at $104bn, netting Mark Zuckerburg $19bn. Yesterday we heard that Pinterest could be valued at $1.5bn. Recently, iPhone app Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1bn.

Social media has become embedded into our everyday lives, into business, the media and Government. It’s why the companies behind the technology are deemed such prized commodities at the moment. While the disruption that social media services have caused is indisputable, whether these services are so deeply meshed into our existence that they really are long term financially viable propositions is less clear. Is the age of sharing going to finish as quickly as it started?

To coin a phrase, if looks like a bubble, and acts like a bubble, it probably is a bubble.
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Arsenal topped the Twitter Social Media league with nearly 1.5 million Twitter followers (also the 3rd highest worldwide for a football club) in May. However, having the most followers doesn’t necessarily equate to being the best. Manchester City were this month’s champions both on the pitch and in the social media world.

City collected their second “Best of the Month” award this season in Freestyle Interactive‘s  monthly Premier League Social Media Stats infographic series. Read More »

This week I’ve been amazed by the prophetic wisdom of folk music legend Harry Nilsson. In 1969 he sang:  “Everybody’s talking at me, I don’t hear a word they’re saying, Only the echoes of my mind.”

So, why has Harry been echoing in my mind? And what has folk music got to do with social media? Read More »

Canadian national newspaper The Globe and Mail is to follow The New York Times and others and begin charging its readers for content. The paper is to implement a metered paywall system although it has yet to announce how much it will charge or how many articles it will give readers for free.

It said the it was moving its plans forward for the paywall in response “to an unpredictable advertising market”, which that has seen both print and digital sales drop this spring at publishers in both North America and Europe. Read More »

Today’s internet is so dominated by Facebook and Google it’s hard to imagine how they could possibly be superseded. This infographic from CenturyLink reminds us that on the web, nothing is forever. The past giants from AOL to Yahoo! have all experienced life cycles, and according to the averages below Facebook has about 3 years until it dies! Maybe we should be taking Facebook up on their offer last Thursday to download an expanded archive of all our data after all.

Do you think Facebook will suffer the same fate as these giants?

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English Premier League football clubs are starting to ramp up their Social Media activity as they begin to gain more followers. In the past few months our data has showed that clubs are quickly gaining more and more Twitter followers and Facebook Likes every month. Clubs have recognised this rapid growth and responded with a higher volume of tweets and updates in order to ensure this growth doesn’t slow. Read More »

Google+ (Search Plus Your World) is over a year into its life and most of us are still wondering exactly where it’s positioned in the market. Google are notoriously anti-competitive and as a publisher, it kind of feels like we’re being bullied into finding a use for it as a service. This is an ironic twist for me as I commented earlier last year that it was social media commentators picking on the search giants 19th foray into the social space.

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