Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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%). Read the rest of this entry »

Maile Ohye, manager of Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, laid out her blueprint for a social media, content and SEO optimised website in an interview with TopRank’s online marketing blog last week.

The question that caught our attention was to do with how she sees the role of social media within website marketing activity, particularly in relation to SEO.

Here’s what she said:

“I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.”

David Miliband is not only William Hill’s favourite to win the Labour Party leadership at odds of 4/9 but he’s also by far the most accomplished exponent of online pr and social media, judging by a review of the nine potential candidates’ websites.

Miliband’s smoothly designed website is the only one to include a blog and the only one to employ all of the most powerful core social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr & YouTube along with an RSS feed.

Ed Balls’s site is the nearest competitor for social media leadership, with Twitter, Flickr & YouTube channels appended to what is a very badly designed site indeed.

Harriet Harman and Andy Burnham are the only other potential candidates to run a Twitter account from their sites while the only concession to online pr being displayed by Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson is the inclusion of an RSS feed.

While I wasn’t particularly surprised that Peter Mandelson & Jack Straw haven’t bothered with a personal website at all (bravo), Ed Mlliband’s site is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – functional yes, a work of design beauty it is not. In Chrome the minute text over-writes the pictures, though they are so small it hardly matters. Read the rest of this entry »

Erik Qualman’s music-enhanced, statistics-based video of social media’s wildfire growth was one of the B2B viral video hits of last year. With social media moving so quickly, he’s already updated it for May 2010 with yet more revelatory intelligence, including that Facebook has now overtaken it’s own country of origin as the third largest by population in the world, behind India and China. When Zuckerburg was programming ‘the facebook.com’ – as described in David Kirkpatrick’s new book, he knew he was on to something big, but this!?