Social Marketing & Digital Agency

1 in 10 pets have social media profile

After the extraordinary #NOTW events of last week, we’re getting back to our bread and butter business of what’s happening in the world of digital. This week seems to be dominated by stats and the promise of sparkly product launches in the Autumn.

So here we go.  The first mind boggling stat of the week is that Twitter now has One Million Apps based on its platform. One million!

But it’s fair to say that ‘Western Twitter’  can’t hold a candle to ‘Eastern Twitter’ with the Chinese equivalent, Weibo, now boasting  140 million users and 50 million active monthly users and growing fast.

In fact, global Twitter and Flickr  activity has been charted in some amazing images this week by Eric Fischer and there are quite a lot of blue dots (Twitter activity) in China – fascinating stuff.

Google came out with a whole raft of numbers this week. All of these were announced on Google+ by CEO Larry Page and impressive figures they were too – earnings up 32% in the second quarter hitting a massive $9 billion. Google + seems to be starting well, although it ran out of disc space last weekend and started spamming.

We have to say that we are still a little bit lukewarm about Google+ but maybe that’s a girl thing, as it seems to be most popular with the boys. However, we see it as a potentially fatal flaw because WOMEN buy stuff (85% of all brand purchases are made by women), so if you want to attract people to sell to you need to attract WOMEN… Is it just that we are women, or is this just really simple to understand? It will be interesting to see how that one plays out Google-side…

On the subject of shopping! Foursquare is to offer daily deals a la Groupon and LivingSocial et al, which is another indication of the rise of social shopping. This has been one of the major trends of this year, and as we move towards the all important Q4 for retail, it will be interesting to see what impact social and mobile shopping has on the bottom line.

Product announcements are increasing again (revving up for Christmas no doubt – Christmas press releases are coming thick and fast now), with Amazon is hoping to throw a spanner in the works for Samsung and others with the announcement that they are going to be launching a tablet (to go alongside their Kindle).   Analysts believe that this could become the one serious competitor to the iPad. And RIM has announced that they will be launching seven, yes, seven, new smartphones in the coming months.

To round off this week, we have two lovely social stories to share. The first is the amazing news that a Japanese company has just a released a very special (and free) Twitter client for the iPad in the App Store. “Breath Bird” lets people who can’t use their fingers and have problems speaking, to post to Twitter by breathing into the iPad’s mic. How brilliant and wonderful!

And finally, we have an excuse to publish a picture of the gorgeous Maneki Neko who was begat by our beloved Lara, the lucky white office cat – apparently one in ten pets now has a social media profile. Not our pets, of course… although Albadore, the office dog, is suddenly looking a bit sheepish…

Have a lovely weekend all, fingers crossed it stays sunny

B2B giant CA creates 'cloud' chalk art and uploads it to Twitpic

We can’t tell how excited we were to read a whole batch of news over the summer telling us that B2Bs are finally waking up to the considerable benefits of social media.

Very significantly we feel, CA Technologies (you may know them better as Computer Associates) have appointed an agency to build its social media campaigns in Europe as it ‘wants to stimulate direct conversations to build relationships.’

What’s exciting about this is that CA Technologies are a very large IT management software company and are about as B2B as B2B gets. And they are using exciting techniques like getting chalk art drawings done on pavements with company messaging and using the photos on Twitter et al – all exciting and innovative stuff.

And those peeps at Cisco, another B2B giant, are embracing social media wholeheartedly too, not to mention Forrester who are constantly bringing out reports that are telling B2Bs to, well, get on with it!

So will those nay sayers at the B2Bs – you know those ‘social media is for B2Cs selling to kids’ types – have to change their plans? We think so. And fast. Not only will they be embracing social media as a means of communicating their corporate messages to their clients and prospects, but they will be incorporating social media into the solutions that they offer their clients.

A little bird tells us that social media is forming an important role in some ‘mega deals’ that are already on the table and that ultimately it will revolutionise how companies communicate.

In fact we think that within the next year we will be seeing an avalanche of B2Bs in the arena all reaping the tangible benefit of integrating a serious social media campaign into their marketing and PR strategies. Watch this space.

Many rumours have been flooding the social media streams over the past few weeks about the possibility of Twitter business pages and verified business accounts.

Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, confirmed that they are to ‘start charging companies for using the platform from next year’ according to The Telegraph.

The new paid business accounts will allow businesses to have feedback areas and also in built statistics.

Biz Stone commented “”This takes advantage of some of the commercial use of Twitter we’ve seen from businesses like airlines and big box stores.  We want to present to them a layer of features that allows them to become better at Twitter, show them some of the analytics.”