Ryan MacMillan

With every new social media service there are new ways for audiences to connect and share information. But we’ve always had the means to make these connections in the offline world, through town hall meetings, conferences and casual conversations. Some organisations are managing to blend the best of both of these new online and traditional offline approaches. Not surprisingly some of the more successful proponents are interest groups and organisations operating the social media space; organising events around technology and digital culture. What have they got right? Where are there lessons for the rest of us when trying  to use a mix of online and offline to foster community, communication, networking and knowledge sharing?

Read more →

Our most recent intern, Jessica Levine, hails from New York City but is currently studying at U.Penn. Jessica has been with us for most of August and for her personal project has chosen to look at how social media is affecting meetings, conferences and other types of real world events.

We wish Jessica all the best with her final year of studies.

The information gathered using various free and paid-for tools across the internet all help map out the social media footprint of a brand. However, it is how you organize this data that makes the footprint a useful snapshot of your brand. A brand can use the social media footprint to answer questions about online activity that can provide insights for their future marketing strategies. In general, the tools available can provide information on three different levels: audiences, topics and issues, and influencers. Here I’ll briefly describe how they relate to the social media footprint, and highlight the relevant tools and social media data available:

Read more →

In keeping with our current theme of looking at free online conversation measurement tools a post on Twist Image. While we’ve covered the six tools that Mitch mentions in our Contagious article there are a couple of new and potentially interesting ones mentioned in the comments including;

• Filtrbox for tracking “mainstream news, blogs and other online content sources” etc. etc. 
• CustomScoop, a news clipping service

I’ve subscribed to the free trials - will let you know later in the week what they’re like.

In a shocking, I say, shocking, development today it has been revealed that about a quarter of kids between the ages of 8 and 12 are evading the age restrictions on social networking sites like Bebo, Facebook and (the inexplicably still-popular) MySpace.

Goodness, whoever would have suspected that such a thing would have come to pass? Child lies about age! Scandal! Moral outrage!

Of course, the reccomendation of Tom Illube, chief exec of Garlik, the company who furnish us with this breaking news, is that “Facebook, MySpace and Bebo need to take their own age restriction policies far more seriously to help allay parents’ real fears.”

Or, Tom, parents could take their duties as parents more seriously and teach their kids to use the web responsibly in order to help allay my fear that everytime some tweenwager gives out his phone number online we blame ‘the internet’ rather than said tweenagers level of intelligence.