Real Fresh TV | Specialists in Social Commerce and Social Media Marketing

This article forms part of a study on social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies.

Each company in the FTSE 100 index was reviewed on its usage of such social media tools as RSS feeds*, blogs, online video, podcasts and social media platforms like Flickr and Facebook on its main website and on occasion, on websites of well-known subsidiary companies.

*RSS feeds are a simple way of delivering fresh versions of a website’s content to online readers automatically.

According to the Guardian.co.uk Business Glossary:
“The FTSE 100 index comprises the 100 most highly capitalised blue chip companies on the London Stock Exchange, representing approximately 81% of the UK market.

Here’s how international electricity and gas company National grid (NG.L) stacked up

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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.

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One of the best things about having a background in creating original video for the web is the versatility of perspectives it provides.

I’m thrilled to have been asked to speak at a panel discussing alternative methods for film distribution at the Bite The Mango Film Festival, taking place at the National Media Museum in Bradford.

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I was privileged to meet Fred Wilson, prolific blogger and pioneering Internet investor on Friday evening at the Evening with Fred Wilson event at Leeds Metropolitan university’s Old Broadcasting House.

Organised by uber-connected Leeds entrepreneur Imran Ali, the evening took the form of an informal presentation and interactive Q&A session with the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, the New York based venture capital firm behind web services like delicious, Feedburner, Etsy, Disqus and Twitter.

Delicious was sold to Yahoo in 2005 whilst Google bought Feedburner last year.

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I didn’t get a chance to blog this yesterday, got in late after attending and presenting at the extremely interesting QuickFire event at Manchester’s Circle Club.

QuickFire is the b.TWEEN conference‘s take on Pecha Kucha presentations and you can find out more info about them here. You can also watch the videos from all the events at b.TWEEN on their YouTube page. The webcast is here.

I’ll put my slides up on Slideshare over the weekend. Follow today’s (and yesterday’s) events on Twitter by tracking the #btween and #btween08 Twitter hash tags using summize.com. You can also check out a pretty impressive preview here at Conference 2.0.

Now onto the Day 1 highlights…    (You can also check out Day 2′s highlights)

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This post is part of a series of articles exploring how to use social media to solve real life marketing problems facing marketers in the UK.

Each article is a response to a real-life question posed by a delegate at my masterclass at March’s Marketing Tech: Tailor Made conference in London. You can read every article in the series by clicking on the ‘Practical social media advice‘ tag.

The Real-Life Marketing Problem

“We distribute tickets for European Rail Tavel. It is difficult to depict customer experience as our products do not belong to us (the trains) and the experiences are so inconsistent.

We also have very restricted budgets so cannot afford digital media.

How to use Facebook or YouTube to get results?”

The Social Media Solution

It turns out that Virgin Trains provide a model answer! The UK train operating company has recently started producing a video podcast series titled ‘Our Man’s Video City Guides’.

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Brendan Cooper, the friendly PR social media planner at global PR giant, Porter Novelli picked up on my introductory post about studying social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies yesterday and opined that:

“It sounds like a serious undertaking”.

True.

My thinking is that as social media is still fairly new in the UK and no one has attempted this before, it won’t be too difficult.

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This article is the fourth in a series of articles exploring the future of social advertising.

Click on the ‘Social Advertising’ tag to read earlier posts/articles.

The last post presented the notion of branded content as “the next big thing in social media” and put forward the proposition that brands are better off looking at engaging directly with consumers over branded content on the major social networking sites than creating standalone social media sites if they are promoting new products or services.

In this post, I expand on the potential pitfalls involved with engaging directly with consumers online using social advertising.

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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.

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This is the second post in a series looking at the future of social advertising.

To read all posts on the topic, click on the ‘Social Advertising’ tag.

The first post examined future trends in Social Advertising, postulating that going forward brand marketers would increasingly look to implementing social experiences offline around special interest groups which could then be promoted via ‘the social web’ using social media tools like blogs, online video and … Facebook groups.

This post examines the value exchange in the largely ‘free’ online environment of social media.

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