Ditching your social media could be the next trending topic for businesses as they struggle to see a return on investment JD Wetherspoon yesterday deleted its Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, citing them as a distraction to the business and blaming social media for widespread unethical behaviour and addiction. The 900-strong pub chain’s chairman Tim … Read more
There are two sides to every story and that’s certainly the case in the much-publicised tale of the White Moose Café’s response to vlogger Elle Darby’s request for a room in exchange for some ‘influence’. If you haven’t heard, Elle Darby wrote to the White Moose Café in Dublin asking for a free five-night stay … Read more
The clarion call of social media service providers has finally come out in the wash. The notion that Facebookers love to engage with your brand has been squashed – by Facebook itself The social network’s decision to further reduce the visibility of posts from business pages is a clear message that people don’t actually like … Read more
Since Facebook passed a billion monthly active users, the actual number has become somewhat forgettable. Or perhaps it’s since the world’s biggest social network became bigger than the biggest country in the world, that there’s not much left to compare it with. So now we know it’s bigger than a big thing, the number numpties … Read more
Facebook have given us some magnificent advertising tools that just didn’t exist when I worked in newspapers. In fact they still don’t. Place an ad in a newspaper and you’ll never be able to count who saw it, who reacted to it and who commented on it. But that doesn’t mean that print ads don’t … Read more
Every now and then someone comes up with an idea that you wish you’d have thought of yourself. And the latest contender for me is ‘Online Strategy Cards’ – a deck of 54 cards packed with content ideas categorised into… well, categories. It’s the brainchild of local entrepreneur Sarah Frame O’Hare. I’ve met Sarah before … Read more
So you’ve probably heard by now that Instagram has a new feature. It’s called Stories. And it’s a bit like Snapchat Stories, a self-destructing sequence of stills and video with text overlays. You can publish them to your timeline, or they’ll automatically delete after 24 hours. Wait a minute! That’s a LOT like Snapchat. In fact … Read more
Last week The Independent and Independent on Sunday announced it will no longer be printed as a newspaper from the end of next month (March 2016). No longer will their faithful readers leave their homes, get in their cars, jog or cycle to the newsagents with a handful of coins to buy The Independent. Instead, they will read their … Read more
Last month, I wrote about the blindness of implementing a social media strategy without considering the wider impact of an overall business, or at least a marketing, strategy. (Link: Social media ‘strategy’ is being over-hyped) I quoted highly-respected blogger Jay Baer in the article because he directly addressed the ‘self-styled gurus’ who are using the s-word to … Read more
The never-ending lust for buzzwords means that this year social media has been dominated by the craze for having a strategy. In business, it’s important to have a strategy, and social media should be part of it, but you can’t just buy a strategy off the shelf. By its very nature, it needs to be as individual … Read more