Author Archives: Andrea Lawlor

Apple’s Human Cost

Posted on January 27, 2012 | 1 Comment

For those of you who haven’t heard, the tech giant was in some pretty hot water this week as a result of a scathing article in the New York Times that highlighted Apple’s involvement in deplorable worker conditions overseas. It’s lengthy, but worth a read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=1

I’ve seen quite a few Facebook posts regarding this article over the past couple of days so decided to dive into Sysomos to gather some insight into the Social Media impact. Surprisingly, mentions of the article/incident accounted for only 2% of Apple’s overall chatter. Pretty tiny. The only shift that could be seen was neutral/negative sentiment shifting from 45% to 66% vs. previous weeks.

What does this tell us? Well, when you’re a company as big as Apple, even major stories like this can be eclipsed by general product chatter and fanboy reviews. Goes to show (depending on the brand involved), not everything has the impact or share-ability we assume it will in social media

 

 

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Social Media & TV – The Golden Globes

Posted on January 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

Social Media and TV are a hot item right now. Rightly so, as more and more companies are cracking the code on how these two mediums relate from an insights point of view.

Check out companies like Networked Insights and Blufin Labs, wicked technology going on here.

As a fun exercise, let’s take a huge television event like last nights Golden Globes. A simple search using our social media tools shows the most talked about people or topics as it relates to this event. This is a quick and easy way to define the impact of a particular show and more specifically, who or what was causing the discussion. Pretty powerful stuff.

But I think the most important thing to note here is that Madonna and her gross arms didn’t even come remotely close to making the cut…I for one, am shocked.

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f8 fallout – what’s the deal with the new Facebook?

Posted on September 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

So you may have noticed that the Social Media community is up in arms lately around all of the changes Facebook has been making to their platform. Well I’ve got news for you, folks. There’s more coming. And it’s going to change the way we use Facebook, big time.

First up – Timeline. A complete overhaul of your Personal Profile, formatted as a scrapbook of your life on Facebook. Starting all the way from your birth date to now, Timeline will highlight everything you’ve done on the platform since you started using it. No longer will your Profile be stalked once by new friends and then forgotten, there’s enough content and visual appeal here to keep people coming back for more.

Check it out:

Last, but certainly not least is the Open Graph. In other words, the evolution of apps to become more social and lifestyle focused in general. Moving away from just game apps like Farmville and expanding into media social sharing via Netflix and Spotify.

It’s going to be a few months before we start to see these major changes but despite all of the grumbling, I think that Facebook is taking a huge step in the right direction when it comes to true social networking.

From a marketing perspective, it remains to be seen how these new changes will affect brands. One immediate observation is that as the users gain more control, brands will have to work much harder when it comes to content, which let’s be honest, is not such a bad thing. The power of the “like” becomes slightly downgraded while engagement & content take the front seat. It will be interesting to see how brands handle this shift in the coming months.

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