business & innovation

At the recent Youth Marketing Strategy summit in London (Chinwag was a media partner - thanks Chinwag) I previewed some interesting new findings from our newly-published Youth Insight Report. These findings were based on research in April and May looking at the aspirations, attitudes and habits of UK 16-24s. We received around 1,700 responses to our survey.

These insights were broad, so here for the benefit of digital-biased marketers I've pulled out six fresh stats that relate only to digital...

Understanding why people behave the way they do, and designing interventions and communications to elicit new, more positive behaviours is an established discipline - but using social media as part of the mix is relatively new.

I’m convinced it has the potential to be hugely effective, because our behaviour is often defined by our interpersonal relationships and our perception of social norms - both things that are an inherent part of the social web.

From a research perspective, the massive volume of personal and conversation data we publish to the web everyday also gives us a gold mine of information that can help us understand individual’s online behaviours and attitudes - more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional research methods.

A failure of leaders to adapt to social media is the main barrier organisations face in embracing social media. This is the message of a research project - The Social Media Garden, a digital era research study about social technologies at work.

There is already a mounting body of research on the use of social media in organisations. However, none of these studies have been conducted using social media methodologies. Pioneering collaborative technology was used to create The Social Media Garden. It is, in itself, a demonstration of how social technologies are changing the way we engage in conversations and exchange knowledge about our opinions, experiences and ideas. 

Unilever and Silverman Research conducted the project (which ran Feb - Apr '12 with approx 650 participants) to provide insight to people who are developing, or expanding, the use of social media in organisations.

In this guest post, Martin Belam, the man behind The Guardian Facebook App, explains the thinking behind the app and where he sees it leading both media companies and brands.

Last September, Facebook promised to forever change the face of sharing on the web, with the launch of new features of the Open Graph allowing apps to automatically share a users actions. Reception, it would be fair to say, was mixed. For publishers it presented an opportunity to vastly increase traffic and reach, whilst for some people it “ruined” sharing. Nine months on, what does the picture look like?

With two weeks left to go 'til Facebook Marketing Conference (18th Jul, ICO Conference Centre, London) we're very pleased to announce more amazing speakers joining our line-up from the likes of Cadbury Dairy Milk, Manchester City FC, TBG Digital, GlobalWebIndex and We Are Social.

That's in addition to our already super line-up: we'll be hearing from Nokia, BBC Worldwide, Yorkshire Tea and more! Find out more about our new speakers below.

There are a few tickets remaining, which you can get your hands on for only £145 + VAT. Check out the Facebook Marketing Bootcamp (17th July) for hands on training the day before the conference and if you fancy coming along to both the Facebook Marketing Bootcamp and Conference, grab a combo ticket for just £395 + VAT. Book your place now!

As you know, here at Chinwag, we love a good infographic. And we've all noticed how social media - particularly Twitter - is changing the way we watch, engage and interact with sports.

Euro 2012 set a new Twitter record, with 15,358 tweets per second during the Spain vs Italy final, as we know, Spain won - but it appears that they also won in terms of tweetage (that's a word in the Chinwag dictionary), as shown by the below infographic put together by sports website, thescore.com with Twitter data from Sysomos.