The short-list for this year’s Social Brands 100 has been announced and includes a roll call of top global brands including Starbucks, BBC, Ford, Red Bull, KLM, Virgin Atlantic, PayPal, Dell, and Xbox.

It isn’t all about big brands and how they are doing in social media. As with last year’s Social Brands 100 there is a good representation from smaller brands with the likes of Muddy Boots Foods, ARKive, Help for Heroes, Frugi, and Fifteen Cornwall all shortlisted. The full shortlist is below. Read More »

You can not have failed to notice the Starbucks promotion this morning that offered everyone a free latte today before 12 noon (check out Brand Republic’s Pinterest board for pics). With free coffee on offer it isn’t much of a surprise to see it get so much attention, did you get one?

We’ve been hearing of branches packed out around the country as people queued up to try out the new double shot latte, but Starbucks has also been doing a bit of a Snickers and hired some celebrity tweeters to pump the promotion. Comedian Jimmy Carr for one has been enthusiastically tweeting away. Read More »

Facebook announced some pretty significant changes to its business proposition. Not only is Timeline now available to brands through the revision of Facebook Pages, the social network has also made some major changes to its advertising platform.

In isolation, these updates have a big impact. In combination, they offer businesses an even more powerful marketing tool. Read More »

A report out today ranks the social media performance of the world’s most valuable brands. It puts Google as overall clear leader with Disney, Apple, Starbucks, Blackberry and Coca-Cola as runners-up.

The report also names and shames the bottom five social performers from the top 50 most valuable brands: Marlboro, Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and China Mobile all score poorly.  Others trailing behing include Gillette, IBM and Visa. Read More »

One of social media’s greatest benefits to brands is the ability to scale up customer engagement for value creation. The most intimate and valuable type of interaction was until recently facilitated mostly by one on one engagements that demanded extensive human resources and expenditures. Now, powered by digital platforms, engagement reaches scale. Engagement via social media has more to offer than recruiting customers and driving sales.

It can help extend the customer life-time by creating loyalty, as well as optimise it by turning customers into advocates and enjoy additional leads and sales. And –finally, but potentially most importantly, engagement through social media can generate insights from customers, which can lead to better products and services. Read More »

After a few months of testing Google is getting ready to roll out business user accounts, which have to date only been available to a couple of test accounts, namely Ford and General Motors, as reports suggest it is nearing 50 million accounts.

Last week Google opened Google+ to everyone. Users had previously needed invites to join Google+, but in an effort to speed its growth Google threw open the doors to the beta testing of its social network. Read More »

In my previous post I suggested that too many brands use social media marketing in a tactical rather than strategic way. Now I want to look at how social media can serve best when strategically leveraged to create customer value.

One of McKinsey’s frameworks for improving customer benefits suggests three areas of concentration: functional, process and relationship. Social media, as a mechanism to create customer value, can touch upon all three of these pillars and, by harnessing digital platforms and new ways of interacting with consumers, brands can create more value and as a result, willingness to pay. Read More »

Most journalists view the term “brand journalism” with scepticism, but it is nevertheless appropriate as the content that companies impart to their corporate “audience” must be entertaining, relevant and current. While most corporate “users” do not expect this type of communication to suddenly become subject to the same independent principles as many journalists might expect, they do insist on transparency. Read More »

Hurrah there is a winner and it is Lady Gaga. The queen of pop has become the first Twitter user (really superstar user) to soar past the 10 million follower mark. She beat Canadian popster Justin Bieber to take the 10 million crown. Read More »

Unless you’ve been living under that proverbial rock for the last six months (and perhaps even if you have), you’ll no doubt be aware of the phenomenon that is Instagram.

For the rock-dwellers amongst you, Instagram is a smartphone app that allows users to share photos with each other, in a ‘stream’ fairly akin to Twitter.  Its variety of vintage filters allows users a level of creativity too, which is proving highly popular (especially amongst the denizens of Hoxton). Read More »