Category Archives: Uncategorized

In an interesting and wide ranging post,  Chris Arnold, talks about the emergence of grassroots campaigning groups as a threat to traditional charitable institutions.  He suggests that “there is some evidence that issue websites are gaining more followers than traditional charity sites in the States.”
We shouldn’t be surprised by this trend.  Charities, like every other [...]

When we wrote the book, we described the emergence of Mumsnet as a typical expression of web-enabled consumer empowerment, but we could not have envisaged how powerful this organisation would become.  Although dismissed by Guardian columnist, Lauri Penny, as “the faux-feminist family values brigade”, there appears to be no stopping this group of evangelical mums.  From [...]

I have described ASDA’s democratic consumerism initiative as one of the first mainstream applications of crowd surfing principles.  When a business such as ASDA starts preaching the virtues of openness and collaboration – and then acting on those principles – you know we are dealing with a truly significant business trend and not simply a social media [...]

Good write-up of the Nestle v Greenpeace story in Communicate magazine, which underlines some critical points for any corporate handling a social media-driven issue:

Blocking or deleting content you don’t like is invariably counter-productive, no matter what the lawyers say … people will still find the content & it makes you look even more devious
The tone you [...]

When a company reverts to an original product formulation within a year of unveiling a new recipe, you know that someone, somewhere has messed-up big time.  Last April, Gaymers  decided to reduce the alcohol content of its Blackthorn cider, unleashing the Wankthorn protest across the West Country … Facebook groups were formed, posters defaced and bearded men [...]