Archive for April, 2008

What is social media?

April 25th, 2008 — Mark

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This definition of social media is hard to beat. It boils to three steps:
1. Listen to the conversations that people are having about your brand, the brands of your competitors and the issues that you both address;
2. Ask yourself how you can [...]

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Can 153,000 users save XP?

April 16th, 2008 — Mark

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 [...]

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Targeting influencers – Cadbury case study

April 12th, 2008 — Mark

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 UK confectionery [...]

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Targeting influencers with virals “doesn’t work”

April 10th, 2008 — Mark

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 [...]

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Umbria acquired by J.D. Power

April 9th, 2008 — Mark

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.

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