Market Sentinel

London Thames Gateway - a tough comms job

MarkRogers — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:57:15 +0000

According to a round-robin email from PR Week Patrick Edwards has just taken the job of comms director the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation here in the UK. These guys have their work cut out. The Thames Gateway is the term used by politicians to define the geographic area either side of the [...]

FA Cup tie, interrupted

site admin — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:11:44 +0000

Last night’s FA Cup 4th game between Everton and Liverpool provided a powerful glimpse of how television is out of step with its audience. The game was a replay after a draw at Anfield. It was long game - not pretty - and after 90 minutes there had been no goals. The [...]

Open letter to Virgin Boss Branson about inflight food

site admin — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:05:30 +0000

The Guardian highlights an eloquent (and extremely funny) critique of Virgin’s inflight food. The letter already has 333 links according to Google. The famously media-savvy Virgin boss is said to be taking it in hand.

Does the techy agency exist?

site admin — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 07:33:25 +0000

We spent a lot of the summer visiting the senior executives at major agencies, talking about the world, figuring out what we could offer them and what they could offer us. It was an interesting experience because the overwhelming sense we got was that the communications world was on the cusp of a big [...]

Dell tweets bargains

site admin — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 06:55:45 +0000

Charles Cooper on CNet points at Dell’s neat use of Twitter to spread the word about bargains.

Blagojevich’s circle

site admin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:24:38 +0000

The New York Times has an interesting network map (an ego-net) featuring the disgraced Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois politician charged with hawking President-elect Obama’s Senate seat. It is interesting how much of the doubtful behaviour complained of apparently happened via the Governor’s proxies.

Measuring social media (4)

MarkRogers — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:55:47 +0000

Paul Fabretti of Manchester-based digital social media agency KMP and recorded a podcast yesterday about methodologies for measuring the ROI on social media marketing. Facebook Connect loomed large in our conversation as did the differing requirements of clients from a marketing or a corp comms background. The podcast is here (24mb; about 25 [...]

Tracking reality TV in social media

Leon — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:31:48 +0000

On E-consultancy.com I examined the potential for TV programme makers to use social media as an tool to monitor viewer opinion.

See the article here.

By Leon Bailey-Green.

Motrin disses baby slings in viral ad, sparks outrage

site admin — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:12:29 +0000

Motrin is a US pain killer. They have posted a video ad on YouTube from the perspective of a Mom who resents having to carry a heavy infant and is looking for pain medication to cure her back problem. (Why doesn’t she just stop carrying the baby, you may ask.) This is [...]

Martha Lane Fox advises online to survive “global crisis”

Leon — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:21:37 +0000

Unable to get away from headlines of an economic crisis, who better to make sense of how to manage fiscal change than the woman at the helm of a company who survived the stock market crash of 2001?

Promoting entrepreneurialism for Enterprise Week Lastminute.com’s Martha Lane Fox told the BBC that online is key to the [...]

Social media in US Financial services

MarkRogers — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:57:06 +0000

Bob’s Guide points at a new report from Corporate Insight looking at how the Financial Services sector is adopting social media.

Here is a précis of Bob’s summary:

The brokers: OptionsXpress, Scottrade, Vanguard, Wells Fargo and Zecco have YouTube commercials based on their web offer, E*Trade reruns their TV commercials. TradeKing (10,700+ participants) and [...]

Obama’s strategy: use the Internet to tap the grass roots

MarkRogers — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:34:06 +0000

Hearty congratulations to Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States. The big difference between Obama and first Senator Clinton his Democratic rival and then Senator McCain his Republican rival lay in his power to motivate grass roots support and then harness it using the internet. Whilst his competitors relied on paid [...]

Measuring social media (3) - podcast interview with David Armano

MarkRogers — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:10:13 +0000

David Armano of Critical Mass, author of an excellent blog on social media - what he calls micro interactions - gives us his perspective in a podcast interview (10 mins) on ways to measure in social media, and how to judge ROI.

(P.S. Because I couldn’t figure out how to work the CallBurner software [...]

Measuring social media (2)

MarkRogers — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:13:05 +0000

To get a better understanding of what constitutes best practice in social media measurement and evaluation, we thought the simplest thing to do was to “eat our own dog food” and use our own social media measurement tools to determine who had influence on the topic of “social media measurement” and then look in detail [...]

ROI on social media - Wispa

MarkRogers — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 05:37:58 +0000

Well, here is a concrete example of the return on investment from monitoring and responding to social media. Last year our client Cadbury relaunched the Wispa bar in response to a campaign for its reintroduction, advised by us. Their UK sales are up 11% over the quarter, global sales up 6%. [...]

Media (and buzz) moves online

MarkRogers — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:07:52 +0000

The huge success of Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live parodies of Sarah Palin (see above) has pointed up something the TV networks increasingly see as a great new opportunity. Great TV is finding a big part of its audience online. Fey’s hilarious (and kind of affectionate) Palin impersonation in the VP debate parody [...]

Measuring social media

MarkRogers — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:33:07 +0000

How do you build brands post-Google?

As the recession begins to bite, brands are finding that getting through to customers is tougher than ever.

Offline advertising is showing diminishing returns. McKinsey predicts that by 2010, traditional television advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.

This is partly because online media is growing [...]

Market Sentinel joins Digital Mission to New York

MarkRogers — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 12:25:46 +0000

Market Sentinel were lucky enough to be selected to take part in the UK department of Trade’s “Digital Mission” to New York’s Web 2.0 exhibition. We will be in New York throughout the coming week 14-19th September, contactable via Crowdvine or on the normal email addresses.

Next generation social marketing (Podcast)

MarkRogers — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:09:44 +0000

Mark Rogers recently did a podcast for the company Knexus looking at the next generation of social marketing. We looked at how to do social marketing using case studies from Cadbury, Sony, Avis and H&R Block, and assessed how to measure the results. Here is the deck to accompany the podcast.

UK PR company “bans Facebook”

MarkRogers — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:09:16 +0000

Today I interviewed a job applicant who had recently completed a stint at a well-known financial public relations company. I asked whether she had used any tools to understand online conversations. To my astonishment she said that not only was this not the case, but that the PR company in question actually banned [...]