Spotify has finally come to Singapore! The world renowned streaming music playlist/personalised radio brand has landed after years of developing its brand in America and Europe and building up a loyal following. The main stumbling block in Asia for all these music/video content players is rights.

Asia is infamous for illegal downloading. The 240 million people who live in Indonesia for example only bought 11 million CDs last year compared to the 6 million illegal downloads they do a day, at a conservative estimate.

Singapore is actually the world capital of illegal downloading per capita fuelled by the obsession with the latest tech gadgets, high speed internet and multiple music playing devices…..and desire for a freebie (despite having the world’s highest GDP per capita, US$30k above the UK)!

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This post is provided by our partner Adobe

In their continuing fight to ride the wave of emerging technology and tame the data collected from social media, marketers have a new suite of tools to arm their brands with.

Focused on metrics, not myths, Adobe’s Marketing Cloud helps marketers turn their data into insight and actions quicker, providing a single service that pulls together data from social interactions and targeted advertising to help marketers get ahead. Read More »

It is fast becoming apparent to many social media companies that Brazil is a hotspot and with saturation being reached in the US and Europe, the Latin American country offers the chance for massive freedom of growth.

That’s something that isn’t possible in China where the state imposes many restrictions on what can and can not go on like and where sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are currently blocked. Read More »

Experian have released a new piece research that explores how consumers share data, much of which is generated through social networks, and  looks at how marketers can use this data to engage consumers. While younger people are far more comfortable with the idea of sharing data with brands, high numbers of people from all age groups are happy to share information and engage with brands, so long as they trust them.

The research found that as many as 82 per cent of UK consumers are happy to share their information with brands across at least one channel, showing just how much this has become part of our everyday engagement with products and companies.

Unsurprisingly, 18-24 year olds are the demographic who are most likely to share information over three channels, and this increasingly including social channels. This younger age group is also frequently the most engaged with brands. Read More »

It is being reported that Apple has held serious talks with Twitter in recent months about making a sizable investment in the social networking firm. Such a deal would help the iPhone maker bridge the gap in its own lack of social media presence.

The investment is said by the New York Times to be valued in the region of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This would add more than $1.6bn to Twitter’s valuation catapulting it to $10bn. It was last valued at $8.4bn last year. Read More »

Women are twice as likely as men to refer to their social network contacts, especially Facebook friends, when making purchasing decisions, according to a study.  It also indicates more consumers  prefer informative content on brands’ social channels to simple offers of freebies and incentives, while  brands should tailor their online content according to age, gender and even income or education.

The study of 1,000 UK consumers using the newly-launched, self-service rapid online survey provider, Usurv*, which assessed their consumption of brands’ content online when making purchasing decisions. I’d love to learn from marketers if the below findings match up with their own experiences. Read More »

I recently attended two very different social media events. The first, the ‘London think-tank summit: at the intersection of traditional and social media’ hosted by the European Parliament, discussed the role that social media can play in influencing public policy and driving awareness campaigns. The second, hosted jointly by Facebook and the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry looked at how businesses can use social media – or more specifically (and rather unsurprisingly), Facebook, to grow a business.

At the EU Parliament summit Cicero’s Chris Jackson compared the business world’s experience of social media to sex – we’re all talking about it, a few of us are doing it and even fewer of us are doing it well. It was also remarked that social media is where the internet was in 1996 – we recognise that it’s incredibly important but we are also still at the beginning of the journey, nobody yet knows where it’s going. Read More »

Labour Party activists in Manchester have come together to launch a social network, which is built around Twitter and that allows supporters to connect online, register their skills, and where others can ask for help.

Called Labour Exchange it uses social media to bring supporters and party members together and it nicely slots another piece of the modern campaigning jigsaw into place.

What it also does is recognise that the greatest asset of any organisation or party is its people and has worked out a way of doing something about that. Read More »

This week saw the much anticipated buyout of the so-called ‘Facebook for the workplace’, Yammer, by Microsoft for $1bn first reported two weeks ago.

There have been suggestions that the software giant will integrate the four year old social network into its Office suite. This move comes after research from comScore revealed that email use among 12-17 year olds dropped by 24% during 2011, with an overall fall in webmail usage of 6% so it would appear that Microsoft is covering itself for the possible demise of email in the near future.

This is certainly a subject that has been discussed frequently among commentators over the past few years and as companies increasingly gravitate toward social networking alternatives, such as Yammer or self designed systems for internal communications, could we really be witnessing the death of email? Read More »

Microsoft is reported to be in talks to acquire business social network Yammer for in excess of $1 billion.

Bloomberg reports that a deal is close at hand and could be signed as early as tomorrow.

Acquiring Yammer would give Microsoft some much needed social networking to offer its business customers and would allow it to build Yammer into its other products. Read More »