As a near-constant social media user it’s interesting watching the gradual shift to an increasingly connected lifestyle. We’ve clearly passed a tipping point in terms of how willing people are to openly share their personal lives online, be it their holiday snaps, favourite restaurants or even the minutia of their daily lives.
For the purposes of Social CRM though, we’re only just crossing over the edge of the New Frontier as people begin to wonder just how comfortable they really are letting companies get involved with their online lives.
Thus far the majority of web users have happily come to accept how services such as Amazon and iTunes are able to track their usage in order to not only tell them about other products they might enjoy but also what other users with similar tastes are purchasing.
Watching the crowds at Heathrow and St Pancras waiting for planes and trains respectively got me thinking about the way brands communicate when there’s something wrong. In each case, the news was filled with disgruntled passengers bad mouthing their chosen travel companies, frequently because of the lack of information that they had been given.
Over the last week, we've been collecting and curating significant digital 'Things' of 2010 through our website, and all your favourite social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter). These 'things' were events, moments, launches, or technical developments within the Digital sector.
We received a fair few responses, and in no particular order, these our top 5 responses:
Social Media Week London currently has 40 confirmed events over the week (7-11th Feb 2011), but we’re still looking for more.
Rome have 70 confirmed events and New York are aiming for 125! Let’s not be beaten by the Americans or the Italians, let’s make London the best on both quantity and quality!
According to Econsultancy’s latest Social Media and Online PR Report, 76% of companies don’t have an ROI figure for their social media spend.
This means that – shockingly – fewer than 1 in 4 companies actually know when their social media activities have been worth the money they’ve spent on them. Even more amazingly, only 7% of firms actively integrate their television and radio campaigns with their social media activities.
Q: What happens when you let an intern loose with 10m lines of data and some processing power?
A: In the case of Paul Butler an intern with Facebook's data infrastructure engineering team, something rather special.
There’s no question that when it comes to Social CRM and accurately measuring the success of all your online activities some metrics are essential and some are entirely misleading.
It can be hard sometimes trying to explain this to clients whose starting point is that they want to get 100,000 fans on Facebook or 50,000 video views on YouTube, without having thought through what these numbers really mean and how valuable these “followers” are. If you get too focused on these numbers you can end up following the “stupid metrics”.
Expanding a business into a new country can be daunting. As we've discovered across the Digital Mission events understanding the market is critical, even when there's a (mostly) shared language like the US.
At first sight, the Indian market looks daunting, the numbers are mind-boggling, as is the pace of change. That's before figuring out how to tackle the business culture.
Step in UK Trade & Investment's London team, they've just announced a Marketing Strategy Scholarship with S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai. It looks like a fantastic opportunity to tap the brains of India's leading marketers in a five-day intensive course at their campus in Mumbai followed by executive placements at Indian companies.
As the year draws to a chilly close, we were wondering what your most significant thing of 2010 would be? Just one!
Your thing could be an event, a moment, a launch or a technical development in the Digital sector that occurred during 2010.
This mini-interview is with Matthew Scherba from 
