MarCom Professional

The Top 100 brands in social media is a fascinating report in the top brands in social media today. Not only is it a great report but we’re particularly pleased with one particular brand:

Finally, LG makes number 25 in the immediate future rankings for share of voice, whilst at Interbrand it is ranked at ninety-four. LG has been actively engaging with the blogosphere for sometime now.

This is really pleasing because, as we’ve mentioned before, we manage the social media campaign for LG, which includes managing their blog not just for the UK but France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but more important working on their relations with other bloggers and influencers in the social media sphere. More...

Last night it was my pleasure to watch the livestreaming of Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech at the f8 conference, courtesy of Sun Startup Essentials.

In truth, the speech wasn’t phenomenally exciting - but then again, Facebook is no longer a novelty. It’s now a technology entrenched in our online lives (latest stats say it’s reached a record 45% share of the social networking market in the UK) and this was more about that technology maturing than wowing the world.

First off, Facebook gets a long-awaited redesign - for too long the design has reconciled the old pre-application Facebook with the slew of innovations and applications since. More...

An interesting piece in The Guardian this weekend… As US newspapers are ditching reviewers in favour of digital alternatives this article looks at and challenges the role of blogger/critique.  

I for one think there is room for everyone, seasoned pro’s can reference their many experiences for a balanced view but a novice may provide a more personal opinion that will sit more naturally with the man on  the  street…  

Finally - our good friends at Jam have also added in to the debate so now its time to make up your own mind.  More...

The title says it all, really:

Via Social PRobiotic

It’s rather punchy message aside, the presentation is also very slickly done and excellent selection of the most relevant and hard-hitting statistics about social media today: 14% of people trust adverts while 78% trust word of mouth. Millennials spend 16 hours a week online. And I especially love the “social > media” slide. Give it a go.

Speaking of presentations, Slideshare is currently featuring “PR 2.0” as its topic of the day, and our congratulations to Paul Fabretti for having his presentation from last week (which talks about some of our work for LG) featured on the front page. More...

On Tuesday Ronnie, our marketing director, and I headed up to Manchester to present at the Marketing 2.0 seminar. We talked about the work we do for LG, including the LG Blog and the various social media outreach activities we manage for them. We’d been invited by Paul Fabretti of KMP and though the event was pitched as an introduction to the landscape, we found people attending had a variety of skillsets and knowledge which made for some interesting conversations.

KMP chief Bill Daring kicked off proceedings with an introduction to the digital landscape, which while it may be meat and drink to seasoned digital professionals, taking stock of what’s out there - from MySpace to Flickr to Twitter to Wikipedia - you forget how much of it is is out there. More...

Last night was a great night for Outside Line as we picked up an award at the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards. We picked up the award in the Music category Sir Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full, which we designed and built. We were also shortlisted twice for Now Play It, in the Music and Best Use of Web categories.

Greg, our studio director and Nick, our account manager for the site, picked up the award at the ceremony last night in London:

More details of the night can be found over at NMA.co.uk - we’re delighted with the award and our congratulations go to all the other winners as well! More...

One of the most innovative and exciting things we’re working on right now is Beck’s Fusions, a unique art and music fusion project that runs throughout this summer, as part of Beck’s longstanding support of contemporary arts and music. We’re working on a digital venture called Live Studio, open to anyone willing and able to display their artistic talents and express their individuality.

The challenge is to create a work of art to a specific music track. Film yourself creating a work of art to the music and upload the video to the Beck’s channel page on MySpace. More...

Yesterday, the owners of Faceparty, the clubbing & party-centric social networking site, decided it was the last straw. After promising to give away “cool tools” (the site’s paid services) for free in exchange for posting a picture of yourself in fancy dress, they found themselves inundated with requests. While they were still dealing with the backlog, users became impatient and abusive, and so the admins have decided enough is enough:

Sowwy dudes, but some of you have pissed us off so much today that we’ve shut the whole site down and ****** off to the zoo.

We’ve all had bad days dealing with running communities and dealing with objectionable members, so their course of action is understandable. More...

We all know banner ads are largely ineffective - exactly as Scoble outlined two years ago. They are only trusted by barely a quarter of consumers, while those that click on them are the wrong demographic and don’t correspond to brand value. It means a waste of up to $1bn a year. No wonder Adblock for Firefox has been downloaded over 20 million times.

The less effective they are, the more jarring and interfering they have become to try and wring every last drop of attention out of their audience, so thanks to Scott Monty for highlighting this tongue-in-cheek look from current.tv at just how bad banner advertising has become: More...

We’ve been working with Berocca and their agency i-level recently, working to help the Berocca brand get more engaged with the UK blogosphere. We have helped arrange their sponsorship of last month’s London bloggers’ meetup, which was really successful. Buoyed by this, we’re pleased to announce Berocca’s latest blogger venture, which is Blogger Relief. Anyone in the UK with a blog can take part - just fill in your details and you can get a special bloggers’ relief pack, including free pack of Berocca (naturally), a stress ball, bubble wrap keyring and penholder. More...