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The 2010 Australian Twitter Election

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 [...]

Daily Mail article on social media critical of companies that actively seek consumer feedback

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 [...]

Foursquare and the opportunity for location based social media

Foursquare seems to be in the news a lot recently, and is starting to exhibit a similar hype curve to that of Twitter. Update 15 March 2010: with one tweet from @mrskutcher (aka Demi Moore) the battle of the location based social media platforms is now over.  Now that she is on Foursquare and other [...]

Social Media World Forum Europe 15-16 March 2010

There is a great Social Media conference being held in London next week and looking at the conference program,  it looks like being a great event and very timely. From their website… Europe’s leading social media event. Two day event featuring four dedicated conference streams, workshops and exhibition to be held at Olympia conference centre in [...]

What new skills are required for social media aware marketers?

As promised in a previous post “Why are clients still scratching their heads about Social Media?” I wanted to look at the additional skills that marketing leaders will need to possess from now on to understand the new world of social media and drive real benefit from it. This post has been prompted by some [...]

Mind the Social Media Gap

This article first appeared in the PointZero magazine, issue 2 October 2009. It is often said that marketing helps consumers decide which product they should buy, and the customer service and operations department of any company is where this work can come undone in a flash. As rightly identified by Dave Evans in a recent [...]

Why are clients still scratching their heads about Social Media?

I read an interesting report in the Telegraph yesterday that says London is the “social media capital of the world”.  This is not hard to believe – a city of 8 million people that the Telegraph claim would rather tweet than talk to each other on the tube. But with such a focus on social [...]

Are social networks creating a generation of techno addicts?

The short answer is no I do not believe so, otherwise I would not have set up @madeleinegrill’s twitter account for when she is older. Last week I was asked by Sky News to provide comment on the issue of “Techno addiction”, as a result of a report by Northampton University, where a study of 1,200 people carried [...]

First look at new Vodafone 360 social media initiative & new apps #vf360

Today Vodafone announced their new Vodafone 360 initiative #vf360 to raise the stakes in the mobile social networking and app store battle between operators.  Designed as a major refresh of their Vodafone Live! initiative, Vodafone 360 aims to go beyond a simple web portal and instead link Vodafone customers with their favourite mobile applications and [...]

Why call centres need to embrace twitter & IM for customer suppport

Like many people in the UK, from time to time I have to call a support line for an internet or mobile / service provider about some sort of problem. I am sure I am not alone at dreading the thought of making this call – being put on hold, having to push 1, 2 etc [...]

Listen, Learn, Engage and Integrate – 4 rules for brands using social media Part 1

I have been fairly quiet on the blogging front of late (inversely more active on twitter), but in between posts I have been spending a lot of time talking to large, well known companies about their social media strategy.  Like many in the mainstream press, I keep reading that social media / Twitter / Facebook [...]

Perhaps Ocado customers should write their emails for them

This afternoon, I received the following email from home delivery company Ocado – titled “Important information regarding operational trading hours at Ocado” The email appears below (click for larger view) What was amazing to read is that for some good news (they are extending deliveries in our area to include Sunday – which provides more [...]

Advertising in 2020 – a sneak peek from Ogilvy and Acision

I have just had the good fortune to be sent a brilliant white paper from Acision and OgilvyOne, developed as part of their ongoing collaboration in the mobile advertising space. You can download the entire paper or view it on slideshare below.  For quick re-tweeting, use the short URL http://lc.tl/ad2020 to access this blog post. [...]

Carnival of the Mobilists 181 is at London Calling

This week the carnival comes to you from a city that has just hosted one of the word’s most famous sporting carnivals – the Wimbledon championships.  Last time we hosted the Carnival, it was the G20 that focused the eyes of the world on dear old London. As we all know by now, Roger Federer [...]

IBM serves up an ace @Wimbledon

On Saturday 4th July, I visited the Wimbledon Championships as a guest of IBM, in relation to a book I am writing on the business use of twitter (more on this in an upcoming post). IBM, in conjunction with their advertising Agency Ogilvy has served up three brilliant applications for the 2009 Wimbledon Championships. You [...]

The end game: week 19

Introducing a new section here – the end game.  Every week I find things that I’d like to share with London Calling readers – things that are too short for a full blog post, but too long for a tweet. Those of you who do blog will know that it takes a lot of spare [...]

Australian mobile market perspective part 1

Following a week of intensive meetings in Sydney, I thought I would pull my thoughts and observations together on the differences between the UK and Australian mobile markets.  For those not familiar with my background, I am Australian and spent 11 years in Sydney working in the telco and online space. I have spoken to [...]

The twitter fail whale backstory

I picked up an interesting story in the Sydney Morning Herald as I was on the plane back to London explaining the origins of the “fail whale” picture that greets twitter users when twitter is over capacity. Apparently the artwork was designed some years ago by Sydney designer Yiying Lu, and is titled “lifting up [...]

an almost perfect mobile campaign

A few weeks ago I came across a mobile anti-knife campaign from the Central Office of Information (COI) here in the UK called “it doesn’t have to happen” (IDHTH).  You can see the campaign at idhth.mobi (looks best on your mobile). The campaign is being seeded across mobile sites – you can see the call to [...]

Twitter – just a fad or something real?

I picked up a well written, if not quite cynical piece from Richard Glover in the Sydney Morning Herald about this new “twitter fad”. His subject was “You could bring back the hula hoop if you found a way of connecting it to the net ” In the piece, Richard suggests “Twitter is a social [...]

What is next for innovators and early adopters?

Many you reading this post are probably are aware of the product adoption curve – an example is shown below (from Wikipedia). It is based on Everett Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle model - here is a quick refresh below. Summarising the curve in words – from Kzero’s blog Innovators are brave people that are willing to [...]

what is the collective noun for a gathering of mobilists?

An interesting evening was had tonight at Home in London, where Dominic Travers and Ryan Carson from Carsonified hosted a dinner to gather thoughts about the next Future of Mobile conference to be held in London in November. An excellent gaggle (is this the right collective noun?) of thought leaders in the mobile space were [...]

Which twitter personality are you?

Over at Stephen Waddington’s excellent Wadd’s tech pr blog (currently number 25 on the top 50 UK advertising blogs chart) there is a very good discussion on the different “types” found on twitter. This sits nicely with my recent discussion on twitter as a serious business tool vs waste of time. Read the whole post on [...]