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According to a new study from BlogHer, the community for women online, people are now more influenced by the opinion of a blogger than a celebrity when it comes to learning more about products or making a purchase.
The BlogHer 2011 Social Media Matters Study, co-sponsored by PR firm Ketchum, also shows that 78% of the female adult online population are active social media users and nearly twice as many (20%) are motivated to consider products promoted by or with a blogger they know, than by promotions featuring a celebrity (13%).
The …

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I was five long years ago that I wrote my first ever post here and in remarking on this, I feel a sense of achievment but also a sense of sadness at how quickly time passes.  A lot has happened since I wrote my Welcome! post.
Five years, 912 posts, 1,527 comments 1,456 spams, three skins later and I’m still blogging.
Originally, my hope had been the blog would help the handful of PR freelancers I was working with “to interact among ourselves and with the outside world of PR, marketing …

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Gartner’s 2010 Hype Cycle report on social software highlights the most important technologies that enable and support social interactions. Organisations can use it as a guide to planning and investment decisions, and to guide realistic user expectations in light of market hype and exuberance.   Here’s  a summary of the trends identified.
On the rise:
Pattern-Based Strategy: a framework for proactively seeking and acting on the early and often-termed “weak” signals forming patterns in the marketplace. It’s also about the ability to model the impact of patterns on your organisation and identify the …

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Image via Wikipedia

Every once in a while I get so caught up in what’s new and cool in the social internet I forget that not everyone is running at the same speed.  I forget that people are coming into this as newbies and might have only limited experience and knowledge. So what was new to me in 2006 might be new to someone else in 2010.
One thing that’s come up recently is blog comment policies.  It’s good practice for bloggers to publish what their policy is for comments; I thought …

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Don’t overthink your social media efforts
Recently I spoke to a company who thought that they needed hundreds of folks participating in their social media marketing effort, like a grassroots political campaign.
Facebook CEO deletes controversial iPhone 4 posts.
For a CEO with a high profile such as Zuckerberg, that probably wasn’t the smartest of things to do. After all, journalists didn’t just write about Mark Zuckerberg making the claim, no, they wrote about the Facebook CEO dissing Apple.
Now, what’s the Radically Transparent way to nip this in the bud? Make an …

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Image by lafalott via Flickr

The United Nations is tapping the power of social media to help raise awareness of the health issues surrounding malaria.  It’s forming a group of ‘social media envoys’  who are committed to blogging and tweeting about the UN’s anti-malaria initiatives and progress towards the goal of  providing all endemic African countries with malaria control interventions by the end of 2010.
“In our efforts to reach the Secretary-General’s 2010 goal of universal bed net coverage, and to reach the longer-term goal of near-zero deaths from …

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I was pretty disappointed that we didn’t manage to organise a Third Thursday meeting of the Isle of Man Social Media Club in October.  I’ve been off the Island a lot lately and @OwenC who is usually able to deputise for me, was slightly preoccupied with the arrival of his new twin daughter and son. So for one reason or another, it just didn’t happen.
But missing one meeting, although unfortunate, does not spell the death of Third Thursday.  In fact, we have a sponsor for November and right now I’m …

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Wow, time is racing by!  Next week 16 July is Third Thursday in the Isle of Man and that means that everyone is invited to drop in for lunch with the Social Media Club at Paparazzi on the Promenade in Douglas 12.30 to 14.00.
Anyone who is interested in Twitter, Facebook, blogging, podcasting or any online social web interaction should come along. It’s very casual. Everyone buys their own lunch and we discuss what we’re doing online, what’s new, what’s cool (what’s NOT cool), etc.
The idea is to share news and …

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Cmypitch.com is an online community site and marketplace for entrepreneurs.  It’s  divided into seven key channels: start-ups, SMEs, businesses For sale, franchises, business opportunities, Entrepreneur TV and the business directory with 60,000 listings of professional advisors, licensed from Thomson Directories.
The site also features blogs by subject experts which aim to provide advice, tips and guidance to help entrepreneurs succeed, and I’m delighted to have been invited to be a regular contributor.  Working with start-ups has always been some of the best fun I’ve had at work, so I’m really looking …

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We had a capacity crowd come out this week to the Isle of Man Social Media Club‘s Super Third Thursday get together.  The focus was on eDemocracy and how the interactive web is changing politics and democracy. Simon Collister, who hails from Ramsey, was our speaker and he gave us a fascinating insight into how the participatory web is rapidly overcoming barriers which made full participatory democracy, as opposed to the representative democracy we have currently, more viable as a political system.
Thirty-eight people attended (a record crowd!) and they had …