Suzanne Stokes is the brand new Social Media/Social CRM Brand Manager at MWEB. Her role is to manage MWEB’s social interactions within their active Social Media spaces ie: Facebook and Twitter and ensure that all Social CRM tactics are incorporated in their approach to customers.

The creative minds at sporting giants, Adidas, have made a fantastic application for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The app, known as “Adidas Matchups” pairs two significant footballers (mainly strikers) against each other. The idea is to select your ideal player and predict all the scenarios that will happen thereafter.

Young consumers are a notoriously elusive target demographic. This is because of the broad ranges of age groups and life stages that encompass the youth category (12 – 34 years old), the keen eye with which they judge the credibility of marketing messages and a difficulty in reaching them with a marketing message in the first place. The flip side of the coin is that the youth have significant buying power, are influential on the buying decisions ...

Social Media isn’t just about how many followers or fans you have. It’s about the community and relationships built with your customers. In this world of community and relationship-building, Facebook is the new black. It is one of the largest Social Media platforms on the Web and its functionality is perfectly geared towards community building and sharing.

It isn’t often that an online store gets featured in our illustrious “site of note” series. The simple reason for this is that most online stores are mind-numbingly boring. If you have seen one, then you have seen them all. The grid-based layout of product thumbnails and short descriptions, the add-to-basket buttons, the cart-summary in the sidebar, the customer reviews, etc. You can’t really blame the developers of ecommerce platforms for their lack of creativity in the presentation of product catalogues. The main aim here is to foster trust and to simplify the process of placing orders for products as much as possible. Not the easiest task in the digital realm, I can assure you. Therefore it is a welcome breath of fresh air when someone breaks the mold with a new approach to online shopping. Levi's has created a lot of chatter with their new “Friends Store” and how they have integrated the newly launched Facebook "like" functionality into their online shopping experience.

The growth of Social Media is often discussed in terms of the potential it provides human interaction and marketing. The point here is that it connects people in increasingly useful ways. The recruitment industry is benefiting from this as well, evident in the recruiter’s search for talent.

Some of you may already know that last week Quirk launched a new short course in Applying Social Media to Business Challenges. The course aims to teach students how various Social Media tools and platforms can be used to interact with your consumers and build strong brand-consumer relationships.

Most people take their privacy quite seriously – I know I do. In fact, it’s of such great concern to me that I’m writing this post under a pseudonym and passing off some photo I found on a dodgy singles site as my profile picture. Considering how paranoid many of us are then, it’s ironic that since December millions of Facebook users across the globe have been unwittingly sharing their status updates, interests and activities with anyone who cares to search for them.

Twories – Telling stories with Twitter Yup, I just made that word up. It’s a portmanteau (not a word I made up) for Twitter Stories (I also like Tweries, Twoap opera or Twitcom). But let’s put the issue of naming things aside for now. Why should you care about so-called Twories? Because it’s slowly but surely making it’s way into your Twitter stream and often for marketing purposes (which is why I like it – of course). It seems rather obvious that a medium for large scale conversation would be ideal for telling stories, and the blurred line between advertising and entertainment has been nothing new for ages – especially not when it comes to online. You’ve probably heard of the MadMen tweets but wait there’s more and if you haven’t been following any of them, here’s a break down of what you’ve been missing:

There are Social Media tools out there to help you re-connect with your friends, find people with similar interests and ones to connect you to your professional peers. There are Social Media tools to help you communicate short messages and ones especially for longer ones. There are tools for building networks and others to help you find a date. Basically, in one form or another, the Social Media tools available to you can do pretty much anything short of making you a sandwich. And it’s only a matter of time before that’s possible.