Month: April 2009

I read an interesting dual post from Todd Defren and Paula Drum offering some top tips for social media marketers.  I won’t go through all of the points but the text that really stuck out to me was this: “Your agency needs to walk the walk – I hate paying an agency to learn on my dime. When we started three years ago, social media was so new and changing so rapidly that we were all learning together. Today there are many different agencies that are building expertise in social media including public relations firms, interactive agencies and newly formed ... Read more

Working in the magical world of social media, we are regularly looking to create accounts for clients across various social platforms and often – it is a well known client – we find that a particular account has been already taken by a cyber squatter. To ensure a client’s identities are easier and quicker to find you need to identify a common username across multiple social media sites. I have been using a tool which does this called namechk. Basically it’s a service which allows you to type a username and check for its availability. Brian Solis has also referred ... Read more

Just as we all started to think that advertising revenues were dropping off from the more traditional channels. Something has come along to show everyone that advertising does still work. Is the video below the catchiest television advertisement ever? Even if it isn’t, it does appears to have done its job. Yell’s sales have increased by a huge 70% since this campaign started and needless to say it plans to carry it on. I have to admit it I can’t get the song out of my head after watching it just once.

I received an outreach approach this morning about a new search engine which has been launched to rival the likes of Google. Oparla, which pays users to search, claims to use social media technology to provide a more accurate search. Visitors can rank sites, comment on results and message other users asking for advice. The release states: “Oparla will reward one user every day with a cash bonus of up to £1000. The lottery like system will be based on account holders signing in and using the search engine to find web pages and images online. Oparla’s interface uses a ... Read more

As marketers, advertisers and PR practitioners are all scratching their collective heads looking at ways to benefit from using social networking it seems the very networks themselves are still struggling to figure out what to do. Yes hot on the heels on ITV looking to sell Friend’s Reunited, Facebook and more recently Twitter having a difficult time to bring in the cash from users.This morning YouTube has been tipped to make a loss of around £321m in 2009. Revolution magazine reports: “The cost of bandwidth, content licensing, ad-revenue shares, hardware storage, sales and marketing and other expenses will reportedly total ... Read more

I loved the story last week about Chelsea starting to use Twitter to communicate directly with fans. Basically, Chelsea FC has begun Twittering (under its mascot’s name) following a huge growth in fake Chelsea FC accounts. I can imagine there are quite a few people out there who would love to hear the ins and outs of their clubs. My club (Liverpool FC) were apparently the first to use it and now others appear to be springing up everywhere. Liverpool has more than 17,000 followers but it also has a number of copycat Twitter users here is one example: https://twitter.com/liverpool ... Read more