Regular readers of the Real Fresh TV blog will recall that last summer I spent a fair amount of time live blogging the b.TWEEN 08 conference.
A veritable cornucopia of digital, marketing, media and future thinking, b.TWEEN08 was a pivotal event for me last year and led to lots of great meetings, friendships and collaborations that have since pushed Real Fresh TV forward.
I don’t know about you but I think Social Media has started off the year with a bang!
From being talked about at the World Economic Forum in Davos to cropping up on Twitter accounts of the great and the good, it looks like participatory media has finally arrived in the UK.
You want more examples?
A day later than expected, here’s the last in the 5 part series covering Sheffield’s impressive Melt 2008 Inspiration Session.
These are notes from my favourite talk at Melt, Tom Savigar of the Future Laboratory’s trend briefing covering consumer trends and insights for a number of industries.
I’ve been reflecting on the phenomenal interest in Twitter of late. From Dell’s 40+ Twitter team to a Social Brand Index that lists the brands on the microblogging service du jour, it seems like there’s no escaping the Twitter addiction. And this despite a recent decision to axe outgoing SMS updates to Twitter users in the UK.
It’s incredible how much groundswell is gathering around a service that is barely two years old.
Twitter’s main devotees in the UK are early adopters and PR types. Very smart PR types I must add.
If any of those are reading this, cast your eye over this brilliant article on the 13 Skills of the Public Relations Pro of the Future by John Bell of OgilvyPR. Thanks for the credit, John!
So this has been a rather frantic week with lots of developments behind the scenes as we prepare to launch the first 5 Day Giveaway by a major brand. The 5 Day PUMA Manchester launches on Monday 26th May at 9am GMT.
My efforts to get a customised version of a third party blog management system retrofitted to support comment voting have proven unsuccessful so far. I’ve deemed this necessary to combat voter fraud in future giveaways. Maybe I’m being paranoid. We’ll soon find out.
YouTube has overtaken Wikipedia as the most popular Social Media site in the UK according to the latest stats released by web metrics firm, Nielsen Online.
If a picture is worth a thousand words then a two-minute video clip on YouTube is worth more than a profile on an online, user generated encyclopedia, it seems.
There has been much online discussion about a recent poll by TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony which found that just 18 per cent of the UK businesses questioned believed their brands must engage urgently with social media if they were to avoid falling behind the market.
The Financial Times and Marketing Week provide excellent overviews.
As someone analyzing usage of social media amongst FTSE 100 companies in the UK, I have to say the findings come as no surprise.
This post is the next in our series covering the future of social advertising.
To read all previous posts, click on the ‘Social Advertising’ tag.
Three articles into our series on social advertising, I think it is worth clarifying a few terms.
Social Advertising is a term coined by Facebook to describe its recently launched Facebook Ads platform.
Much has been written about Facebook Ads of late including recent reports about potential privacy breaches by third party retail partners who can now use Facebook Beacon to publish information about a user’s online purchase directly into the user’s News Feed on Facebook.
This information can then propagate through the Facebook network through the News Feeds of the user’s friends. It is worth noting that the user’s online purchase is published to his/her trusted network of friends within Facebook and not directly on the internet.
Still, some might find this irksome, especially if they were unaware it was happening.
Change is always welcomed but often resisted.
We are at a cross roads with online advertising.
Most of you will now know that today’s voting mishap has been resolved and that the deadline for the iPhone giveaway has been extended for the last time to midnight on Sunday to accommodate it.
For those unaware, my web developer inadvertently broke the voting system for a few hours this afternoon when he uploaded the changes I requested back on Tuesday (he has been having email problems), oblivious to the fact that I had already fixed the problems with voting earlier this week.
Here’s a summary of events as they unfolded, unscrupulous votes and all, in the social media soap opera that is the first British iPhone giveaway. You can also read all the daily updates by clicking on the iPhone tag.
In essence, because the voting system used, Comment Karma, allowed either positive or negative votes to be made for each entry, it was possible to vote down entries as they were made.
This meant that as the giveaway progressed, most entries accumulated negative votes because some entrants(?) were maliciously voting them down.
As the second deadline for the competition approached (I first extended it to allow people to enter up till the Monday after the original deadline: iPhone launch day UK), I initially decided to scrap the voting idea.
The plan was to choose a random winner from the comments entered, much like Engadget and TechCrunch do with their giveaways.
However, Imran pointed out that it would be wiser to only enable positive votes for each comment.
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