I was lucky enough to recently visit Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, just outside of San Francisco. The multi-building campus is incredible and feels like it could have been designed by Willy Wonka, if Mr Wonka was a software developer with a penchant for working long hours. I didn’t lick any walls though so my [...]

Social media is changing the way that marketers think about the world around them. Platforms like Facebook are not just new ways of reaching audiences, they also contain huge volumes of data about each individual. Every time a Facebook user “likes” a page or connects with someone else a record of that event is created. [...]

While many media outlets are still debating the various “pay for use models”, such as premium content paywalls, much of the rest of the business world has come to the conclusion that the real value is the audience, not the content itself. As a result, businesses are now more focused on generating and distributing high [...]

Kmart USA has been dealing with very intense competition lately. On one hand, Walmart and CostCo have outplayed most other department stores. On the other hand, Amazon and online retail in general have squeezed the whole category with the delivery of products to the customer’s door, at lower cost. However, in the last couple of [...]

Few companies have adopted social media with the enthusiasm Virgin has. It is said that everyone in the company is now active on social media platforms. Virgin has jumped feet first into this new form of communication led by the man who is the driving force behind one of the world’s most desirable brands – [...]

Social media has been mainstream for long enough now for “best practice” examples to be widely available. Many of these are focused on marketing[campaigns] but it’s worth looking at a broader horizon to get a real feel for what works and what doesn’t. The U.S. Army has, for the last few years, published the “U.S. Army Social Media [...]

The proportion of marketing budgets that gets allocated to the digital and social media space is growing inexorably. As a consequence, the focus on how to measure return on investment is intensifying. There is much debate about how to best design social media metrics. This is a symptom of the tension between “digital as add-on” [...]

South by Southwest, or SXSW as it has come to be known, is a mecca for those involved in the tech start-up scene. The March SXSW festival is held each year in Austin, Texas and it has been the launching pad for mobile apps and social media platforms that have now become household names. This [...]

As major brands expand their social media budgets their marketers’ sights are moving to the new and innovative uses which are offered by less well known social media platforms. The rapid growth of Pinterest has attracted many of these marketers attention. There have been many interesting cases of Pinterest being used effectively but few stand [...]

Over the course of this series looking at social media ROI we have moved from theory and strategy to the practical implementation of a social media plan. We looked at metrics and measurements in part one, discussed the art of growing your community in part two and developed real world guidelines for the differing social [...]