Personal branding is so powerful these days, gaining media attention and influencing peoples purchasing decisions within a heart beat. The recent news of  David Beckham rupturing his achilles tendon and not playing in the world cup highlighted to me the power of the personal brand. Have a quick watch and hit me up with your thoughts below:

There has been quite a bit of hype since the new Windows 7 operating system was released a few weeks back, as there was about windows vista when that came out, as there was when Windows XP was released!

Talk about clever marketing! I LOVE the edgy approach Mac has taken in tackling it’s competitor head on! This short ad is a real giggle and cuts right to the core. Could MAC be one of the only companies to get away with edgy marketing like this?? Your thoughts guys?

I am a BIG lover of the Ford brand. What they are doing on the social media space simply raises my heart rate above 100BPM!!! While GM and Chrysler are following a more traditional brand voice, Ford are truly reaping the rewards through their social media strategy.

Recently, Scott Monty (head of social media for Ford Motor Company @Ford) gave a talk on social media marketing at OMMA Global New York.

Scott and his team have really taken onboard all the human aspects that assist a social media strategy to propel forwards, injecting this into the big brand. Quite simply put, they have seized as many opportunities out there on the web to engage and interact. The difference being that real, passionate people interact with you as opposed to auto responders and plain speak marketing messages.

Soak up the presentation Scott gave at the end of this post, I trust it will get your brain stems tingerling!

The presentation is jam packed full of Fords Social Media experience. The strategy is extremely simple and focused on making the company human – the key on this space. They have executed it with passion and creativity – the two hot ingredients when releasing a social media strategy, and haven’t they done well!

It runs through some of Fords best Social Media campaigns. It also highlights that the strategy is only 1 element, you need to bring the strategy to life by engaging and interacting with your customers, adding value all the time.

Due to Fords authentic, real marketing and community building efforts through social media, they have also gained some hefty media attention in traditional media avenues. TV and print are now lapping up Fords social media efforts, assisting them to release a powerful story to share offline – this is a win win for Ford, building the brand to an all time high.

So come on then, am I the only on raving on about this wonder brand? What have you got to say?

Social media marketing is hotter than the sun right now. Big brands, companies and businesses are all playing or coming to play! Why? Because it works. Watch out! This space is going to get noisier by the second,  so you really need to cut through the noise with your campaigns and marketing strategy more than ever.

I always share what we soak up at Let’s Refresh and Thinktank Media, so here’s a report that’s a must read for anyone embracing or wanting to embrace this power space.

It’s juicy and covers the topical question “what is social influence in marketing”.

Here’s a breakdown of what you will fill up on when you stop by and fuel up!

• Research insights
• Measuring social influence marketing
• The future of social influence marketing
• Can social ads do better than display ads? (Chris Bowler)
• Viral marketing through social media (Greg Pomaro)
• Social groups (Andrea Harrison)
• Customer relationship management – social media (David Baker)
• 10 ways to make the twittersphere work for your brand (Diana Stepner)

Razorfish have released this report, yet another piece of gold from them!

You can hop along to the report here

Then pop back and let us know your thoughts!

This Web2.0 space is bursting with growth and it’s only ever increasing. The numbers below highlight to all businesses how much opportunity is out there on the web right now! Stop crying and start working harder in this space! 2009 for small business owners has never been so great! 

Hold onto your hats and fasten your seat belts!

Internet

1,596,270,108 people are actively using the internet (Internet Usage and World Population Statistics are for March 31, 2009)

Google

 1 trillion URL’s are indexed on Google –  Source 

Here is how Google grew in terms of number of indexed URLs :

1998 : 26,000,000 (26 million web pages)
2000 : 1,000,000,000 (1 Billion web pages)
2008 : 1,000,000,000,000 (1 Trillion web pages)

Google has done 2 billion searches a day, or about 700 billion a year Source

Top 100 google hot trends - http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Blogs

133,000,000 - is the number of blogs Technorati has indexed since 2002

A new blog is created every second, totalling 80,000 new blogs every day. 

900,000 blog posts are created daily

Blogging grew 68% in 2008

346 million people worldwide read blogs

77% of active web users read blogs

The average blogger in the US:

• 51% male 
• Aged 35+ (58%)
• Aged 18-34 (42%)
• College educated, 74%   Source

Twitter

Number of tweets as of right now! - 1,691,543, 819 - ( click here for an up to the minute count)

At the start of 2008 Twitter had only around 500,000 monthly visitors

Growth rate for Twitter was 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December 2008  Source

Twitter.com is a top 500 site that reaches over 4.1 million U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more educated, slightly more female than male, young adult audience. Quantcast, March

Twitter is receiving 8million unique visitors in the month of March 2009.Compete (via Nick) March 10

 Melbourne’s top 100 twitter users

Facebook

• More than 200 million active users

• More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day

• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college

• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

• More than 20 million users update their statuses at least once each day

• More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

• There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

• http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

• Inside Facebook says: “the number of Americans over 35, 45, and 55 on Facebook is growing fast. In the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled. Developers and marketers may want to think about how to serve this group of new users.” Inside Facebook, March

• “Women over 55 remain the fastest growing group, and growth among the teen and college-age set has been relatively paltry. In absolute numbers there are now even slightly more members between the ages of 45 and 65 than there are 13-to 17-year-olds.” Wired Magazine, March.

YouTube

You tube nears 5 billion views Source

 Average internet users watch 2 YouTube videos a day

The average video length, according to comScore.com, was 2.7 minutes.

YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. 

One of the most watched videos on youtube in 2009 – set to break youtube records! 

This illustrates how web clips are mixing with TV shows and bringing in a bigger audience. 

Mobile usage

63 million on mobile internet daily

Significant growth in the numbers of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones vs. a year ago. The company says that today there are just over 63 million mobile web users in the US and 35 percent of them are online via their handset daily. Source.

I trust your mind had been sparking off like a new years eve fireworks show! Here are the numbers, now where are you seeing the opportunities within your own business?