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, [...]

A major new survey of 50,000 people in 46 countries has found that in many emerging markets around the world, people are spending more time on social networking sites than on email. The startling result, is just one of many insightful conclusion in the report from British research firm TNS that can be viewed here: [...]

The consumer market is getting even more crowded as the big online giants try to expand their own footprints into new areas of the social networking landscape at a quickening pace.  Whether it’s social bookmarking, geotagging, following friends or looking for online music providers the distinctions between the services are becoming more blurred by the [...]

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 [...]

When Steve Jobs gave a rare press conference last week to defend Apple’s fourth generation iPhone, he specifically criticized what he said was the way the media had exaggerated problems with the smart phone’s antenna reception to attack the company he founded at the start of the digital era. To watch the event go to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]