Social Marketing & Digital Agency

So with another week dominated by the financial crisis it’s no surprise that ‘Italy 10’ became a trending topic on Twitter. And interestingly for brands who target families and/or the mums market, Twitter has been announced as a leading brand with families, whizzing 10 place up the charts with Facebook falling a little out of favour and dropping down 16 places.

In a ‘Digital Life’s survey of 72,000 people in 60 countries, Britons have said that they want brands to stay off social media as most did not listen to what consumers want. However the same number said that they liked to engage when they were offered promotions and discounts, which sends a strong message to brands to get their act together and engage with consumers via social media properly, rather than just fiddling around or acting without a proper strategy, which “risks alienating customers and impacting business growth” according to Stephen Yap, Group Director, Technology, TNS UK.

Mobile usage and M Commerce are becoming the most rapidly emerging trend for businesses to take note of, and a cross-industry group of retailers, network operators and trade bodies, led by eBay, has just called on the government to aid consumer take-up of m-commerce by prioritising network improvements in a ‘Mobile Manifesto’.

In other mobile news, the mobile phone market is booming in Africa;  Apple have come up with a rapid fix for their new operating system which was attracting lots of negative press last week; the UK is going to have the best broadband in Europe (allegedly) within the next few years; Blackberry makers RIM have suffered a huge loss in subscribers after their recent outage disaster and LinkedIn has launched a dashboard for groups which will make things a lot easier to cope with.

There’s a lot ‘silver surfer’ activity this week including news that older mobile users are switching to smartphones and this age group is one of the fastest growing users of the devices. And with the recent news that Google is thinking of moving into TV, and tablet technology allowing ‘Pad Dads’ to watch more and more TV on a mobile device content producers should take heed of this new survey which says that a huge proportion of older people can’t hear what is being said because of recording techniques.

There’s been a fair amount of Google + news this week, with the announcement that you can set up Google + pages for businesses.  We have set up ours  but were rather surprised to see just how unintuitive it is and that you can’t have multiple admins – it seems their senior executive was right after all saying that Google + was not a ‘social’ network, even though it’s what they told us it was a few months ago… We have suspected all along Google+ is more of a search network, and so are advising all our clients that they need to be in the space as it is likely to prove more businessy than the other social networks – see Specsavers ‘hangout’ with Gok Wan for an early example of how brands might use it in the future.

And at the risk of this column becoming like Groundhog Day, we have another Facebook privacy story today, this time with Facebook probably having to agree with privacy regulators to regular audits.

Lest we forget, it is Armistice Day and this event has been marked by Twitter with its own Remembrance Day Service. What a lovely move by Twitter and a fabulous example of how technology can be used for the greater good.

Have a nice weekend.

Well it’s the end of another interesting week, what with all the EU/Greek shenanigans and all, and here is our spin around digital land, which as been a bit “calm before the Christmas storm of launches-ish”.

Facebook privacy  is once again making the headlines as apparently Facebook users are struggling with the privacy changes  which is maybe not surprising as they have changed them eight times in two years.

And there was also the rather disturbing news that a whopping 600,000 Facebook accounts are hacked every day.

Over on Planet Apple, there have been a few grumblings about the battery life on the new iPhone 4S and Apple have had to fess up this week that there is actually a bug. In fact, anyone who has upgraded their existing iPhone to iOS 5 could be experiencing a problem, and while they are obviously going to fix this, it might take a few weeks… While in a report out this week it was revealed that Android phones are more likely to break (that is a hardware failure) than Apple or Blackberry.

There has been a slew of positive Google news this week headed up by ‘do a barrel roll’  trending on Twitter, which is a clever trick which people have had fun using, and best enjoyed on Firefox and Chrome apparently, and those lovely folks over at Mashable have revealed a whole host of other Google goodies that you can play with in a dull moment.

More seriously, Google are contemplating offering  paid cable-TV services to consumers, a move that could unleash a new wave of competition within the traditional TV business.  This is a very interesting development and one which we will be watching in the coming months.

So rounding off this week with a couple of lighthearted stories:  hackers accidentally broke into a French rugby club website, when their intended target was actually the German Stock Exchange. The website, which usually only gets 700 hits each day was visited 80,000 times as a result of the attack. And some bright spark at Vsauce, a YouTube channel, has worked out that the weight of all the electrons in motion that make up the internet at any one moment is equivalent to 50 grams which is apparently the weight of a strawberry (although rather a large one we feel!)

So on that mind-boggling note, here’s wishing you a lovely weekend, complete with lots of fireworks!

Privacy seems to be the word on everyone’s lips in digital land this week following Facebook’s changes last week. Even the launch of the new Amazon tablet, the Kindle Fire, (which has been generally well received, although not as a competitor to the iPad) has been tainted with privacy issues too.

Facebook has been inundated with requests for hard copies of data that they hold on users and Spotify has angered a lot of users by making membership of Facebook compulsory. In fact, Facebook looks like it will face official investigations. We’re sure this story will run and run…

In other news, there are lots of new shiny phones on the horizon, just in time for Christmas – well, it is almost October after all. Some clever peeps in Germany have taken all the iPhone 5 rumours and made their own prototype – if they’re right, it does look suitably gorgeous, but we will we to see the real thing next week. And not to be put off by the hype around Apple, Google (well, Samsung) and HTC will be launching new uber lovely products in the following week.

Things are a little quieter over at Google, but they have just celebrated becoming a teenager with another fantastic google-doodle. And they have just announced a new sooper-dooper eco-friendly data centre in Dublin, which was selected for its cool climate – saves on air con apparently, which is all good.

In the meantime, those Twitter people are sailing merrily along and they must be pleased to see that their revenues are predicted to go through the roof in the next year or two.

This is good to hear as this week has been dominated by the gathering storms of a Euro Zone/global financial crisis and there’s also been talk of a tech bubble, which might burst sometime soon.

Ah well, at least we have the iPhone to look forward to and it’s hot, so not all bad. Have a good weekend!