Category Archives: Uncategorized

Citizen Powered Question Time

By Martin | February 1, 2011

The Coalition government’s efforts to involve the electorate in helping to shape policy and spending decisions – what David Cameron describes as the ‘largest public engagement project ever launched by the British Government’ – closely follows a template created by Barack Obama.  For the second year running, Obama has appeared on YouTube in a live [...]

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The Year of Slacktivism and Hacktivism

By Martin | December 18, 2010

This has been the year in which the words ‘slacktivism’ and ‘hacktivism’ made it into the collective dictionary.    In the eyes of many political and social campaigners, what often passes for protest in the digital world – signing an online petition or changing your profile picture on Facebook to demonstrate your support for a [...]

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Introducing Loose

By Martin | December 9, 2010

The core argument in my new book is that all institutions need to adopt a looser approach to the way that they operate if they are to survive and thrive in our highly complex world. Agility, flexibility and the ability to improvise will become the defining characteristics of successful businesses, whilst those institutions that rely [...]

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Popular Subversion and the Christmas No. 1

By Martin | November 18, 2010

The battle for the number one spot in the Christmas music charts has become a very public platform for popular subversion. The campaign that took Rage Against the Machine to the top of last year’s Christmas charts – beating X-Factor winner Joe McElderry - was described by one music retailer as “the greatest chart upset ever.” [...]

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Why The Tea Party revels in its lack of organisation

By Martin | November 8, 2010

They may come across as a bizarre collection of cranks and extremists, but the emergence of The Team Party movement has important implications for students of consumer behaviour. It started in early 2009 as a largely spontaneous, grassroots protest against the US government’s $787 billion economic stimulus package and Obama’s healthcare plans. Despite its name, [...]

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Gap in search of backbone

By Martin | October 8, 2010

In an all to typical example of how corporations lose their backbone in the face of a social media-based protest, Gap has asked people to suggest new designs for its logo, only a week after unveiling a new corporate identity. Having no doubt spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing and researching the new logo [...]

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Managing the Community

By Martin | October 6, 2010

Two great examples of how to build online communities were presented at yesterday’s Social Media Academy B-B Conference.  RS Components, working in collaboration with the team at FreshNetworks, has built a community of over 17,000 electronics design engineers from 139 countries in only three months.  The DesignSpark community provides the engineers with free software tools (many [...]

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Dell Revisited

By Martin | October 1, 2010

Sometimes  it pays to revisit the more well-thumbed case studies to establish whether the companies involved have been able to achieve sustainable success.  Dell featured prominently in Crowd Surfing as we charted its recovery from Dell Hell to the epitome of the new model corporation.   I am currently chairing a series of conferences for Social Media Academy [...]

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We’re all lawyers now

By Martin | July 1, 2010

When I was at university, the law students were the ones burning the midnight oil in the library and even after they graduated, they had to go through years of Law School before they could be let loose on the statute book.  It now appears that they wasted their time, because the cuddly Coalition now running [...]

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Amplifying the volume of moaning

By Martin | June 28, 2010

Interesting post from Ben Bold describing P&G’s frustration with the way that social media appeared to exagerate customer complaints about the latest Pampers product.  When looked at from a positive perspective, social media is ‘word of mouth of steroids’, but, as P&G has discovered, it can also ’amplify the volume of moaning.’  To paraphrase the old tree falling [...]

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