These are my links for May 18th through May 21st:
- How Starbucks Engages Millions of Facebook Fans – A massive high street international brand, Starbucks have also been extremely successful at adopting the social media space. In this video interview, their head of Digital Strategy talks about how they have a 'listen first' tactic, and make use of video and special offers to bring people into stores.
- Nestle learns its social media lesson the hard way – More examples of how social media is shortening the gap of opportunity, particularly for campaigners, to speed up direct action, in this case against environment-destroying suppliers. As one person notes in the comments, Nestle are lucky this didn't happen in the 80s during the powdered milk for Africa scandal. Another example of how individuals can use social media for collective action. The real lesson here for brands: get smarter, quicker. The campaigners (in this case Greenpeace) are many steps ahead of you.
- The top seven Facebook tools for publishers – A neat little summary of the main tools in your arsenal as a publisher/business website to connect your content and audiences with Facebook.
- Why I Steal Movies… Even Ones I’m In – Peter Serafinowicz – British comic Peter Serfaniowicz, one of the top Brits on Twitter, writes a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on Gizmodo about why, as a professional writer, actor and content producer, he still on occassion chooses to file-share. And it all comes back down to that old chestnut: convenience. Until the UK market place can accommodate for those with far-ranging tastes (he cites the bizarre example of how Jungle Book is unavailable on iTunes, and pop music promos have been locked down from embedding (i.e. sharing amongst fan sites). It's a brave post, and certainly reflect my own usage of legal and illegal sources of accessing content (in my case the vast amount of what I seek is unavailable commercially, because it doesn't make commercial sense to release obscure, historic film and music content). Until the legal market can provide 'better than free' access and service (without complex territorial restrictions) P2P remains the marketplace of choice for many media consumers.