Oh, Gordon. Brown’s attempts last Friday to charm the members of Mumsnet went down as well as a mouldy custard cream. The PM’s repeated refusal to name his favourite biscuit was only one reflection of his generally awkward tone. But the press obsession with what is now being dubbed ‘biscuitgate’on the boards suggests that the issue was the Brown’s [...]
Remember Second Life? Yep, the parallel virtual world which was once the frontier of digital marketing for switched-on brands – not to mention the frontier of digital adultery for switched-on cheaters – is an internet-ancient six years old. Techcrunch have just reported on the ongoing popularity of the platform, asserting that it is still the [...]
If you read just one post this week, make it Lingering, Benjamin Kunkel’s brilliantly written and thoughtful essay on the ways in which social media is changing our behaviour. Kunkel grapples with what he calls the semiotic promiscuity fostered by the web, whereby truckloads of ever ‘shorter, more frequent, more spontaneous, and more casual’ content [...]
Mindshare have released an interesting report examining the social media activity of six major brands (Dow Chemical, John Deere, NetApp, New York Life, Toyota, and Vodafone) and how their failure to engage with certain communities, or address issues emerging from consumer conversation, is leaving them vulnerable. The full report costs big dollar but you can [...]
Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2009 has shown us that trust is one of the biggest issues facing brands across the world. With trust in American brands down 77%, and the UK, France and Germany clinging onto an abysmal 36%, only emerging economies such as China and Brazil are seeing an improvement on last year. And the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
As we keep telling clients that they need to become conversational within as well as without, by learning how to turn their employees into brand advocates and transform their internal comms into a creative, collaborative social network all of its own, we’re careful to walk the talk ourselves. Having experimented with platforms such as Wikis [...]
One good thing about the media’s Twitter mania is that some provocative people are starting to comment on the behaviour behind social media tools. Cue psychologist Oliver James in the Times: “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter [...]
A couple of interesting books getting some press this week –Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, and Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? – serve as a reminder of just how important an open source, collaborative, mashup mindset is to Generation 2.0, and how absolutely it [...]
