Mark Hillary

All eyes on Friday were on the Facebook IPO with analysts and investors still undecided about whether it makes sense to value a company with revenue of under $4bn at $104bn.

And one of the key questions is how Facebook will increase the amount of revenue they earn...

Last week I was presenting some social media disaster stories at a conference hosted by the customer care people Teleperformance. You can guess at some of the brands I talked about - when I asked the audience to suggest a few ideas of online disasters they called out...

The Damned were always a little different to most punk bands, with singer Dave Vanian possessing the kind of voice many crooners would kill for and guitarist Captain Sensible being a skilled musician. Contrast this to Paul Simonon writing chords on his...

It is exactly one hundred days until the opening ceremony of the London Olympic games when, under Danny Boyle's direction, thousands of British volunteers will show the world that the UK can match anything China did four years ago. Well maybe the budget for...

Let's build a smarter planet is IBM's mission statement, but does that include a planet where women are considered equal to men?

It may seem that IBM do believe in promoting women to senior positions - earlier this year Ginni Rometty rose up to become...

For as long as I can remember some people have suggested that the use of computers to communicate with others is anti-social and leads to the decline of in-person socialisation, like having a pint in the pub with friends. But I can recall using CompuServe 20 years ago...

I am a Londoner, but I live and work in São Paulo in Brazil. This week I collected my Brazilian permanent ID card. It's taken months of bureaucracy and many visits to the policia federal in Lapa to get this far. Though my permanent resident status was approved...

I once moved job from a French financial services company to an American one - Société Générale to Sanford Bernstein. My new boss was based in New York and he used to endlessly mock the holidays we were given by our employers in Europe.

After one...

Guitar amplifier legend Jim Marshall died today. And today also marks the 18th anniversary of the death of one of his best-known customers, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain - though the coroner had to estimate his exact time of death as his body was only...

The arrival of social media has been both an opportunity and headache for retailers. It's certainly easier to build a community of loyal fans and to work on deals and offers with them, but it is just as easy for the community to share bad news about your company -...

There is about to be a revolution in the customer service industry, but it is creeping up slowly on customers and those who manage the contact centres. Like the frog that can be slowly boiled to death, if those in the customer care industry step back and look...

Ever the diplomat, Morrissey declared at a concert in Córdoba, Argentina, last week, "we know the islands belong to you". The former Smiths singer was referring to the Falklands, or Las Malvinas, depending on your point of view.

Many would...

The BBC recently published an interesting viewpoint by Tom Austin, Vice President of the analyst firm Gartner, on the changing nature of work. Tom outlined some changes he expects, such as work and non-work time becoming intertwined.

Tom lists 10 key trends that are changing the...

Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone appears to be very slightly ahead in the race to win the next Mayoral election on 3 May, according to which polls you believe, but he has started to take an enormous amount of flak recently - often self-inflicted.

The fallout...

In my spare time I like to take photographs. Mostly just snaps on a phone or compact camera - nothing too serious - so when I received an email recently about a photo of mine I was a little surprised by the message:

Dear Mark,

The First Lady of the United States of America, Michelle Obama, joined Twitter today. When I followed her she had tweeted only twice and had just over 20,000 followers. As I write, she has added another tweet and has over 111,000 followers.

But is it really...

Brazil's economy has now officially overtaken the UK. So says economic research group, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) in a recent report. In fact, the Economist Intelligence Unit has predicted that by the end of this decade the new international economic...

When people will listen, I never fail to tell them just how much I believe that social media will revolutionise the process of customer service in 2012. I've talked about it in the past from various angles - not least that the graduates of today don't remember a...

Last August, Muhammad Ruhul Amin Khandaker, a lecturer of the Department of Information and Technology at Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh, updated his Facebook status to comment on a series of fatal road traffic accidents.

A well-known local filmmaker had recently died, so had a well-known journalist. With a...

Facebook finally launched their new Timeline feature to the world last month. Much attention has focused on the improved look and feel of the user interface, particularly the large cover photo that now dominates a Facebook profile.

But much less attention has been paid to the...