This week, Cohn & Wolfe received an impressive 4th place overall ranking in the 2011 Holmes Report/Sociagility Social Media Performance study of the top 23 global PR agencies.

Besides Fashion Week, big things are happening in Milan. As an official partner of Milan Social Media Week, the Cohn & Wolfe Milan office got to work commissioning an original research study in collaboration with AstraRicerche (an Italian research firm) and the University of Udine to measure how companies operating in Italy approach social and digital media from a structural point of view.
By surveying more than 100 managers of small, medium and big companies operating in Italy, we wanted to study how companies are organizing themselves internally to meet the challenges of the digital age—what are the mean budgets, available resources and who calls the shots when approving plans are some of the questions we posed.

In the last week, Facebook has made two announcements on new updates to the platform: the addition of the ‘subscribe button’ and the new ‘friend lists’.  These updates have spurred a series of questions around Facebook’s loyalty to its original mission and have made many ponder, “Is Facebook a copycat?”

I would sound like a broken record if I told you that digital media is becoming a part of every PR plan and a focus of communication firms worldwide.  I would be preaching to the choir if I touted the benefits of working with bloggers that might not be as impressive or established as The New York Times, but could potentially be more successful in reaching small, targeted audiences.  And I would be the recipient of thousands of eye-rolls if I tried to bill blogger relations as quick and easy.

LinkedIn had a crazy IPO late last week.  "Crazy" isn’t my word, it’s the Wall Street Journal's.  Shares began trading at $45 per share, but over the course of the day on Thursday rose to over $108 – over 140% increase.  This values LinkedIn at $10.5bn, or 43 times its 2010 revenue.  Even before shares started trading, LinkedIn was slated to be the biggest IPO of a technology company in the US since Google in 2004, and its first day pop in stock price is one of the largest seen since the dot.com bubble.  When eBay went public in 1998, its stock popped 168% on the first day of trading.

Last November, more than 500 Cohn & Wolfe employees around the world harnessed the power of collective creativity to create a compelling 30-day fundraising concept for pro-bono client Project Kaisei.  Our smarts and ingenuity resulted in a quirky campaign that is truly an amalgamation of global imagination.  Titled “Save Kai,” the initiative centers on a streaming video of Kai, a small goldfish involved in an epic battle against ocean plastic.

Our Cohn & Wolfe Digital crew stopped by the SXSWi Trade Show today and picked up a bundle of souvenirs from a variety of brands.  One thing we quickly discovered; all tchotckes are not created equal.  Here are the highlights of the free swag we snagged at SX:

From food trucks and games of four square to rewards flash-mobs and achieving enchantment, here are the highlights from day three of SXSWi:

Cohn & Wolfe Digital has a team of people attending this year’s SXSWi, covering panels, interviewing thought leaders, and hitting every last happy hour – all for you!  Check Wolfe Tracking each day (or better yet, subscribe) for a daily recap of the “Top Bold Digital Moments & Ideas” from SXSW.  Here’s the rundown for today, Friday, March 11:

While this year’s 83^rd Academy Awards may have offered few surprises in terms of which actors and which movies ended the night with coveted statues in hand, there was a tremendous amount of buzz througout the social media space in the days leading up to Awards night, with viewers taking to Facebook, Twitter and their respective blogs to talk about this year’s nominees.

In honor of Social Media Week 2011, I had the pleasure of attending an excellent event entitled “Social Media Around the World” hosted by Freddie Laker of SapientNitro—digital strategist, international man of mystery and all-around nice guy. You can read details from the event here.  

Two weeks ago, I attended WPP’s Stream Conference, which brought together a collection of creative, technological and digital minds across the WPP network to talk about what’s on the horizon for digital media and how we can best continue to leverage it for our clients.