Obama's twitter fundraising

In 2008 Barack Obama's used twitter to help fundraising and support within his 2012 election.  They used YouTube with an expletive laded post holiday message for supporters, however when the numbers where counted Obama's aided now $1 billion to have been raised for the 2012 campaign. This broke the 10 figure milestone, the reason for this is it brought in more small dollar fundraising through email, social media, mobile and its websites during the final months.  It was said that his team raised $690 million digitally in 2012 this was a significant raise on the $500 million raised for the 2008 campaign.
 

HMV News

HMV are one of the last music retail shops due to the internet offering easier and free music.  The company is at the edge of closing down.  Research shows that people only buy CD's from music stores because of the novilty of owning a DVD.  Companies such as amazon and Itunes offer easier methods of music sales over the internet.  Amazon's new free mp3 music scheme will make selling CD's for HMV even more differcult.  However HMV generates money through its technology devices, Band T-Shirts, Videos Games and Posters. 

Blockbuster News

Blockbuster is becoming bankcrupt due to their lack of DVD sales.  Other companies are using easier methods of DVD sales which is taking blockbusters sales.  Comapanies such as Netflixs and Love film are offering thousands of free films, streamed from the internet, for £5.99 a month.  Also broadband companies such as Virgin and Sky offer on demand films for a cheaper price than Blockbusters.  1,400 stores are at risk to closure due to these companies and half have already been closed.  46% are high street shops, 20% are shopping centres, 17% are retail parks and the final 17% are stand alone locations. 

Twitter Scandals

In 2008 the AMC learned that some fans had created fake Twitter accounts for the Mad Men crew This outpouring of fan zeal was, frankly, unacceptable. So the network complained to Twitter, and Twitter disabled those accounts. Tons of bad publicity later, AMC decided to allow the accounts.

Many times we have tried to convince ourselves that the Beliebers aren’t so bad. They’re just little girls, right? Just as we loved New Kids on the Block and JTT, they love Justin. Well, maybe not. Now that Bieber is dating Selena Gomez, some of his biggest fans are tweeting death threats to the 18-year-old singer/actress. In fact, the FBI has gotten involved, and some of these girls may face jail time.

Because he hadn’t yet disgraced himself enough in the minds of right-thinking people when he dared to lay a hand on Rihanna, Chris Brown recently came back for another round of assholery. When B2K’s Raz-B tweeted, “I’m just sittin here Thinking how can Eric Benet & ChrisBrown disrespect women as Intelligent as HalleBerry and Rihanna,” Brown didn’t exactly take the criticism in stride. Instead, he responded, “razb2k, you want attention! Grow up !!! Dick in da booty ass lil boy” — an especially classy comment, considering that Raz-B has come forward as a victim of sexual abuse. A few more homophobic tweets followed, and Raz-B chimed in with some cringe-worthy “I know you are, so what am I?”-style digs. Both have since apologized (Chris Brown tell us, “I love all of my fans, gay and straight”), but considering they should have known better in the first place, we’re not terribly impressed.

You know what will get you in trouble? Tweeting a photo of an underage girl’s no-no place. Hilton lost advertisers, drew tons of criticism, and could have faced jail time for disseminating child pornography for the stunt which he later claimed was fake, because why would Miley Cyrus ever go out in public without underpants? Then, this fall, inspired by the It Gets Better campaign, Hilton posted a video in which he pledged to be a better person. Here’s hoping he sticks to it.

Research- Play.com

The Jersey based firm of play.com is to be moved move on the ending of Low Value Consignment Relief, which allowed items less than £15 to be sold to the UK VAT-free.  147 of the staff will be made redudant in Jersey and 67 of Bristols and Cambridge will also be made redundant.  Play.com will now become more like a shopping centre, no longer selling directly to customers.The Low Value Consignment Relief (LVCR) loophole was closed by the UK government in April 2012.  A spokesperson confirmed the changes meant they were completely pulling out of Jersey, but about 200 staff would be left in the restructured company, which will be based in Cambridge.

BBC- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-20953357
Daily Mail- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/bills/article-2259559/Play-com-shut-retail-business.html

Research- Amazon free mp3 downloads

Amazon have added a technology to their company, this is called 'AutoRip'.  This is only available in America and it allows customers who have purchased a CD's to get a free digital mp3 copy.  Customers will be able to store there free copy on Amazons cloud player which is accessibly through the web, smart phones and tablets.  Any customer who has bought a CD in the catalogue from Amazon since the firm started trading in 1998 will be eligible to get a free MP3 copy of it. Amazon said it anticipated creating copies of millions of CDs.  This new stage is mostly considered to go against other music companies such as Itunes.  The Cupertino giant has similar cloud storage services for music and leads the market with more than 50% of the market share, while Amazon has less than 15%. Google offers a similar service.

BBC- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20972027
Amazon- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/10/amazon-apple-itunes-store-autorip

The Long Tail Theory

The Long Tail theory was formed by Chris Anderson and he thought of the idea of a graph that goes from the top right to the bottom left.  At the top of the graph is the popular products which big companies such as Amazon, HMV etc will store plenty of these products due to there popularity.  Then at the bottom of the graph is the nich products which companies will store a low amount of this is either because they are not popular or because they are from years ago.  This theory effects are econmy because popular sales will sell more and the unpopular wont.

An example which I will link this theory to is films.  Within films the big named companies such as Warner Brothers will produce more sales with cinema tickets and DVD sales, this is because they are at the top of Andersons graph.  Wereas independent companies such as Big Talk will not have as popular ticket and DVD sales because they are a nich company and are at the bottem of Andersons graph.