Posts Tagged ‘social media’

IKEA launched their new Malmo store via  Facebook this autumn, setting up a profile for the store manager Gordon Gustavsson, who regularly uploaded images from the store. The clever part was that items of furniture were given free to the first person to tag their name to a product in the image. Created by Swedish agency Forsman and Bodenfors

A new US study has found  that  29% of chief marketing officers have a working social media policy in place.

26% say they have one, but it’s not followed within the company while a further 31% say they are still developing a policy.

The research from peer networking group, the CMO Club, suggests companies are struggling to create social media marketing policies internally.

Budgets for social media are also scarce with nearly 85% of top marketers spending less than 10% of their budgets on social media, and non-traditional communication channels.

Pete Krainik, from the CMO Club, says online marketing is now brand critical, as push marketing gives way to pull. Read the rest of this entry »

In a dream last night I got up as usual to write my morning blog and found that the toaster had integrated with Twitter and my favourite coffee mug was streaming LinkedIn status updates. Rubbing my eyes I pulled a cereal bowl out of the cupboard and an Outlook message flashed up at the bottom of it saying 1 Reminder – you need to get out more.

OK, my dreams are not that interesting but it does seem social media is infiltrating everywhere at the moment, building influence through strategic alliances – LinkedIn and Twitter, Xbox and Facebook and now, potentially the real game changer for businesses, LinkedIn and Outlook. Read the rest of this entry »

A new survey from Weber Shandwick reveals that while 73% of Fortune 100 companies have registered an average of 5.5 Twitter accounts, three quarters are not used very often, which in Twitter terms is as good as saying, they’re not being used at all.

The Twitter accounts had a variety of purposes, newsfeed 26%, brand awareness 24%, sales 16%, thought leadership 11% and customer service 9%.

More than half are described as having ‘no personality’ meaning they are faceless corporate accounts rather than ones with human advocates and 11% were placeholder accounts designed to prevent brand jacking.

If, as WS suggest,  Twitter should be viewed as ‘an uber corporate cocktail party’ it would seem these businesses are all dressed up with literally no idea where to go. Even if they found the party, possessed of  ’no personality’ they wouldn’t be very popular anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

The last entry to the actual  live competition (as opposed to Thursday’s spoof) to win Toyota Australia’s social media business for their Yaris model has been submitted by Iris:

Stephen Fry who almost quit Twitter last month  is about to exceed one million followers. He needs only about 9000 more to blast through the Twitter sound barrier into the realm of the extraordinarily well followed. The average number of followers is 126

In so doing he’s moved ahead of Sarah Brown, currently on 941K who briefly overtook him in October prior to the Labour party conference.

A million followers still won’t make him the UK’s most followed celebrity however, that position is (probably) still held by Lilly Read the rest of this entry »

A social media strategy meeting expertly lampooned, the advocates quaking as they fear the wrath of the old guard, referencing the Toyota Yaris Australia pitch where five agencies have been given $15,000 each to show what they can do with social media.

Three diverging news stories this morning bring the position of social media in business into focus – for a moment at least.  From California, Palo Alto Networks report that use of Twitter and Facebook in enterprise level businesses is up 250% and 192% respectively (which from Palo Alto’s firewall perspective means new security issues to be addressed.)

From social media rock star Pete Cashmore’s bedroom in Aberdeen, AKA Mashable, comes the news that Twitter and LinkedIn have struck a deal to share status updates, confirmation of the business potential of both sites, with the promise of further integration to come, not least because Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are best buddies.

Thirdly, from San Diego and the Public Relations Society of America, via SDNN, Arianna Read the rest of this entry »

Some 400 years after the gunpowder plot was revealed, political blogger Guido Fawkes is doing a better job than his namesake in laying explosive content at Westminster, particularly in the area of MP’s expenses.

While Guido plots content for his blog, the overarching battle for online visibility races on. On one flank you have the keyword and link focussed techy SEO practitioners wearing various shades of hat, white, grey & black, creating text bristling with optimisation. On the other side, PR and digital  agencies advance steadily into SEO territory with content crafted to build brand reputation online with social media levers attached.

The arrival of Twitter has changed the game again and lately, in favour of the content providers. Link building has long been the covert weapon of choice for SEO experts but with Google publishing Twitter posts, content providers suddenly have a powerful new link building tool all of their own.  Read the rest of this entry »