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 »

According to the Hay Festival’s competition to find the most beautiful tweet ever tweeted, announced by Stephen Fry it is this, from a Canadian Marc MacKenzie:

“I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.”

Organisers of the festival that said the definition of the most beautiful tweet fell into a number of different categories, including the most eloquent, most evocative or the best pun.

Entrants were sent to Hay Festival’s Twitter account.

Tweets short-listed included SyfretJ’s “The blackbird’s tweet is fairer yet than all man can muster” and “Beauty is in the mind of the retweeter” by TheEponymousBob.

Source: BBC News

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.

The other curious thing is the launch more »

The Icelandic government has called for all 320,000 of its citizens to use Facebook at 2pm GMT today to promote their country in an emergency move to try and repair damage the ash cloud has had on their main industry – tourism.

“It’s a worldwide campaign to let the rest of the world know that Iceland isn’t completely covered in ash,” Icelandic tourist board director of marketing Jon Gunnar Borgthorsson said.

“The eruption has indeed had very little effect here in Iceland, it’s only about three to five per cent of the country that’s been affected by it,” he said, adding “the volcanoes are all far from urban areas, and anyways, we are well prepared for eruptions.”

A Facebook page ‘Inspired by Iceland’ has been created along with a Twitter account, a Vimeo video upload page and a dedicated website. With fours hours to go to launch, Facebook fans stand at 10,847 and Twitter followers at 466.

Iceland’s government said in April it would provide 300 million kronur (£1.6 million), in aid to the country’s tourism industry, which was bracing for mass cancellations due to the ongoing volcano eruption.

Iceland’s move is the most dramatic example to date of tourist boards using social media to promote tourism, following last years Best job in the world from Queensland and Philadelphia’s announcement of a Foursquare promotion this month.

Source: heraldsun.com.au

I remember dating a budding actress at university who at some point in our ultimately doomed relationship, pulled out a square, white chequebook with old fashioned writing on it – very different to the animal patterned Nat West ones most students were sporting in those days.  I remember being impressed and slightly intimidated by it, as I was by her if I’m honest. She explained it was a Coutts chequebook –the Queen’s bank – that her Stepdad had given to her.

At that time in the late eighties, Coutts had a rock solid, exclusive reputation which any self- respecting yuppie wanted a piece of. Legend had it that you needed half a million in cash minimum before they’d consider letting you in the door. As with many of the aspirant financial clubs of the eighties, the lack of information available about them just added to their mystique and cache.

Just as the red Porsches and matching braces have all but disappeared from the City, so the era of such corporate reputations, locked tight in a marble clad safety deposit boxes, have gone. It’s not just the high profile Madoff, Enron and Lehman scandals that have shaken public belief in financial institutions but on a micro level, through the internet, reputations now rise or fall on what customers are saying online. more »

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.

While Robin cuts a sad, yellow figure on his own, with Batman by his side, he’s super cool and some brands understand 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 »