Louis Halpern's View

Exploring the impact of the digital world and reputation managment

Category Archives: What’s on my mind

iphone fun stats

I’ve been researching statistics about the iPhone for a presentation I’m doing tomorrow and thought I’d share the following:

- average total number of unit sales for apps is 101,024 copies

- 1m UK iPhone Units passed on 27 Feb 2009

- 7% of users have only free apps

- 38% of iphone app purchases are in the entertainment category

If anybody has any similar statistics please share with me….

I’ll add sources in due course.

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Labour landslide in the celebrity con-twit-uency

With the final live debate days away, Labour is leading the race when it comes to celebrity endorsements on Twitter. With a combined reach of 1,760,608 users, Labour has harnessed by far the most celebrity endorsement influence on Twitter. With only 27m voting in 2005, this influence is likely to give the party a significant boost when the country goes to the polls on 6 May.

The Liberal Democrats came a distant second to Labour with a celebrity reach of 74,121 Twitter-users, followed by the Green Party on 18,366, and the Conservatives on 11,138. Political campaigner and stand-up comedian Mark Thomas, who is using his Twitter feed to support Bristol independent Danny Kushlick, for whom he has written/compiled a manifesto,

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Circular Halo in St Lucia

At lunch time today at The Body Holiday (the amazing St Lucia Spa Fitness & Wellness Vacation / Holiday destination) Andrew, Craig and I witnessed a High Sun Parhelic circle alternatively known as a Circular Halo

According to wikipedia it is formed by the refraction of sunlight through cloud suspended ice crystals rather than raindrops. I had my doubts about the ice crystals as the air temperature was in the 90s today and there was a distinct lack of wind, but thanks to the internet I have found a similar example from La Silla astronomical observatory in Chile on 27 January 1990.

Apparently, only arc sections are usually visible so there are…

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Man Utd ban players from Twitter

Manchester United banned its players from Twitter. The accounts of Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs, and Darren Fletcher have already been removed as the club attempts to control the flow of news from the locker room and prevent players speaking out of turn. In September 2009, striker Wayne Rooney ranked as one of the football’s most prolific twitter-users, with 22,200 followers….

My thoughts on this personal and brand reputation management issue on this are….

While Manchester United’s decision to ban its players from Twitter will prevent leaking sensitive information and reduce the risk to its reputation from ill-considered player tweets, simply banning everyone from the platform is a myopic, draconian measure.

What Sir Alex Ferguson has failed to realise is the…

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Reputation empowerment with Employee involvement

We are ‘living’ more and more in the online world. Businesses are now aware that for them to truly interact with their target audiences they must build and maintain an online presence through social media, rather than just via online advertising. This applies to large, blue chip multinationals and ‘local’ SMEs alike, and has been addressed by many companies with varying degrees of success.

With a massive upside for businesses that successfully use social media, it is perhaps surprising that many employers are wary of getting involved. This may be attributable to a lack of appreciation of that potential or due to the fact that these employers do not fully understand how to use the social media tools

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A framework for kids, parents and educators

In an age where young people are connecting with their friends online every day, access to the internet and online communications services is no longer a privilege for the few that can afford it; it is now part of every young person’s daily life.

As CEO of a digital agency, and a parent myself, I’ve always been vocal about the need to educate not just our children, but also parents, and how youngsters can safely and sensibly make the most of the online world that is available to them.

Where adults have tended to be in the dark about what their kids do online, seeing it as risky and to some extent unproductive, young people have always been

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Facebook for Celebrity Kids

Last night over dinner I was asked by a prominent friend of mine if he should let his kids go on Facebook. At first, this may not appear to be such a dilemma, but when he told me why he was concerned, it was easy to understand his reasons for being so cautious.

It’s an interesting dilemma. Children should be allowed explore the world whoever they are. However, I can also see that if you are a celebrity or a billionaire, then you have a different set of concerns to us mere mortals. My advice was:

  • Encourage them to create an account
  • Discuss if they are also on other services such as MySpace, Bebo, etc
  • Really, really

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Naked gun cop shows why employers like The Met need to do more to educate staff on the impact of their online behaviour

What an employee posts online, even in a personal guise, can have direct implications for their employer. This is a problem that we’ve seen before, from naked policeman in public sector organisations like The Met to offensive retail staff in Currys and PC World, and it’s a problem we can expect to see time and time again unless businesses start taking a proactive approach to educating their employees about online literacy.

Following the sacking of naked bobby Malcolm Thomas, a senior Met source said on the incidence that: “Firearms officers must behave impeccably in their professional and personal life. They cannot lay themselves open to blackmail or disclose information that could put them or their colleagues at risk. Armed officers…

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Maximise the UK’s £1.4bn Twitter time

I keep hearing an old refrain that I was reminded of in an article in today’s Financial Times – “Twittering Workers Cost Businesses £1.4bn.” Oh yeah. All that time spent on social media at work. Shockingly, the article found the average person spends 40 minutes a week on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook (my casual observation is that this is an understatement) and valued the time wasted by employees at £1.4bn per annum.

I believe this research has the wrong spin. We should be talking about the potential for UK businesses to use their talent pool to spread positive messaging about their brands.

Just think… what do people do when they spend time on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc?…

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#iranelection

I was going to tweet but they postponed planned maintenance to aid the Iranian protestors [http://is.gd/13MDT]

I’m not sure if I know enough about Mousavi’s positions about lots of issues that are important to me.

I am sure that I do not like oppression.

I am sure that I like the way that the Internet and what we call social media is a democratizing force that allows humans to exchange messages and interact one to many in a way that has never been possible before.

If we don’t act to use these forces as a catalyst for change we could lose a unique opportunity to create a global community where the values of helping one another, which are common amongst…

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