Archive for December, 2009
Stop Press: Publishers Start to Take Social Media Seriously
Finally, ten years after I first began building “online communities”, five years after MySpace took the world by storm, four since Facebook stole their social networking crown and 18 months after Twitter went mainstream – publishers are starting to take social media seriously. I’ve been amazed that newspapers and magazines have, during the social media revolution, almost uniformly failed to capitalise on their incredibly powerful positions, such that many are now going out of business. How can groups of intelligent individuals, publishing regular, compelling content to large audiences of engaged readers have failed to realise the value of engaging in conversations?
7 Things You Never Knew About Re-Tweets
A passionate believer in the power of re-Tweeting, I spent a worthwhile half hour today reviewing Dan Zarellas “Science of Re-Tweets” presentation (below). It’s well worth a look and, for a bit of fun, I’ve extracted seven things you probably never knew about re-Tweets in my analysis below. Enjoy!
The Top 10 Viral Video Adverts of 2009 And Why They Worked so Well
I spent a greatly amused hour watching Mashable’s “Top 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2009” today. The list includes slick agency produced ads, amateur films, bloopers, spoofs, a protest video and a wonderfully botched Windows 7 video from Microsoft. My favourites are the BooneOakley ad and Dave Carroll’s musical demolition of United Airlines, who callously broke his guitar (allegedly), but I also like the fact that the dancing baby’s dad is using the huge popularity of his video to raise donations for his college fund. Smart fella.
Monitoring Social Media 09: A Short Funky Video
We don’t yet have the full video footage of Monitoring Social Media 09 (MSM09), so we’ve put together a funky little video using pics from the day. We used Animoto for this which, if you’re interested, is a really, mind-crushingly simple way of creating a fun, short video. They cleverly limit free accounts to 30 second clips, which (we suspect) matches the amount of a song track you can use without paying a licence fee – hence the proper music. Enjoy!
The Business Case for Social Media Monitoring
I’m (finally!) able to publish the excellent presentation that Ann Longley, Strategy Director at MediaEdge: CIA, gave at Monitoring Social Media 09 last month. Her insights into the “new stock exchange” of brands – based on the number and sentiment of online mentions – showed how marketing metrics are changing. Some slides are blocked out because they contain secrets of national importance (the true location of Camelot etc.)
Social Media Monitoring Goes Niche
One of the most interesting points made at Monitoring Social Media 09 last month was the suggestion from Matthäus Krzykowski (VentureBeat) that monitoring could be made more accurate by narrowing the focus of the tools down to a specific industry. It stands to reason really. If you narrow down the lexicon you start to reduce the opportunities for error…
The London Inbound Marketing Meetup – 18th December
Inbound Marketing is a well known division of marketing in the US, yet to date it remains relatively unknown in the UK. I recently gave a seminar to a room full of students at University Campus Suffolk and only a couple had heard of it. Given that it’s set to change the face of marketing for most businesses – this isn’t an ideal situation. To help spread the word about Inbound Marketing, Murray Newlands (the affiliate marketing blogger) and I have set up the London Inbound Marketing Meetup.
