Market Sentinel

Wispa returns - for good

MarkRogers — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:50:01 +0000

Cadbury have announced the momentous decision to bring back the Wispa bar permanently. The Wispa was originally reintroduced in a limited edition in 2007 after Cadbury’s responded to an online campaign for its return*.

23 million bars were sold in seven weeks and the success of the revival has encouraged Mars to rebrand [...]

Sexual disease in young Britons on increase

MarkRogers — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:36:39 +0000

Two years we highlighted the UK government’s decision to shun social media and opt for magazines and television in educating the young of Britain about the dangers of Chlamydia, Gonorrhoea and other sexual diseases. This decision flew in the face of research showing that most young people took advice about sexual matters from their [...]

What brands can learn about persuasion from ex-Bush guru Rove

MarkRogers — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:42:54 +0000

It has long been rumoured that much of the success of the Bush campaign in 2000 and 2004 was down to their superior understanding of social networks. Now a chance remark (highlighted by Valdis Krebs) by Bush’s campaigning guru Karl Rove on Obama’s election campaign draws attention to this.

Barack Obama’s manager admitted [...]

The recession = a boom for value hunters

MarkRogers — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:58:54 +0000

Budget airline Easyjet announce that load factors are up - that means they are selling more seats per plane than last year. Decoding this one gets the impression that the “recession” so far is pushing people to get better prices for discretionary spend items (like holidays) rather than making them cancel their plans. [...]

A Facebook founder who helped Obama

MarkRogers — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:54:02 +0000

Brian Stelter profiles Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder who has played a key part of generating the grassroots-up political support for Obama.

Dell.com offers Windows XP downgrade as “bonus”

MarkRogers — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:37:59 +0000

Microsoft has struggled to convince users of Vista’s superiority to XP. And there continues to be a demand for the old OS. As of 1st July Windows XP is officially no longer being shipped by PC suppliers, but Dell have announced on their small business blog an ingenious way of downgrading to XP [...]

Social Media pioneer H & R Block ups profit

MarkRogers — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:41:17 +0000

H & R Block have published impressive year end figures, driven by growth in the number of people using their software to file tax returns. Could this be linked to their success in using social media to boost their brand awareness?

Recommending contacts in a social network - patent claim

MarkRogers — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:32:09 +0000

Some scientists at Microsoft have applied to patent a method of recommending contacts in a social network. For social networking nerds it is worth looking at the claims and the prior art responses. Social networking is now close enough to the mainstream of web activity for this patent claim to represent a serious [...]

Vonage - failing to be human

MarkRogers — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:59:04 +0000

We have just finished a disastrous six month flirtation with Vonage, the voice over IP (VOIP) telephony provider. VOIP providers offer a great solution for a fast-growing business. You can run your own exchange software - Asterisk - create conference call dial-ins, allow staff in different countries to share your switchboard - all [...]

Obama and the power of networks

MarkRogers — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:35:35 +0000

Roger Cohen writing in the New York Times points to the success of Barack Obama’s campaign as an example of the role of social networks in 21st century marketing. It is an example of the power of the many and shows up Hillary’s somewhat narrower base. Quoting from Joshua Green in the Atlantic [...]

H&R Block do social media

MarkRogers — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:00:15 +0000

H&R Block used social media marketing to boost their profile and raise awareness of their digital accounting product, reports Ad Age. The lady responsible was Amy Worley (Photo: Jonathan Fickies). They used YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Second life. As AdAge comments, this kind of marketing in social media is “about stacking [...]

Personalised PR pitches

chunte — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:09:23 +0000

For the casual person, the more emails you receive, the more popular you are: normally be a boost to your ego. You’d expect that popular bloggers will be thrilled by this as a recognition of their popularity but 300+ “PR Spam” emails a day can be a little much.

Chris Anderson, [...]

Twitter or Facebook?

MarkRogers — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:37:27 +0000

The scene is the playground at my wife’s school in Oxford in the 1980s. Two children put their arms around each other’s shoulders, they start chanting: “Anybody want to play kiss-chase?” As each child joins they put their arms around the shoulders of a child at either end of the line they join [...]

Employees “sell” Apple Macs to their bosses

MarkRogers — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:29:15 +0000

Steve Jobs of Apple doesn’t employ a sales force to persuade corporations to switch to Apple. Nonetheless Apple market share in this area is growing, driven in part by the consumer’s liking for the iPod and iPhone. In an intriguing Business Week survey Peter Burrows highlights that employees, sick of a PC by [...]

What is social media?

MarkRogers — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:46:10 +0000

Your browser does not support JavaScript. This media can be viewed at http://www.podtech.net/home/5018/brand-engagement-social-media-storytelling

This definition of social media is hard to beat. It boils to three steps:

Listen to the conversations that people are having about your brand, the brands of your competitors and the issues that you both address; Ask yourself how you can be useful [...]

Can 153,000 users save XP?

MarkRogers — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:37:56 +0000

XP - that stable, reliable operating system we have pretty much gotten used to - is going to be killed off in 73 days time, on 30th June. Windows users will then only have the choice of “upgrading” to Vista, an OS which has proved troublesome for pretty much all its users. You [...]

Targeting influencers - Cadbury case study

MarkRogers — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 06:07:25 +0000

Joe Marchese over at MediaPost has a good post on the Watts vs. Keller controversy. He, too, thinks that the truth lies in a middle ground. Influencers are important, but not for viral marketing. Hubs/mavens/folks with high “betweenness centrality” scores are helpful in that case.

The experience of our client the [...]

Targeting influencers with virals “doesn’t work”

MarkRogers — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:01:31 +0000

Duncan Watts is a Yahoo researcher who has done detailed work looking at the best strategy to launch a viral campaign - the kind of campaign which is aimed at getting the consumer to pass the idea along. Watts compares campaigns which targeted viral communications via “influentials” in the social network with campaigns which [...]

Umbria acquired by J.D. Power

MarkRogers — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:56:38 +0000

Our competitor Umbria - Boulder, Colorado based text mining company - has been acquired by J.D. Power/McGraw Hill. J.D. Power’s customer satisfaction focus links nicely with the kind of opinion-mining methodology used by Umbria. A good deal for both.

Workaholic bloggers “die at desk”

MarkRogers — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:42:31 +0000

Matt Richtel of the New York Times has a chilling piece about how blogging (amongst other fasten-you-to-your-desk activities) carries a severe health risk. The costs of being a one-person media outlet can be high. I didn’t realise the great Om Malik had had a heart attack. Get well soon Om.