There’s a danger, when we talk about how important it is for brands to become conversational inside and out, for companies to assume that everything they do must therefore be shared; that everything is interesting. In truth, being conversational means having a pervasively social, sharing approach but also knowing when to select and withhold. As [...]
As any of the many people who’ve met our Relationships Team know, they’re a sociable lot who love nothing more than a good knees-up (all in the cause of very serious social media networking, of course). So we’re all rather proud that they’re shunning the booze and stretching their hamstrings in order to raise money [...]
Here’s a new whitepaper from Satmetrix looking at the actual monetary value of ‘promoters’ and ‘detractors’ in the wireless telecomms industry. Their methodology used the value of buying power, customer tenure and referrals to conclude that each Promoter was worth c.$1,700 and .5 of a new customer to a brand, while each Detractor cost them $300. [...]
A couple of weeks ago the wonderful Jess Greenwood from Contagious Magazine asked me if I wanted to join her in presenting some emerging social media trends and innovations to 80 or so Girl Geek bloggers from Belgium and France in London’s Apple Store. I said Well, if I must. The girls were brought over by [...]
Back in the Facebook and Twitter-free salad days of 2006, tech innovations company Pelago created Whrrl, a ‘social discovery’ application that allowed members to track the ‘footstream’ of their real world adventures and upload recommendations and reviews. It foundered, but Pelago’s social media principles of “perfect information, people are media and pervasiveness of location-awareness” (read [...]
A WOM ripple can be defined as the spread and exposure of a piece of conversation or content across online and offline scapes, as it is relayed, repurposed and used to inspire further conversations. There’s lots of commentary devoted to identifying effective ripple triggers, such as the whitepaper on Spreadable Media I mentioned yesterday; key [...]
Interesting discussion going on over at the Economist’s Technology Quarterly about just how important online reviews have become, with new research from Bazaarvoice showing that “visitors are more reluctant to buy until a product attracts a reasonable number of reviews and picks up momentum”. But with the new ‘helpfulness’ rating on Amazon reviews emphasising quality [...]
‘Viral’ has become a vague and largely negative term in social media marketing, synonymous with brands ‘seeding’ gimmicky quick-win content to a reluctant web, so the Convergence Culture Consortium’s whitepaper on ‘Spreadable Media’ is a welcome attempt to clarify and reposition the idea. In the report Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf and Joshua [...]
Publicly accessible figureheads are increasingly important for brands. People build relationships with individuals not corporations, and word of mouth thrives on opinion and character rather than bland generalisation, so brands are trying to personalise their social media presences and give them a single, relatable, human focus for engagement. At last week’s Social Media Influence conference [...]
‘Member communities’ (social networking and blog sites) have become the fourth most popular internet activity, overtaking personal email for the first time. They have a growth rate more than twice that of the other four top sectors, accounting for one in every 11 minutes spent online. They reach over 5 percentage points more of the [...]
