Just as major retailers like Gap and Zara are heavily promoting their own social media services  on Facebook, new research questions if most consumers want to browse for clothes when they click onto a social network. A new survey from consumer research firm shoppercentric.com questions the merits of the social media strategy of some of [...]

The dramatic impact of social media services over traditional  Internet marketing techniques shows it eclipsing more established techniques like search engine optimisation and search engine marketing. The rapid ascent of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are well-known, but now it seems that they are not just accounting for more of the time that people spend online [...]

Every day new social media services are being announced or major improvements to existing platforms are unveiled as a wide variety of firms vie for the attention of global consumers. The intensity of competition to innovate and therefore to both capture and retain users gives an indication of the prizes on offer for all firms [...]

Facebook may have more than 700 million registered users, but many small firms are still sceptical about the benefits of social media services as a business tool, according to a new survey by RatePoint. The detailed responses demonstrate that, unlike consumers, small businesses are not convinced that social networking can help them reach customers. Instead, [...]

High street fashion chains have been much slower than other business sectors to embrace the Internet over the past decade, as they feared the online marketplace could cannibalise their brick and mortar presence, without adding value of its own. But this sentiment appears to be changing as the world’s largest fashion chain retailer, Zara, has [...]

Twitter doesn’t like to think of itself as a social media company like Faceook or LinkedIn but instead perceives itself as an information provider. In reality, it spans both sectors but risks falling in between unless it continues to evolve its own niche, something it’s attempting to do with an impending series of major changes. [...]

The human touch makes a dramatic difference when it comes to website visibility as social bookmarking is demonstrating to increasing effect. While algorithm based services like Google use ‘spiders’ to scour the Internet and rely on links and keywords as the way to rank pages, social bookmarking services put readers in control. Increasingly, Internet users [...]

Geotagging is about to come of age as both Twitter and Facebook introduce it, letting users physically locate friends and contacts which makes social media services more interactive than ever. Geotagging uses data from smartphones to pinpoint a user’s location. In existing services like FourSquare and Gowalla, it lets people ‘check-in’ to bars, restaurants or [...]

Apart from promoting themselves through CSR projects and other programmes, firms need to need to monitor their firm’s brand identity using smart programmes like Jungletorch.com. It aggregates comments and makes it easier to monitor the general sentiment towards a company – imagine the kind of feedback BP would be getting at the moment with regards [...]

The key way to publicise efforts at HR ‘employer  branding’ are through social media marketing strategies that generate positive goodwill. “Studies have shown that all things being equal, employees will choose to work for companies with a strong corporate social responsibility programme ­– they want to be proud of where they work,” said Jeff Hicks, [...]

Once upon a time, like in the post-War era depicted by the Mad Men TV series, clever people in marketing departments or an elegant advertising agency spent their time dreaming up catchy ways to lure consumers to their products. They created demand for things people never knew they wanted, they sliced up the market and [...]

There’s a vast and confusing array of social media services out there, from Twitter and Tumblr to Bebo and blogs. But there’s no point trying to focus on all of them, or your social media marketing won’t concentrate on anything. That’s where Optimize Interactive can help with all youronline communications. We follow the rise and [...]

A top Facebook executive predicted this week that email will soon go the way of the handwritten personal letter – it will become a rarity. The bold assessment from Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg argued that while people of her generation use email constantly, the next generation has already discarded it for social networking sites and [...]