Does your audience really need another social network?On Facebook alone, you can wish a friend “happy birthday,” post photos, share a Spotify playlist, and even send beheadings (yes, really). From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, the major social media platforms we already use really don’t leave anything -- or anyone -- out, and that’s the problem.Your audience doesn’t need another big social network to compete with Facebook, but there is room for smaller niche networks to provide a way ...

Great relationships are like Russian Matryoshka Dolls. They are a series of partnerships within partnerships - between client and agency, between agencies, and even between departments within the client's own business.These partnerships are all vital because they ultimately facilitate the most important partnership of all -- the one between your customer and your brand.Based on my 20 years of experience, here are 10 simple principles that can help you transform a rickety client/agency relationship into an unbreakable one:1. A value ...

The best compliment I can give Sony's SmartWatch 2 is that it works. I still believe that wearable devices are in their infancy, and the SmartWatch 2 is proof of this. While it's filled with great ideas, a readable screen and actually looks like a fairly cool watch, the SmartWatch 2 is still more a novelty than an essential gadget buy.Here's the question you'll be asking yourself: "Why do I need a smartwatch when everything I need is right on ...

Ever left staring into the depths of your grocery cupboard wondering what on earth you can chuck in a pan or pot for your next meal? Well, a clever food fundi from the Netherlands has some suggestions for you -- and he'll give you the recipe on Instagram.By filming a cooking show in 15 seconds or less, Bart van Olphen has embraced the challenge presented by rapid fire social video and turned it into a popular Instagram account, which ...

Forget any suggestions of retrenchments and screw anyone who thinks forking to Android would be a good idea. That seems to be the message coming from Microsoft, following the announcement of a series of updates to Windows Phone and Windows 8.x.At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company underlined how much Windows Phone in particular has grown over the past year, before explaining how the Windows platform will evolve over the coming months.On the hardware side, said Microsoft's ...

There’s even more focus on messaging apps after Facebook’s buy-out of WhatsApp. The acquisition has also highlighted the many strong alternatives that there are to WhatsApp, especially across Asia, such as Line, Viber, KakaoTalk, and WeChat, who collectively have over a billion registered users.Some Asian nations have homegrown challengers as well. In India there’s Hike app. It launched in September 2012. Kavin Mittal, from the Bharti Softbank incubator that runs Hike, tells us that Hike has now grown to 15 ...

Seven March sees the second Rewire London hosted at the Google Campus in the heart of the UK capital's Tech City and it promises to be more of an energetic versus a chair breaking affair. Beyond the interactive talks are peppered the unusual (but helpful) nuggets such as a public speaking workshop. But this is what we know... the fun about Rewire London is that most of it materialises on the day.To describe Rewire London as a simple ...

Naspers CEO Koos Bekker is stepping down, the emerging markets media and internet giant today revealed.In an official press release posted to the company's website, Naspers says that Bekker will step down from the Naspers board for a year before taking over from Ton Vosloo as chairman in 2015.Bekker, who is largely responsible for turning Naspers from an exclusively print and broadcast player into an emerging markets internet powerhouse, will be replaced by Bob van Dijk.Currently Naspers' ...

Has it ever pained you that your favourite toilet paper brand doesn't have a Facebook page? Does it annoy you that your breakfast cereal doesn't tweet? No? Me neither.There are many good reasons to be on social media: to advertise specials and promotions, to use it as a sentiment indicator and to give your users an easier way to complain or compliment the brand. But does this really mean that all brands should be invading our news feeds and tweet ...

In the fourth of her series of articles on business archetypes everyone needs to start paying attention to over the next few years, Megan Bernstein looks at the "archaeologist". As holistic branding agency ITI notes, the archaeologist is pretty much the antithesis to the kind of tech-obsessed kind of person that increasingly populates contemporary businesses. That doesn't make them dinosaurs though: their knowledge of things that worked in the past means they can help adapt them for use in the ...