“According to Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid, around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.” And so the FT Tech Blog throws us a pretty interesting statistic, and one that doesn’t surprise [...]
Some great comments by Michael Nutley, editor of New Media Age, in The Guardian’s ‘People Power’ supplement this week, all about how the new culture of public invovlement is transforming politics, society and of course advertising: “The most important quality in using social media is authenticity – a painful lesson for many communications professionals. It [...]
Pizzeria Delfina in San Fransisco has found an interesting use for negative Yelp reviews from unhappy customers. Instead of pretending they don’t exist (a common practice), the company has made each employee wear a tee-shirt emblazoned with one of the negative customer comments. Talk about transparency and openness! Any business so in tune with what [...]
I’ve noticed a trend recently with a number of clients and agencies asking us if word of mouth applies to B2B. The answer is indubitably yes – eMarketer’s study showed that WOM had become far and away the biggest influence on US business decision makers by 2007; Forrester researcher Laura Ramos predicted last October that [...]
I discussed the benefits of Skittles’s new social home page on Monday. But the risk they ran by highlighting brand conversation on Twitter, where they have no moderation rights, has become the greatest talking point; the pile up of competitors, spammers and general pranksters skewing the WOM proved just too much to bear. So it’s [...]
There’s been lots of conversation and comment (see Molly’s thoughts below) on the back of Forrester’s latest paper, “Add sponsored conversations to your toolbox” and here’s mine. To recap, Forrester’s new brief recommends pay per post as long as there is clear disclosure and suggests it’s something we’ll see a lot more of in the [...]
Here’s the thing. Forrester’s new report on the cost-effectiveness of brand sponsored conversation – incentivising or paying social media voices to talk about a product – is rather beguiling. Surely so long as transparency is maintained, social media will self-regulate, as Nicky Tillyer comments under this fairly approving Adweek piece: “as long as there is transparency [...]
Skittles has hit the social nail on the head by transforming its home page into a floating menu that points viewers towards brand conversation on Twitter and Facebook. Product pages have become Wikis, adverts sit on YouTube and images are showcased on Flickr. Mars has already forayed into social media with ‘Instant Def’, a series of [...]
