Digital Marketing & Communications

I only stared my MRes in October, yet the term is already over. The term is short (8 weeks in total), the lectures are intense but thoroughly enjoyable. I am learning to cram as much information as humanely possible in the short amount of time I have to study; my evenings are filled with shortlisting and annotating articles, and I work on my research at the weekend.

Being faced with a database for the first time in your life is a daunting process, especially as academic researchers do not necessarily use the same terminology as us, professionals, do. In the spirit of helping out future researchers in their endeavours, here are my 5 favourite, and most useful articles to date in the field of social media and consumer behaviour:

Matt Brittin, Google's vice president for Northern Europe, says Britain risks squandering its innovative heritage if it doesn't address the growing skills gap.

Imagine you knew you could write the best article of your life, but no one would ever read it. Would you bother?

I asked Dan Colarusso, Global Head of Programming of Thomson Reuters, this question over breakfast in New York’s West Village a week ago. If there’s anyone who understands content, it’s Dan – given his background in infusing content with passion for companies such as Bloomberg, CNBC, New York Post, as well as a host of others.

 ...n my current series on developing response strategies in crisis communications, I shared ten essential elements that your crisis response plan needs to include. One problem with many crisis plan “kits” is that tactics can be so template-oriented that they often fail to work smoothly in a crisis. When it comes to designing a social media policy that works for all operations including crisis management, the key ingredient is flexibility.

When Coca-Cola’s ad agencies ran out of ideas for a marketing brief, the company decided to turn to an online community to crowdsource some ideas.

It may not feel like it, but the computer revolution is only getting started. Having one PC or even multiple devices that are like supercomputers in our pocket isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning. The Age of Trillions is around the corner. Trillions of computing devices, communicating with each other and with us is a done deal.

Where content gets posted has always been incredibly important to Google. They have been using signals such as page rank to indicate the authority of a site for a while now. Websites that have built up authority and respect will get their content favoured in comparison to their less established competitors. As a result, any content that an established site produces will automatically get favoured and rank highly in the search results.

As of now, Google will be looking at an even better indicator of quality content- the authors themselves. Google patented something called ‘agent rank’ back in 2005 but didn’t do much with it; until recently. It has since developed into what we now know as authorship.