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

There has been much discussion on social media marketing return on investment (ROI) of late.

Manchester, ever the hotbed of digital debate hosted a fiery contest on the topic at this month’s The Feed event which inspired this hardnosed assessment by Ian Pettigrew over at Kingfisher Coaching.

Ian’s argument, that ROI calculations should be grounded in the realities of the sum total benefits to an organisation chime with a recent report by the New York Times who have assessed the common myths businesses should consider before diving into social media.

With the average social media campaign costing up to $210,000 for bigger US brands, as reported by a May SocialTimes infographic, this debate is not going to go away.

(more…)

The Social Media Surgery is a free monthly event that attempts to help Manchester businesses embrace the social media revolution in order to grow their company.

Each event features a panel of experienced digital and social media marketers who discuss social media projects and issues presented by the audience.

The informal networking events offer an opportunity to find out how other companies are benefitting from using free social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to market and grow their businesses.

Since starting in December 2009, the surgeries have gone from strength to strength.  Here are a couple of videos from previous events:

(more…)

Bit late this month but here comes a roundup of upcoming social media and digital content events taking place in the region in October.

Want to add your event to the list?

Contact us at least one month before your event and we’ll publicise it! Call it a media partnership in the making…

(more…)

Hope you enjoyed the summer!

Here comes a roundup of upcoming social media and digital content events taking place in the region in September.

Want to add your event to the list?

Contact us at least one month before your event and we’ll publicise it! Call it a media partnership in the making…

(more…)

Image credit: handsongourmet on Flickr

I’m sharing this after getting asked for practical examples of what companies have achieved after attending our social media marketing training courses.

Here’s what a company we recently trained achieved in half a day at the Learning Social Media By Doing Course, our Level 2 course social media training course.

(more…)

Wow, where did July go?  It flew by so fast we didn’t get round to posting details of any events!

Well, here comes a roundup of upcoming social media and digital content events taking place in the region in August.

Want to add your event to the list?

Contact us at least one month before your event and we’ll publicise it! Call it a media partnership in the making…

(more…)

Here comes a roundup of upcoming social media and digital content events taking place in the region in June.

Want to add your event to the list?

Contact us at least one month before your event and we’ll publicise it! Call it a media partnership in the making…

(more…)

I thoroughly enjoyed presenting at the highly anticipated Marketing Tech conference in London’s Grange City Hotel on Monday.

It was fantastic to see how much interest there is in using social media and other emerging technologies in the ‘New Digital Mix’ by brands and companies in the UK despite recent reports suggesting otherwise.

From rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of advertising (Publicis, WCRS and more) to meeting marketing visionaries at Cadbury’s and 3M, the event was a fabulous barometer of the emerging digital mix in the UK and brilliantly well organised by the smart team at Haymarket to boot.

For those who couldn’t make it, you can see my presentation on SlideShare:

(more…)

With the exploding interest in social media at the moment, it’s enough to make a busy marketing type run for cover. Blogs, web 2.0, Facebook, where does one begin?

This blog post covers some essential reading material for busy marketing executives too busy to do social media. Amongst the tips I link to interesting articles on effective social media marketing.

(more…)

Social media brands YouTube and Wikipedia have entered Nielsen Online’s list of the top 10 most popular internet brands in the UK, at the expense of Real and AOL.

Here’s the two page report from Nielsen Online which also reports that Facebook accounts for the two of the fastest growing online brands in the UK: RockYou! and Slide.

RockYou! and Slide are heavily used by Facebookers – particularly 18-24 year old women – to organise photo slideshows, according to Nielsen Online.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

YouTube is now the UK’s fourth most popular commercial media brand.

According to Nielsen Online, its audience has grown 84% over the last year to almost 10 million unique users – almost one in every three UK users online use YouTube.

There is also a strong performance from Facebook which has grown a massive 1,647%, from less than half a million UK users to almost eight million, in just 12 months.

(more…)