Google last night opened up its social network service Google+ to brands and businesses with the launch of Google+ Pages.

In so doing it finally offers a much needed alternative to Facebook where many brands, which many brands are increasingly making the focus of their social media campaigns.

Already as Marketing reported major UK brands including Burberry, MailOnline, O2, Cadbury and Mumsnet are among the first to launch pages on Google+. Read More »

While it was reported earlier this week that News International had ditched the idea of a paywall for The Sun other parts of the News Corporation empire are pressing ahead with plans.

The Australian will put its paywall live on Monday, according to News Limited boss John Hartigan, beginning with a three month free trial. 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 »

How many buttons can a website take? Twitter is testing that a little more this week with the launch of its ‘Follow button’, which allows users to follow Twitter accounts directly from a website.

It’s a simple way of getting new follows for websites, blogs and brands. It also allows sites to show just how many followers they have, which in itself can often attract new followers. Read More »

If you have followed The New York Times Twitter feed you will know that until now it has been an automated one much like many other publications, but that’s now changed — at least temporarily.

As Poynter reports The New York Times has replaced its main automatic feed this week with two real people, in social media editors Liz Heron and Lexi Mainland, as an experiment. Read More »

The Wall Street Journal appears to have launched what looks very much like its answer to Wikileaks.

Called Safe House it is asking people to help it “uncover fraud, abuse and other wrongdoing” by sending it documents using “a special system built to be secure”. Your identity, it assures, would be kept “anonymous or confidential” if needed. Read More »

Listen carefully, I think I heard a penny drop. Entertainment title Variety has had a brain wave and is launching a breaking news blog outside of its paywall.

Rather like The Times  Variety has a paywall that hides all of its content, which of course discourages websites from linking or sharing its content.

Read More »

News Corporation might recently have delayed The Sun’s move to paid content, in light of the disappointment with the The Times, but that is not stopping the Telegraph Media Group pushing ahead with plans to introduced a metered paywall for Telegraph.co.uk.

Marketing reports today that the Daily Telegraph website is to a unveil paid-for website in September and that it will be a metered model, which unlike The Times and its anti-social media paywall will allow articles to be freely shared online. Smart move. Read More »

Here’s an interesting one. Steven Brill’s Journalism Online paywall system has put out a survey that claims newspapers using its paywall technology are noticing little difference in terms of traffic or advertising revenue.

The default belief is that web traffic evaporates as it is thought have done at The Times where it has put up a impenetrable anti-social media paywall. Not so elsewhere. Read More »

Well that’s embarrassing. Political blogger Guido Fawkes is claiming today that he has more readers than The Times newspaper website, which has seen traffic fall through the floor since it locked its site behind an anti-social media paywall.

His claim is based on figures from Hitwise that suggest only 54,000 people are visiting The Times website each day while Guido has a readership of around 60,000. Read More »