Ken dumps Barbie in Social Networking coup

Friday, June 10th, 2011

The folks over at Greenpeace have embraced social networking to huge effect, and this week they launched their latest campaign with a really clever combination of their own site, a dedicated facebook page, and a cool video available on youtube. The story is a simple one – Mattel, the toy giant, has been accused (along […]

Don’t forget about local search

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

There’s a good article posted by Nine by Blue’s Vanessa Fox (who, when working for google was responsible for google’s webmaster central), about why restaurants should care about local search. Amongst the key points that it makes is that your business needs to take on a holistic approach to its online presence, not concentrating solely […]

Marketing Pullman’s ‘The good man Jesus, the scoundrel Christ’ online – some lessons

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

There’s a interesting, though flawed, marketing campaign going on for Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus, The Scoundrel Christ. It takes full advantage of social networking and technology to promote the book, and is worth looking at a little more in detail for other novelists promoting their books online – with or without […]

But does your brand ‘need’ to be on facebook?

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

There’s a good article in Mashable magazine entitled ‘Why Your Brand Needs to be on Facebook Now’, which goes back over the fact that Facebook hit a milestone recently when it became a more visited site than google in the US – that’s their main reasoning behind why your brand needs to be up there: […]

Alice Hoffman blasts reviewer on Twitter

Monday, June 29th, 2009

There’s an interesting story brewing on Twitter at the moment, as best-selling author Alice Hoffman has taken to task reviewer Roberta Silman for her review of The Story Sisters, Hoffman’s new novel. There are countless blogs and twitter profiles talking about Hoffman’s reaction – she tweeted up to 27 times about the review, going so […]

Twitter trashes skewed Daily Mail poll

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Right-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail found itself with egg on its face on Friday as one of its infamously non-neutral polls was targeted by psychologists on twitter. The poll which had the decidedly non-neutral question ‘should the nhs let gipsies to jump the queue?’, raised the ire of a number of psychologists who as […]

#wossybookclub teaches some twitter lessons for authors online

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

The power of twitter (and social networking / online presence in general) to shift books has been forcefully demonstrated by the almost impromptu launch of the #wossybookclub. Jonathan Ross, the tv celebrity who tweets using @wossy and has over 250,000 followers, decided last week to set up a book club on twitter. Browse over to […]

Twitter users target Twitter with their anger

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

It’s a web 2.0 irony, that the biggest social networking platforms find their biggest pr nightmares occuring through the use of their very own structure. It happened recently with Facebook when users started setting up facebook groups demanding a return to the old design, after Facebook changed the layout of user profiles (to give public […]

Learning a lesson from Facebook’s localisation into Hindi

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Localisation is the over-technical term used by software developers to describe the translation of their programs into other languages. It serves a purpose, though, to stress that translation is far more than simply substituting words from one language to another. For a program to work in different markets different cultures need to be taken into […]

Overoptimistic about Twitter search

Friday, April 24th, 2009

There was an interesting article last month about twitter search, which raises questions for any prospective webmaster – given that search engine optimisation is, rightly, a major concern in the design and upkeep of a site. The article, published in twitip.com, will have pleased twitter executives as it – with more than a little hyperbole […]