Mark Cameron

Advances in technology – including cloud computing, Software as a Service and the next generation of CRMs – are all changing the landscape for sporting organisations. However, the primary influence on sport’s digital future is not – strictly speaking – technology-based. Social media, and the ways organisations and their stakeholders are using it, are redefining what it means to interact with a community. So, how is the digital landscape changing and what future does it hold for Australian sport?

Many companies have been adopting an approach to social media based on an assumption that it is ‘free’. They have set up accounts and hoped it will work. It won’t. Hope is not a strategy, and social media takes time to get right – so it can’t be free. So let’s walk through the basic steps.

The web is no longer a digital version of print. It is the space where conversation is facilitated. Websites are becoming applications that feed information out to various social-based platforms. This means that most brands need to start thinking about their website as a database that organises and distributes information and features to specific groups within the world of social media.

This is not a story about Twitter being used to influence an election or kick-start a sit-com. This is a story about using Twitter commercially. Retail giant Best Buy has moved social media intelligence and online engagement toward the core of its marketing strategy. But one of its latest moves pushes that philosophy even further. It's called Twelpforce, and it appears to be a bold and brilliant move.

It seems as if every company is now looking to social media as a marketing panacea for the woes of the GFC. In this three-part series, Mark Cameron takes a close look at the social media landscape, describes some of the 'platforms', examines how these are changing the market place and outlines a strategic framework for deploying social media as a branding, marketing, PR and intelligence tool.

Perhaps the biggest misconception about social media is that it creates market segments from nothing.

Companies can no longer hide behind the “official company line” or rely simply on media spend to influence the public’s thinking on any given subject. Take the recent tempest caused by on-air remarks made by conservative US television commentator Glenn Back when he called Obama “a racist”. Ignore social network-driven campaigns at your peril.

With a simple change in policy and little additional investment, MySpace would no longer be the place where people simply try and get famous enough to make it to TV or newspapers. It could become the destination. Mark Cameron thinks he knows how to save MySpace from terminal decline.

Unless you are Osama bin Laden’s roommate, you'll know that 2009 is the year Twitter took off. It has grown by over 1,000 percent and the phrase "tweet it" has become part of the popular lexicon. While many people still "don't get it", it has become incredibly powerful. How did this happen?

Brand leadership through social media Not so long ago, the relationship that brands had with their customers was a one-way street. The brand was the...

Historically, the marketing budget is the first to get cut back when companies feel the squeeze. As Darwinian principles take effect, the unprepared marketer...

The people at the pointy end of the internet pecking order are already talking about and planning the Semantic Web - or Web 3.0 - which is meant to help us make sense of all of this data. So what is Web 3.0 and what does it have to do with Twitter? To explain, let's start back a few years...

Social networks are fundamentally reshaping the newspaper and TV industries worldwide. In an earlier article, "What the newspaper industry needs to do to survive", I explained the changing dynamics of the newspaper industry. In this article I look at where TV is headed.

Frankly, it sounds like newspapers are struggling to understand the opportunities and rules that govern the online world. There is a whole generation that has grown up with the concept of freemium economics. Try to charge them for something they have always had for free and you’ll lose them altogether. They need to remember that their main customers are advertisers.