Tag Archives: social media

Graphing Likes

By February 1 2013, 9:02 am Leave a comment

With big data comes great responsibility. This is what Spider-Man* might have said if he was working for Facebook these days. Facebook has the personal information, photos and likes of over a billion people with more than a trillion connections. That’s a lot of data, so no wonder that privacy concerns are mounting since Facebook announced its new Graph Search a couple of weeks ago, which uses everything we have been sharing on Facebook to let us look up people, places or photos, packaging it into structured information we can actually use.

This is like Google but instead of giving you links to external sites, results are Facebook pages for the people, places or things that match your query, making the search more personal than a traditional search engine. For example, you could search ‘restaurants my friends who live in Dublin like’ to get a list of places to eat in Dublin your friends ‘liked’, look for ‘friends that work at my company who like karaoke’ if you’re looking for a singing partner in crime or ‘new movies my friends like’ if you don’t know what to watch. This all sounds very exciting, but it can also be a bit scary, as Tom Scott’s Tumblr Actual Facebook Graph Searches shows. Read more »

Once upon a Twitter time

By December 19 2012, 10:48 am Leave a comment

Earlier this week we learned that Twitter has started letting its users download all of their tweets. This feature will allow people to browse tweets month by month and search their entire archives (Stephen Fry might need to hire a team of analysts for that!). Currently just a small number of users are able to test this new function, but this could be rolled out soon if testing is successful. Sadly I’m not one of the ’chosen ones’, but according to those who have tried it, a ‘request your archive’ button comes up on your Twitter’s setting page and once you activate it, you get a link to download your archive as a html or csv file. Read more »

Instagraming our lives

By November 9 2012, 8:21 am Leave a comment

Many people use social media to portray their aspirational self, tweeting on Friday night when you’re at that cool bar or telling all your Facebook friends you’re in front of the Taj Mahal. I am a sucker for apps that can ‘make’ my childhood aspirations come true. I wanted to be a chef, a professional travel writer or a photographer. I’ve tried (with mixed luck) half of the food apps on the app store, written travel diaries on Triposo and most recently I’ve become an instagram junkie.

instagram logoAlthough my jeans are not (at least not yet) grass stained from attempts to get a cool shoot of a lone park bench, I use it almost every day to capture moments of my life, full of filtering joy.  Instagram allows me to pretend that I am a half-decent photographer, but the reason I really like it is that I usually prefer posting visual content rather than trying to describe it.  In an era where even 140 characters can be deemed too much if you’ve got a short attention span, a picture is definitely worth at least a thousand words. Read more »

Social, Mobile and Urban – The Games come to London

By July 25 2012, 6:12 pm Leave a comment

Much has been written about the London Games being the first socialympics, but as this picture of the Olympic torch relay passing through South London illustrates, social is increasingly mobile.

Think about it.  What’s the first thing you do when you see something out of the ordinary? You take your phone out of your pocket to capture what’s going on. From road accidents to flash mobs, laser shows to Olympic torches: as soon as we see it, we snap it and share it.

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Just how private are your privacy settings?

By June 12 2012, 8:50 am Leave a comment

Even with the most private of privacy settings there’s a wealth of information known about us without us even realising it. An article in the New Scientist sheds more light on the information social networks know about us which they are reluctant to reveal.

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In Search of Social media DJs

By March 23 2012, 11:47 am Leave a comment

Following on from the recent SXSW it seems all eyes in social media are fixed on the box – Zeebox to be precise. To quote the words of Mugatu from the movie Zoolander:  Social TV is “so hot right now”.

But beyond all the hoopla, another media channel has been quietly perfecting the art of engagement for decades without getting the credit it deserves. I’m talking about radio.

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1 to 1 Social CRM – why weren’t we doing it last year?

By February 20 2012, 11:47 am Leave a comment

We are all familiar with the traditional CRM / Direct Marketing / Data Driven Marketing / Direct Response*, *choose preferred name here, world.  Whatever you call it, essentially it’s where we collect data about an individual, determine what we think is relevant for them by looking at their behaviour, their purchases, or from research, and map it to our business needs. Then we put it all in a database and use it to drive mass-customised messages – the key being that we incorporate personal information from our database and then use automated rules based systems to generate relevant communications.

The most prevalent example of this right now is email. (And let’s not get into how good some specific brands are, or aren’t at doing email marketing, that’s a topic for another day!). Read more »

The Super Bowl Ads – TV Sacks Social

By February 7 2012, 3:40 am 1 Comment

Let me begin with a disclaimer. I’m not American and I know very little about football – American or otherwise. What I do know is that if this year’s Super Bowl was a contest between TV and Social Media. TV won hands down.

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Social intelligence

By January 16 2012, 11:29 am Leave a comment

This social media thing is all the rage isn’t it. If we were all confused before about integration and the impact of digital on our businesses we are doomed now.

I can’t think of a client we have that doesn’t need or use some form of social media in their day to day existence.

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