Matt Owen

Matt Owen is Head of Social at Econsultancy. He looks after Econsultancy’s global social media strategy and architecture, where he has led community engagement and growth since 2010.

Matt has a background in music, film and television in addition to marketing. Prior to joining Econsultancy, he was instrumental in building the UK's largest entertainment blog network before moving into dedicated social management and strategy for one of the world's largest business schools. He has a particular interest in social measurement and organizational integration.

In addition, he works with a community of 200,000+ digital marketers daily across a variety of social channels and has written best practice guides for popular social platforms. He contributes regularly to the Econsultancy blog, industry titles and makes regular appearances at events and conferences.

Explain like I'm five: How Community works

You probably haven't heard of Explain Like I'm Five. Only about 250,000 people have.

‘ELI5’ is a subreddit, a stream on the content behemoth Reddit. And it's an amazing example of community in action, one that's been taken to a new level by the people running Reddit recently, with a small move that should be front of mind for any brand attempting to build a community.

by Matt Owen 20 March 2013 09:38am 0 comments

Service Announcement: How comments on the Econsultancy blog work

Part of my daily routine here at Econsultancy is to log into the admin section of the site and run through the new blog comments.

The blog currently has an Akismet spam filter, which sweeps posts it deems dodgy under the digital carpet, but unfortunately it isn’t perfect.

Recently there have been a few comments about this unreliability, so I thought it might be handy if I clarified how the system works and why you might occasionally see a comment you posted disappear...

by Matt Owen 15 March 2013 10:27am 2 comments

Announcing our new #TheDigitals SuperStar of the Week: @SilverBean

It’s been a long, hard race to the finish, but today @SilverBean have nosed past the post to become our sixth #TheDigitals SuperStar of the week!

Congratulations Silverbean! We’ve seen them sharing some great content over the past few weeks so it’s a well-deserved win. As promised, Silverbean have won a place on our international judging panel for The Digitals.

Together with our other judges, they’ll be helping us decide what campaigns, products and services really deserve recognition for advancing the digital landscape. If you or your client have worked on something that you’re really proud of then don’t keep it to yourself, get your entry in by March 13th to be sure of a crack at fame and glory!

by Matt Owen 08 March 2013 16:24pm 0 comments

Congratulations to our newest #TheDigitals Superstar: @Silverbean

Well done this week to our latest Digital Superstars – Silverbean.

Silverbean is a search marketing and digital agency specialising in SEO & Social Media, PPC, CRO and Affiliate Program Management, and they've been rocking the hashtag all week, congratulations guys!

Find out more about this week's winners on their site: http://www.silverbean.com/

There’s been lots more action around the #TheDigitals hashtag this week, and we’ve welcomed a number of new faces to the top twenty, quite a feat when you remember we now have over 7,000 people battling it out for the chance to be on the judging panel for The Digitals Awards.

Over the past seven days you’ve really upped your game, and we’ve seen some fantastic links to innovative, exciting and just plain useful stuff that’s helping define the digital marketing landscape.

Of course, #TheDigitals leaderboard is all about sharing great content, so here are a few useful links that we saw pop up...

by Matt Owen 01 March 2013 15:13pm 0 comments

Five reasons Google Glass will be a catastrophic failure

Sergey Brin recently ignited conversation about Google’s Glass by claiming that using a mobile phone was ‘emasculating’.

He might be right, but do wearable computers really offer us a better option, or is Glass likely to be filed under ‘Massive Fail’ in the near future?

by Matt Owen 01 March 2013 11:36am 16 comments

Social media measurement: focus on the big picture

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about some of the problems I’ve encountered when trying to gauge accurate traffic from our social media channels, particularly Twitter.

Based on the overwhelming response in the comments section, and feedback from our own recent social media measurement roundtables, it appears this is a very common problem.

Lots of you took the time to offer up ideas and recommendations, so I thought it would be useful to recap (and test) some of the suggested solutions here...

by Matt Owen 28 February 2013 12:02pm 6 comments

Announcing our latest #TheDigitals SuperStar of the week!

We’ve just finished updating #TheDigitals leaderboard and we’ve found that @Danbarker is STILL topping the charts!

Well done to Dan, who’s managed to keep up a steady flow of content all week, sharing and creating knowledge about the digital landscape, and staying on top of some very tough competition!

There's been some great action on the board this week - let's look at some of the new faces and new changes...

by Matt Owen 22 February 2013 13:35pm 0 comments

Dealing with a Twitter hack: Lessons from @BurgerKing

Fast food giant Burger King experienced a social media meltdown earlier this week, as the brand’s Twitter feed was hacked, its profile picture and name changed to that of industry rival McDonalds, and a series of unusual tweets were fired out to the brand’s followers.

Things first went amiss around noon EST, and followers were treated to over an hour of links to YouTube videos, pictures of dirty kitchens, tweets about percolate and a few reminders that comms managers can’t afford to take public holidays off...

by Matt Owen 21 February 2013 11:12am 0 comments

Congratulations to @DanBarker - our reigning #TheDigitals superstar of the week : Who will be next?

It’s been yet another busy week on #TheDigitals leaderboard, with over 6,000 of you tweeting and sharing some amazing content that you think is worthy of an illustrious Digital award. Thanks for all your tweets and contributions, we’re really building up a huge library of outstanding digital content.

The familiar face of @DanBarker is still sitting proudly at the top of the board for a second week, managing to clock up an astounding 210 mentions in the last week! Well done again Dan – influence in action!

So the question is: Who can knock him off the top spot and be our next Digital Superstar?

by Matt Owen 15 February 2013 12:50pm 0 comments

Social media measurement: Is Google Analytics getting it wrong?

Social media attribution is BIG news.

Marketers are struggling to attribute revenue to social channels, and lack of definable ROI is one of the major reasons that businesses cut back on social investment.

I spend a lot of time looking at our own social attribution, but it strikes me that in many cases, the closer I look, the less clear a picture I have.