MarCom Professional

I spied an interesting article in a recent Independent “Viewspaper” section (consumed on the iPad of course) titled “Welcome to Planet Blog: How blogging has taken over the world” that basically said we are all bloggers now.

This got me thinking – firstly is this true, and also what is the status of the “pure” bloggers who started this whole blogging thing all those years ago.  My first blog dates back to around 2004.

To the first point – the Independent article asserted that even those updating their Facebook status are blogging.

I can’t really agree with this (and perhaps this is the “purist blogger” in me) because I think there are those who use Facebook and twitter but do not maintain a “blog” are not bloggers (nor would they call themselves bloggers). More...

On my recent trip to Sydney, I picked up an iPad (around £100 cheaper in Australia given I could claim back the 10% GST as I was taking it out of the country, and it is not subject to the “cost of doing business in the UK” Apple tax).

What has amazed me is that everyone that has seen it has been ooh-ing and ahh-ing as if I had a new born baby sitting on the table in front of me.  As the proud father of a beautiful 4 year old daughter, I know what this feeling is like.

The number one question I get from people who both own the iPad and those that are thinking of purchasing one is “what do you do on it?”. More...

I landed in Sydney at 5:30am on Saturday from London and by the time I had arrived at the hotel and checked in, the TV channels were buzzing with the news that the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard was about to call a Federal Election.

All of the commentators were calling this the “twitter election” as apparently Julia had tweeted that people should enrol to vote.

[in Australia, voting is compulsory, and you must enrol to vote before the writs are issued.]

In today’s weekend papers,  there was a brief article (shown below) titled “tweeting your way to victory” which also stated that “the August 21 poll will be the first Twitter election”. More...

This coming Friday, 9th July 2010 Reputation Online will be hosting an event at the London Hesperia hotel in Victoria titled “Navigating the online monitoring jungle“.

Having recently presented to an agency who said they had “shortlisted” 12 other monitoring companies, I know that this will be of great interest to those who want to start on the journey of Listen > Learn > Engage > Integrate.

It really isn’t a jungle once you know the right questions to ask to tell if your potential supplier is really up to the task or they offer not much more than the “free tools” everyone likes talking about. More...

On July 14th between 4-6pm  Visible Technologies is sponsoring an event at the IAB in London looking at the “buzz about the social media buzz”.

The team at brand-e.biz has assembled a fantastic line-up including

• Chris Clarke, Global Chief Creative Officer, LBi on leveraging social media for the Conservative Party
• Robin Grant of We Are Social on real-time monitoring and planning
• Matt Rhodes, Client Services Director at FreshNetworks, on the Jimmy Choo Trainer Hunt – creating online/offline buzz
• Claudio Branno, head of seeding at The Viral Factory, on seeding and tracking viral campaigns
• Claire Ralphson-Cook of Thinktank International and Mary Stewart-Hunter of Applied Social Media with a buzz world cup case study
• Paul Armstrong, director of social media at Kindred, dispels those myths about measurement

The session will be moderated by Steve Mullins of brand-e. More...

By now everyone knows that news that on the weekend, the ITV High Definition (HD) channel missed the first goal scored by England due to an “interruption”.

it was actually an ad.

While many people have (rightly) beaten up ITV and their commercial approach, the incident points more towards how things will look “beyond advertising” in the future, and what we need to learn now about these new channels of mobile and social media.

We all appreciate that programs like the World Cup have to be paid for by advertising and sponsorship, but when you interrupt the utility of the channel people get angry. More...

It must be a slow news week, because a recent Daily Mail article by Jason Lewis titled

How ‘BT Sarah’ spies on your Facebook account: secret new software allows BT and other firms to trawl internet looking for disgruntled customers

seems to suggest that companies that are actively seeking our customer feedback on public websites like twitter are somehow “spying” on customers.

Now I know that sensational claims like this sell newspapers, and hence advertising but I doubt the Daily Mail readers will see this as more than just a beat up.

They claim there is “secret new software” that is “trawling the internet looking for disgruntled customers”.  Debatescape was developed by BT a couple of years ago, and it would only be able to look at information from public sites, or those who have chosen to make their Facebook news feed public.  Nothing secret or sinister here, and it’s exi More...

I received a note via LinkedIn from an old contact Theresa Mascarenhas about a new iPhone app she has developed for Children called “When I Grow Up (Vol.1)”.  It sounds like a great use for the iPhone platform so I thought I would promote it here.

When I Grow Up is the first personalized children’s storybook app that will let you embed photos of your child and their mother into the story — YOU are the characters!

Your child can decide what occupations they would like to have when they grow up, and then see what they will look like dressed up for these vocations (e.g. More...

IAB to drive research in the mobile industry with appointment of Alex Kozloff as dedicated mobile manager

The Internet Advertising Bureau – the trade body for online and mobile advertising – has appointed Alex Kozloff, former media research manager at Unanimis, to expand its mobile research and education programme in the UK.  Working alongside head of mobile Jon Mew, she has been enlisted to drive the critical expansion of the IAB Mobile offering to meet the growing training needs of advertisers and agencies in the UK.

Now in its 2^nd of year as the official trade body for mobile advertising, the IAB has doubled the amount of educational initiatives, events and research projects since 2009. More...

Foursquare seems to be in the news a lot recently, and is starting to be exhibit a similar hype curve to that of Twitter.

The über adopters and innovators get on first, try it out (as they did at SXSW last year when Foursquare launched) and then tell their friends, build a fan base then the celebrities get on it and the rest they say is history.

For those who have been on holiday or off-line for most of 2010, Foursquare is a location based social media service where you can arrive at a location or venue and “check-in” (manually) to tell other people that you are there (or have been there). 

To those who have just stumbled across Foursquare for the first time, it seems like a great waste of time (remember what we all said about Twitter in 2007…).  For those Location Based Services (LBS) purists out there (and I can see you scrunching up your face as you read this post) you will hate Foursquare because the user has to physicall More...