MarCom Professional

The last few weeks has seen the arrival of a series of tools that take content recommended by your Twitter network and present it in a newspaper-style format.

Twittertim.es is the first instance that I discovered. It assembles content tweeted by your personal network and friends-of-a-friend network to create a crude web page summary. Stories are promoted based on how frequently they are tweeted.

Paper.il uses the metaphor of a print deadline to generate an online newspaper that is emailed to you once a day. Content is organised using semantic analysis into difference sections such as media, business and technology. More...

Unless you literally run your business with your ears plugged and your eyes covered, you are aware of the importance of social media and its impact on both brand and bottom line. However, while social media is the topic du jour in mainstream news, on blogs, in books, at conferences and at your local Starbucks, we may still underestimate its overall promise and potential.

The socialization of business is comparable to the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the red pill in the Matrix. If ignorance is bliss, awareness is awakening. Where there’s insight, there’s opportunity – but with opportunity, there’s also a cost. More...

I saw a video on the State of Social CRM post on Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang in which Paul Greenberg talks about how companies are having difficulties with cultural changes internally to execute against the new bread of customer, the social customer.  In case you don’t know what CRM is, it’s Customer Relationship Management as described in Wikipedia as a “technology that allows companies to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.”

What an ear full!

My version would be just an application that keeps track of customer facing activities so you can find the gaps in your service and 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...

Escherman’s Andrew Smith and Realwire’s Adam Parker have scrutinised the reach versus engagement for 50 online news sites ranging from Heat to The Economist.

“In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical.  Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement,” say Smith.

But for online PR, Google tools provide hard numbers. Parker and Smith define reach as the number of views that a page receives and engagement as the amount of time that a person spends on a page.

They find that visitors spend a widely varying amount of time on different news sites and predict how many words they are likely to have read per page. More...

Some really interesting mini-research out today from Realwire’s Adam Parker and Andrew Smith of Escherman.

They took 50 online news sites from across different industry sectors and analysed them against three key areas: readership per article (average numbers of UK page views per Google indexed url per month), engagement (time spent per page to indicate how long a reader is likely to be spending reading that content when they get there) and UK relevance (what proportion of the sites readers as a whole come from the UK and would therefore be likely to be relevant if you were trying to reach a UK audience). More...

Recently a report was released by US market research firm Pear Analytics with a statement on how 40% of Twitter messages are “pointless babble.” As you can see from the comments that followed, the statement rubbed some people the wrong.

Although the analysis was based from a personal value judgment on individual’s communication, it somewhat puts Twitter usage in perspective. At the end of the day nobody can speak words of wisdom every time they open their mouth (not even Warrant Buffet), but the real value of Twitter is its openness as a real-time platform for engagement opportunities. More...