With elections in Russia already happened, those in the UK, France and the US to come there is much debate about how social media is now being used in both the electoral process, and more broadly as part of engagement between our world leaders and others on social media. Barack Obama has traditionally been held [...]

Excerpts from Bazaarvoice’s Conversation Index Vol. 3 One way to cull out product suggestions is to look at pivot language within user-generated content. Pivot language describes a word or phrase that marks a transition in tone or sentiment, especially when discussing the features or aspects of a product. We analyzed more than six million pieces of user-generated content to quantify [...]

An excerpt from Nielsen’s report, The Global, Socially Conscious Consumer When it comes to advertising and recommendations, socially conscious consumers trust recommendations from people they know (95%), while also looking for opinions and information posted by other consumers online (76%), slightly more so than the global online survey average (92% and 70%, respectively). Among paid, third-party advertising channels, socially-conscious [...]

Excerpts from Mr Youth’s Class of 2015 New College Orientation Don’t think of Back-to-School as just August and September. Recognize that the journey begins with college acceptance and runs through the first days on campus. The conversation and underlying student need-states shift throughout the journey, reflecting a variety of offline events and key back-to-school milestones. Building programs that deliver on [...]

New Chinese social media sites have long been inspired by popular sites and trends from the West, such as Facebook’s distant cousin Renren and Twitter’s brother Sina Weibo.  It is no surprise then that they have embraced Pinterest with both arms. Rather than just creating direct clones of the site, they have been inspired by [...]

Like by matt_london Facebook has reportedly acquired Instagram for $1 billion in a mix of cash and shares. The photo-sharing service was launched in October 2010 and recently launched its Android app having been exclusively on iPhone before that. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook will be “keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather [...]

There is a concept in macroeconomics called ‘perfect information‘. In brief (and apologies for missing many details of the theory and debate for a non-specialist audience), this would say that if all consumers know all things, about all products, at all times, then they will choose the best one for them. Taken to its conclusion, [...]

From SXSW to new apps on the scene, this month has seen another big month for social media. Let’s take a look at our what’s hot in social media round-up for March 2012… Charity and social media The beginning of March saw a host of charities using International Women’s Day on 8th as an opportunity [...]

The Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK has warned employers not to ask for the Facebook username and log-in details of their staff or of people who apply for jobs. That this even has to be ruled on will come as a surprise to many – I wouldn’t expect to give my employers access to [...]

At SXSW 2012 Gilad Lotan from SocialFlow spoke about the “math that matters”. Gilad’s RD team spend a huge amount of time looking at data provided by the Twitter firehose and the bit.ly stream, using this information they are able to gain valuable insight into how Twitter users interact, and so predict the potential virality [...]