There’s been a lot of talk recently about newspapers charging for online content. Famously, Rupert Murdoch of the News Corporation said that the newspapers under his command – which include the Times and the Sun in the UK – would move to pay-per-view formats. More recently, Johnston Press in the UK has begun charging readers to read their articles online.

Johnston Press is one of the largest newspaper firms in the UK, and publishes a wealth of local newspapers. Taking part in its pilot scheme are the Worksop Guardian, the Ripley & Heanor News, the Northumberland Gazette and the Whitby Gazette, and – in Scotland – the Carrick Gazette and the Southern Report. The Scotsman – another Johnston Press title – already has a pay-per-view model in place.

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The results of a survey of the cost of workers using social networking sites have been published, putting the figure at £1.34bn.

The report, commissioned by tech firm Morse, was covered in the Daily Telegraph in late October, and labels the use of these platforms as a “productivity black-hole”.

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I enjoy blogging. It’s a bit of a hobby – which is great, because I get to maintain this blog in my professional time. In my spare time, I write about whatever takes my fancy: everything from the fashion industry to the latest video games.

Getting your blog noticed on the internet is difficult. Large, well-known brands have a natural advantage in that people are already searching for them, but what can the rest of us do to put our words in front of the world?

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Many companies have jumped onto the Facebook application bandwagon. Most of these apps bomb and the ROI must surely be negative. However, there are some great apps out there. Here’s a case study about an app we found that ticks the right boxes.

On one of our intranets, we developed custom functionality to enable employees to rate feature articles. The client stipulated that ratings should appear itemised beside the article with each employee’s name.

However, there was the possibility that this would discourage members of the organisation from providing feedback, given news of soaring unemployment all over the world due to cutbacks.

The fear that all employees’ engagement is visible across the internal network potentially leads an employee to ask themselves “will my manager scrutinise my level of participation in my next appraisal?”

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Social Media is undeniably a powerful tool in the hands of patients, enabling them to give immediate feedback to doctors, pharmacists and marketers.

Patients are able to exchange vast amounts of information and insight into their conditions through a range of social media tools, providing valuable perspectives. For example, people who suffer from diabetes can engage with online communities and cover areas related to their condition, such as how successful their medication or glucose meters are. Discussions like these provide a support network for patients and allow healthcare providers to listen and engage with their target audiences.

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Social media. It is thought of by many companies as the domain of the clinically bored, and by many marketers as being actively dangerous towards the corporate image.

In the right or wrong hands, social media (that is, blogging and the use of social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) can be the difference between a company being accepted as cool and being a laughing stock. When marketers only use social media to throw out the company line, they quite often miss the point of the medium.

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More and more healthcare companies are building their presence on Twitter. Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Roche, Astra Zeneca, GE Healthcare and Boehringer Ingelheim are all tweeting and being tweeted at. Some companies are even using Twitter to promote specific branded treatments: Novo Nordisk call attention to their Novolog and Levemir diabetes treatments.

In spite of all the hype surrounding Twitter, it looks like these early adopters might be on to something. Whilst still small in comparison to Facebook, Twitter offers something unique: it attracts a lot of content creators and critics – the minority of people who actually create content on the internet as opposed to the majority who merely browse and consume content. These creators are the ones most likely to discuss your brand, either on Twitter itself or on other social networks, such as blogs, message boards, YouTube and so on. For companies, the benefit of Twitter is clear: it’s about seeding your message to the creators so that it finds its way all over the web. It’s all about PR.

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An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The bartender turns round and says, “Is this some kind of joke?”

I’m sorry: terrible gag. I don’t know any good jokes. However, love it or hate it, would you put it on your company website?

One of the hardest things to get right with online content is tone. A lot of content – both on intranets and the internet – is written in a formal ‘company’ voice, thick with information and respectability. More light-hearted styles of writing are often shunned for coming across as inappropriate.

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It’s been revealed that the White House hired a social marketing firm to distribute mass emails and unsolicited spam to sell President Obama’s health care plan. Millions of Americans received emails and read blogs, without realising they were reading well crafted marketing messages manipulating them to support the Government’s agendas, programs and legislations.

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