Social media

Undoubtedly, the nature of news is changing with the advent and immense popularity of social media. Media is painfully aware it needs to be involved with the new social order to keep audiences engaged. Social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, provide people with additional channels to not only get news about the world, but to involve their community and immediate sphere of influence. So social media enhances mainstream news by taking it to additional channels, but also fills ...

When you are promoting an event or function, social media is one of the most valuable, inexpensive and creative platforms that you have at your disposal. But there is a right way and a wrong to go about it. You need to intrigue and entice your potential audience, without irritating them and turning them off. Here are five tips on using Facebook and Twitter to successfully promote your event: 1. Choose your audience, know your platform Facebook and Twitter may both be social ...

Measuring your brand’s social media equity can be a tricky business. Confronted by the multitude of platforms, buzzwords and measurement tools you might be tempted to simplify both your metrics and your strategies. After all, who’s to say that a follower on Twitter is more or less valuable than a fan on Facebook? The problem is that as seductive as this urge to simplify may be, it can land you in hot water. Just as in real life, social media ...

When you have an 11-month old, you don't get out much.  So when we went away this weekend with my parents, and the opportunity presented itself to go to lunch while they watched our daughter, we jumped at it.  The problem is, we were in Kleinmond, a small South African village.  There are probably about 5 restaurants in Kleinmond, and let's face it, they can't all be good.  So the pressure was on: where do we go? In the US, this ...

In the last two articles on Memeburn, I covered the basics of how to set up and how to use a Flickr account to grow your brand online. Once you’ve set up your account though, like any other web presence, you need to allocate time resources to promoting it - both inside and outside of Flickr. If you're spending a large amount of time and effort uploading photos to your Flickr account as a business owner and/or entrepreneur, it's prudent to ...

The stringent social media policies adapted by some Western newsrooms indicate an inflexibility in adapting to a changed information and news environment. This has left the door open for journalists in developing economies to step up and drive adoption of social media tools in journalism. Important US-based papers such as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are choosing to restrict use of social networks by journalists. These are papers with proud journalistic traditions which have helped define modern journalism. An ...

At the recent Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco, it was categorically stated that the social media future has already arrived in the US property sector. This was evidenced by the fact that almost all of the 2000 property professional attendees carried social-media-enabled smart phones, while 25% already utilised the cutting edge iPad. Formal research confirms these empirical markers. A recent report by eMarketer says that 60% of internet users aged 35 to 44 (and 50% of those in the 45-to-54 ...

Measuring a brand’s value is an inherently tricky business. Even in a supposedly clearcut case like Coca-Cola, which is essentially commoditised sugar water dressed up in world class marketing, the actual value of the brand is difficult to separate from the product (or service) itself. Yes, crowds of fans spontaneously sang the Coke song during the World Cup, but how much is that sort of thing actually worth to a brand? Do the people who talk about your brand actually buy ...

In last week’s article, I gave a background to using Flickr, Yahoo!'s photography-sharing site, as a place to increase exposure for your brand and business online. Once you’ve set up your Flickr profile and begun uploading photos to your account, you're ready to begin extracting real value from the site. The best way to do this is to add value to the Flickr community, rather than just seeing Flickr as a traffic driver to your blog or website.  Although this shift ...

When it comes to connecting and communicating with women an old-fashioned, bog-standard website may be a better bet than the in-vogue world of social networking. These are the surprising findings of a new US study by authoritative brand development and marketing insight consultancy Added Value in partnership with Yahoo!. The newly-released research, called Connectonomics, details women's needs and how they relate to the online channels they use on a daily basis. The findings are both interesting and surprising. The independent research ...