This survey dates from June, but I've included it in case you missed it first time around, as I did. While preparing for an interview with Rosalie Marshall of V3, I was looking for data to support the fact that a) People tweet about brands - check, 20% of all tweets are brand related. And b) that people's favourite topic of conversation online is themselves. The conclusion being that people are highly likely to relay a personal experience - good or bad - that they've had with your bra... Read Full Story

The final installment of Technorati's State of the Blogosphere survey from last week looked at the micro-blogging service Twitter. In particular, Technorati wanted to find out what use bloggers make of Twitter, and if they don't use it, why not? Remember - this is a global survey of bloggers, not the general public. It's people who are at least vaguely familiar with Twitter. As a result, not surprisingly, 73% of bloggers use Twitter and 27% don't. But for the quarter who don't it's stil... Read Full Story

Mobile Abilities MapView more documents from Helge Tennø. "Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone." (Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer) Yep, that would be right Steve. In fact, maybe you should check out this awesome presentation by Norwegian digital strategist Helge Tenno about all the things smart phones supposedly can't do. A really comprehensive list, with plenty of apps I certainly hadn't heard of, I liked Helge's parallel at the e... Read Full Story

Amelia Torode's presentation from IPA Social Oct 09View more presentations from The_IPA. Anyone in the UK won't need any introduction to 'Aleksandr Orlov', a Meerkat who fronts a campaign for Meerkat comparison site comparethemeerkat.com, with the whole thing actually being in aid of price comparison website comparethemarket.com. Comparethemeerkat / market is easily one of the UK marketing success stories of the past eighteen months, with a fair amount of online pick-up being key in giving th... Read Full Story

Check out this campaign for UNICEF done by Y&R in Jo'burg. The issue of child soldiers being drafted in (or pretty much abducted), in places like Sierra Leone has received a lot of publicity over the past decade, now Y&R turned it into a mailer for corporate sponsors. When you open up the packet, it looks like a collection of toy soldiers you might have played with yourself as a child. But on closer examination, it's actually a collection of children reading books, riding bikes,... Read Full Story

Technorati is carrying on with it's annual State of the Blogosphere report, which it has been drip-feeding out over the week. Day four's results look at how some bloggers make money by selling ads, as well as - of more interest - how they feel about brands. Unsurprisingly 70% talk about brands on their blogs. Really I would have thought that it would be higher as surely it's almost impossible not to mention brands or products in some shape or form in posts, even incidentally. Less than o... Read Full Story

This piece of research from the Chitika network is worth noting. The main destination from Twitter is news websites (28%), followed by movie sites (23%). This links into something I posted about the other day, that there is pretty much a 3-4 hour news cycle between things breaking online and hitting mainstream media, and that's the window you have to take control of events. That's because Twitter, with a high concentration of bloggers and journalists using it, more often than not acts as... Read Full Story

This chart is fairly conclusive: The Wall Street Journal might be doing just fine in charging the suits for news. But here in the UK, other papers in Murdoch's stable such as the tabloid, The Sun, and even The Times have a tough sell ahead of them. According to MediaWeek, 91% of UK consumers wouldn't pay for news and 90% wouldn't pay for analysis. However, just over one in five would pay for sports content, which does provide news publishers with an area that they might be able to moneti... Read Full Story

The Value of Visual Thinking in Social BusinessView more documents from David Armano. I'm a bit of a charts and visualisation geek...even though my own visualisation skills don't go much further than drawing the equivalent of a stick-man! US blogger and social media consultant David Armano on the other hand has built his reputation on visual concepts that instantly sell an idea and that have been used again and again. A good example is the seminal influence ripples diagram demonstrating how i... Read Full Story

This is a bit off-topic but it's a fascinating study - the over 55s who go online see improvements in their brain function after just one week. UCLA researchers presented the findings of a study at the Society for Neuroscience. Two groups of 55-78 year olds were chosen. One with Internet experience and the other without. The net newbies were told to go online and conduct searches for an hour a day, for a total of seven days over a two-week period and given two different tasks with a brai... Read Full Story