Forbes has added a social media ranking to its annual most powerful celebrities list, topped by Lady Gaga.
Forbes explains, “Because of the growing power of social networks, we added a social media ranking that reflects each celebrity’s presence on Facebook and Twitter.”
The Celebrity 100, which includes film and television actors, TV personalities, models, athletes, authors, musicians and comedians, is a measure of entertainment-related earnings and media visibility (exposure in print, television, radio and online).
Oprah Winfrey topped the overall money and fame list, followed by Beyonce Knowles and James Cameron.
Cameron came second on estimated income – $210 million whilst being at the bottom of the social media rankings at 81st, proving that in 2010 at least, you still make shed loads of cash without a million Twitter followers.
The slow adoption of social media channels by FTSE 100 companies is limiting their potential influence on investors and ultimately share price, according to a new survey by online pr and social media agency Furlong PR.
Furlong PR analysed corporate websites for the FTSE 100 constituents in May 2010 and found that the majority – 78% are lacking in basic social media functions such as a blog or an RSS feed.
Only 12% have a blog linked to their site, an omission that Furlong contends at least halves (1) their potential website traffic and therefore restricts the information flow that can have a positive effect on share price.
Furlong cites the example of a Canadian copper mining company, TVI Pacific Inc (2), who began a social media investor relations programme in November 2009. By January 2010, the company had increased website visits from 100 to 4000 a week, trading volume rose 55% and the share price doubled from $0.06 to $0.12.
FTSE 100 companies are more active when it comes to Twitter accounts – 23% having one, the lack of integration with an overall strategy suggests many may not know what to do with it. Furlong says that in any case Twitter is not the most important social media channel for influencing share price. More »
Social media sites now account for nearly 15% of referral traffic to B2B websites that have a social media presence, according to the LeadForce1 analysis of 4.4 million leads analysed over a three-month period.
LinkedIn is the top referrer, accounting for 27.1% of traffic to B2B sites, followed by Wikipedia (16.8%).
Bookmarking site Reddit (18.4%) and developer site Dzone (13.0) also feature prominently, though this is probably due to the relatively high number of tech companies included in the study.
Meanwhile, Twitter accounts for just 9.5% of referred traffic to B2B sites and Facebook 6.9%.
Visitors referred to B2B websites from LinkedIn are more interested in finding out about the people within a company rather than what the company does: The most frequently visited Web pages are “management team” pages (13.76%) and “contact us” pages (13.49%). More »
New data on the world’s most popular consumer and media brands has been released by Famecount, a media measurement service to aggregate online popularity across multiple social media channels.
Starbucks was found to be the world’s most popular consumer brand with 7.4 million Facebook fans, 901,925 Twitter followers and 6,509 YouTube subscribers resulting in a Famecount index of 69.7 percent.
Coca-Cola ranks two (53.8 per cent), followed by the whole Foods Market (48.4 per cent), and Skittles (48.3 per cent) with food and drinks brands accounting for 6 of the top 10 worldwide consumer brands.
The highest ranked non-food & drinks consumer brand is online shoe and clothing shop, Zappos.com, with a Famecount index of 46.3 per cent. Red Bull, at 47.3 per cent, is the only non-US brand to make the top 10.
“It is interesting to see established offline brands perform so strongly.” said Daniel Dearlove of Famecount, “ Social networks are helping them to tap into wider audiences More »
The Icelandic government’s appeal to it’s 360,000 population to use social media yesterday to promote the country as an ash free tourist destination has met with some success, at least in terms of Facebook fan increases – 10,847 yesterday morning to 17,021 at the time of writing.
It’s not clear though how many of these sign-ups are from potential tourists or from Icelanders themselves. Call me a seer but you don’t need to be told the benefits of visting Iceland if you’re already living there.
This is the problem with social media, it’s pull not push. It doesn’t really matter how many Icelanders go online to promote the country what you need is one spectacular viral creative idea that pulls in your target market, showing that Iceland isn’t actually very dusty at all and should still be top of every discerning traveller’s city break list.
Having said that, ‘Inspired by Iceland‘ is a great tourism site, once you’ve found it, it’s very compelling and truly deserves more Facebook fans. The videos are cool, there’s naked people and everything, see below.
Persuading senior executives of the benefits of social media remains a larger hurdle for B2B marketers than for their B2C counterparts, a survey by White Horse has discovered.
More than a third of B2B marketers said there was ‘low executive interest’ in social media while just 9% in B2C said the same.
Senior management in B2B are more confident in dismissing the worth of social media, 46% of marketers saying it was viewed as ‘irrelevant’ in their organisations, compared to 12% in B2C.
Measurement of social media also varied, 34% not measuring it at all in B2B versus 10% of B2C respondents.
Genius.com/BtoB magazine revealed earlier this month that 50% of B2B marketers don’t blog, 49% don’t use Twitter, 43% don’t use Facebook and 25% don’t use LinkedIn.
R2integrated discovered that lack of measurement and gaining management buy-in were the two biggest obstacles to running social media campaigns.
There’s a whiff of the batcave about some of these social media applications, high tech gizmos we’ve never seen the like of, geo-locational tools like Foursquare where you become the electronic mayor of wherever you want and Twitter streams where you can see what people are saying in a 20 mile radius.
And while Robin cuts a rather sad, yellow figure on his own, with social media Batman by his side, he’s super cool and some brands have cottoned on to this associative effect.
The Pennsylvania Tourist Board for example has just launched a Foursquare tourist trail, with 20 itineraries, 100 tips and badges, not because they think take up will be massive, but because the association instantly turns Pennsylvania cool.
Starbucks has managed to combine the cool halo effect with revenue. Their Foursquare campaign offers free coffee to the mayor of each branch, served with a slight bow. No doubt thousands of caffeine stoked students are plotting mayorial coups all over the US right now.
In the UK, it’s not yet quite so competitive, I became the mayor of the IET this week – venue for the Epublishing Innovation Forum – ha, ha I thought, Kappow!…..but I don’t think anyone has noticed to be honest. More »
Thanks to Aeneas McDonnell from The Economist for sharing this great video ‘Did you know?’ about the changing media landscape, at the EPublishing Innovation Forum yesterday.
While it may have been Twitter’s year from a publicity point of view, LinkedIn, the grand old dame of business social networking – who turned seven this month, continues to dominate corporate America. New research from Netprospex shows that 43% of large company employees are members of the site.
Facebook is a distant second with 11% while Twitter languishes back in fifth spot (3%) behind Flickr and MySpace (both 4%). You quite often hear the phrase in relation to consumer social media ‘we need to fish where the fishes are’ but how often do you hear of the same thing translated to B2B, i.e., LinkedIn marketing campaigns
In our experience of LinkedIn marketing, judicious seeding of content can generate 75% of referred website traffic, far more than Twitter can manage, so why not do more of it?
The answer may lie in another recent study, marketers were asked what the main obstacles are to using social media. They said lack of analytics (35%), lack of management buy-in (25%) and that their audience isn’t yet active on social media (21%). More »
A senior PR agent at a large agency once said to me, rather cynically, that if a client asks ‘can you do this?’ the answer is always yes, then you go and figure out how to do it.
No doubt there’s a bit of this when it comes to online pr and social media, levels of purported expertise vary hugely, so here are seven questions I’d recommend asking a prospective online pr agency/agent, to establish if they really ‘eat their own dog food’.
1) Do they write a blog? If they aren’t blogging at all, put the phone down or call a taxi. If they’re blogging less than once a week, you have to question their content led online pr strategy – do they really believe in it?
2) How many connections do they have on LinkedIn? – Anything less than 100 connections and they’re playing at it.
3) Are they a mayor of anywhere on Foursquare? OK, this is quite new but if they say yes, you’re talking to a proper social media geek that’s interested in what’s next, not just what’s popular now. More »
Forbes has added a social media ranking to its annual most powerful celebrities list, topped by Lady Gaga.
