This contribution is by Mike Johns, President of Digital Mind State
Like Cavalier Poet Robert Herrick’s ode to the illicit, Farewell to Sack, America has a deep-seated love for our favourite forbidden fruit: cannabis.
This love affair between our creativity and psychic elevation continues to play out before our eyes in popular culture. Continue reading
Remember Flash Mobs, the post-Situationist ‘situations’ where interested people were mobilised over email and social networks to create an absurd happening?
In their day when there was more money about and everybody had time to have fun they had their place, but in the post-recession reality of 2012 they look like whimsies. Continue reading
By regular contributor Lloyd Gofton who tweets here
As a social species, we should expect our habits and actions on social networks to reflect our natural priorities as humans… as a species we crave companionship and like to feel part of a community.
Our instinct is to learn from each other and share our experiences with like-minded individuals. That habit has served us well, but at some point in our conversations and relationships the number of contacts we have has been given a higher value than the quality of the connection we have with those individuals, groups and brands. Continue reading
Melod.io, a mobile music messaging platform, has raised $300K to launch a service that lets users of social networks create and share personalised music and audio messages.
Using an onscreen slider, users can preview and download different music packs and search across genres for rhythms and vocal styles. They can create their own backing music using pre-loaded effects, loops and beats before recording their voice messages over the top of the backing track and sharing the track across social.
According to the company, social media users want to do more than send text-only communication because it doesn’t allow them to express themselves enough. It also suggest that music and audio messaging can be a new m-commerce platform that can lead to sell-through and retention. Time will tell… it might have a chance.
The service is available os a freemium no-ads model on the Apple iTunes Store and is ‘coming soon’ on the Google Play store for Android. The company will release a freemium version with ads and a premium model later this year.
Another week, another social media screw-up. When will brands and people ever learn? The social network is a public entity and has to be respected as much as any other channel that has an audience.
The list is endless of how companies treat social media as a place to show off about their brands, believing the world loves them as much as they love themselves. This is certainly not the case with many brands and boy is it easy to engage a ‘hater’ audience. Continue reading