Euan Semple holding forth on the subject of social media and business.

My Web-Doppelganger has become the town crier for Looe in Cornwall.

Excellent post on network theory and PR by Tim Hoang.

Colour schemes by search terms – groovy…

Analysis of how Twitter's business was hacked…

"According to news-monitoring service VMS, a cool $48 million over the past 30 days. (That's half of what Microsoft plans to spend marketing its biggest product launch of the year, Bing.)"

Superb feature of Marketing Society Marketer of the Year, Pete Markey. Some good mentions of living.morethan.com, the blog-based social space iCrossing UK built for MORE TH>N:

'Living is key to the company’s exploration of online for branding rather than the direct response traditionally associated with finance brands online.'

"Want to see something juicy? Spokeo searches deep within 43 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers."

Couple of good bits here.

Story of how the Center for International Legal Studies was fooled into thinking a fake site belonged to the WTO.

Crowdsourcing approach to verifying mainstream news stories.

Howard Rheingold links to this "crap detection" framework for testing the usefulness / truth of online information:

"The CRAP test is a way to evaluate a source based on the following criteria: Currency, Reliability, Authority and Purpose/Point of View. Below are some questions to help you think about how to measure each of the criteria…."

"Ideas Are Awesome is a web culture aggregator tracking emerging marketing, design, and technology themes."

A call for input on ideas around what it means to be an expert in networks from David Weinberger:

"Instead, assume for the moment that just as books shaped our traditional idea of experts, the network is shaping our new idea of them. Many of the properties of the network become properties of the new expertise: loosely connected "clouds" of people, where the value of the conversation far exceeds the value of mental contents of any of the participants. Rather than being definitive, the new expertise wants to surface all sides and watch them disagree, because there’s often more truth in honest disagreement than in a settled agreement….

"I would love to hear your thoughts, your stories and your push back. In particular, if you know of a business that is experimenting with the new networked expertise, please let me know via e-mail at self@evident.com."

Reboot Britain is an event that was brilliantly curated. Full video archive of presentations and much more here.

Some more thoughts from me on social web literacy and brands.

The “six minute version” of Howard Rheingold’s thoughts on social media literacies.

“Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part – the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it’s up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. “Crap detection,” as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: “spamming.”"

So gutted I missed Reboot Britain this year, Steve Moore organised a great event. Howard Rheingold’s speech is about literacy and 21st Century Literacies… Literacy is “skills+community” according to Howard…

The WOMMA presentation I did is “Required Reading” this week on FreshNetworks’ blog – chuffed!

A website which tracks pundits’ predictions and says whether they got them right or wrong.

“twibbon.com is the easiest way to promote awareness of your cause on twitter. Create a twibbon in 3 easy steps and soon all your supporters will be proudly wearing their twibbons on their twitter profile images. Simply describe your cause and upload a twibbon image and we will do the rest.”

“A couple of interesting things that came out of the study included the debunking of some social networking myths. Social networkers are not as interested in friending strangers or creating “fake” friends to boost their ego. Out of the group, 45% connect only to family and friends and another 18% will connect only to people they’ve met in person. In other words, two-thirds are connecting to people they actually know. Only 10% of those surveyed said they will friend anyone.”

“Perhaps underestimating their own ability to adapt — or pick up a telephone — just 29% of Facebook and LinkedIn users say they could “probably do without” the popular networks, according to a new study by Anderson Analytics.”

$100 for a Twitter background… “Why use one of Twitter’s stock backgrounds when you can have a custom background that will not only make you stand out from the crowd but also provide an excellent marketing opportunity? If you’re using Twitter to promote something you’re missing out on its full potential if you don’t consider the background as part of your promotion.”

“SAP recently announced a new set of Social Media Participation Guidelines and an internal forum to help employees make the most of new social media channels such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the spirit of Web 2.0, and like other organizations such as Intel and IBM, we would like to share our guidelines with the community.”

Great advice – I’m rubbish at packing.

“For Dummies” advice on Twitter. Very basic and straightforward.

Lots of good content from the “For Dummies” guide brand on all things internet.

A course in Digital Humanities laid out in links from the University of Maryland:

“DIGITAL HUMANITIES is already a vast and multi-faceted field, and during our week in Taos we will only be scratching the surface of the surface. Our primary orientation will not be procedural in nature, that is how to use specific software or complete particular tasks, but rather directed toward gaining a broad overview of the many different kinds of methods, practices, and scholarly and creative work currently being conducted under this aegis.”

“Advertisers are starting to target ads to you based on what you say on Twitter. And if you tweet something nice about a product, you might even see your blurb in bold type on an ad, just like a Jeffrey Lyons movie review. So says Seth Goldstein, the chief executive of SocialMedia, a company that has created advertising formats for Facebook, MySpace, and now Twitter.”

Bruce Sterling’s image stream around the concept of atemporality – being outside of time, “like steampunk with metaphysics”.

Concept cars: “”Concept cars” are more-or-less “real cars” never intended for mass production. They are propaganda items intended to influence public taste. They are promotional head-fakes toward an image of “futurity” that might move consumer demand in the direction of the manufacturer.”

Bruce Sterling speaking at Reboot 11. Wish I had been there… Includes:

* How FIAT is moving the FIAT 500 into emergent demographic groups (“scary and terrible”)
* Atemporality: “it’s like steam punk with metpahysics”
* The Twenty-teens will be a time of dark euphoria: things falling apart…
* Gothic high-tech…
* Favela-chic…
* Barack Obama: “he’s a Chicago machine politician, not Vaclav Havel…”
* Obama and Sarkozy are positioning themselves in the narrative rather than creating infrastructure…
* Favela chic: “You’ve lost everything but you’re still really big on Facebook”
* MySpace is a Favela: you can’t do anything there, but you have a hut (until they pull the plug)

A set of gorgeous case studies of using social media and community online tools…

"How a group of individuals persuaded Coca Cola to help Africa’s children"

The glossary section of the social by social book…

Personal branding tips from Dan Schwabel, personal branding expert.

"This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned."

Music to write to?

The place to download that Belgian iQ font…

"Perhaps we need to start thinking about building the reality of temporary advantages into the way we hire, develop and allocate talent."

'It’s alarming how hard it is to say anything constructive about [web 2.0] from any previous cultural framework…

'what kind of rattletrap duct-taped mayhem is disguised under a smooth oxymoron like “collective intelligence."….

'I’ve never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I’m bored with the deceit. I’m tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I’m disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I’m up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.'

Mashable are great at these useful little lists… I like the uses they pinpoint for academia of social media. Particularly like the "coaching for the spotlight" point…

Toyota Belgium used the iQ to draw a new font. Love it.

"CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–Ben Mezrich's new book "The Accidental Billionaires," a dramatic and contested account of the early days of social network Facebook, is on the fast track to Hollywood."

US recruitment site that includes reviews of companies. E.g. this for EDS when I looked: "EDS. Company Rating: 2.6. CEO Approval: Joe Eazor -
10% “Approve”. An EDS Infrastructure Specialist-Senior said:
Pros: “Strong stable company. "Average" here would be superior at 99.44% of other companies. Company has high standards for employee conduct–racism, sexism, etc. are not tolerated at…" It goes on…

Facebook's use of personal photos in ads "is not the first time this week that individuals have seen their social media-related identities hijacked for advertising purposes. Crunchgear recently reported a slew of tweets linking to phishing sites. Essentially a bot account has been pushing out fake retweets from celebrities in the hopes that loyal fans will see the RT@aplusk's and RT@oprah's and make the mistake of clicking through."

"What this tool can do for you:
Help you better understand how to determine the "fairness" of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code.
Collect, organize & archive the information you might need to support a fair use evaluation.
Provide you with a time-stamped, PDF document for your records [example], which could prove valuable, should you ever be asked by a copyright holder to provide your fair use evaluation and the data you used to support it. [why is this important?]
Provide access to educational materials, external copyright resources, and contact information for copyright help at local & national levels."

Someone saw their wife’s photo ina singles ad on Facebook. Apparently unless you adjust the privacy settings in the right way it is fine for Facebook to use your pics in ads…

“A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact.”

“Discovering and developing the nation’s digital health through productivity training, design consultancy and the invention of new online services.”

“Discovering and developing the nation’s digital health through productivity training, design consultancy and the invention of new online services.”

“Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian’s URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months – way more than any other UK newspaper.”

“Students need to be proactive, using social networking sites to rapidly build new networks with high quality connections in organisations or industries they might want to enter. They need to use sites such as Twitter to take advantage of breaking news and current issues to create energy and develop activities in real time: build up a project, set up a charity venture, connect with others on-line who have similar interests, as things are actually happening.”

“But here’s a nice little McKinsey piece about system thinking, natural and economic disasters. Go ahead, read it but ponder the latter stretch particularly the suggestions…

“Too much of our thinking in marketing, management and politics is about the particular (the individual, the particular brand) without really enough attention being paid to the system within which that exists…”

“SoundCloud lets you move music fast & easy. The platform takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending & distributing music for artists, record labels & other music professionals.”

This seems mad, then you look more closely (and watch the video and it starts to seem really lovely… “Our concept is to bring back the way Despina worked, with her and her friends socializing while sewing. Our idea involved making a networked object that lets her and friends interact without being face to face. This allows them to gossip and chat about their creations as they do them. Each friend would be represented by a mini sewing machine, that is a transmitter and a receiver.”

“The Mistake Bank is a place to share stories of mistakes people have made in their lives and careers. Please contribute videos or blog posts recounting your mistakes that you think others could learn from. Start a forum topic or participate in an existing forum.”

“Facebook’s privacy conference call just ended, and it’s clear some major changes are going to be coming to the social network soon. Some of these, like a totally revamped privacy control page, are both long overdue and very welcome. But others, like the Transition Tool, seem ripe for disaster.”

“In order to comply with Canadian privacy law, Facebook must take greater responsibility for the personal information in its care. That’s not what we said, it’s what Canada Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says in a statement following an investigation into the social network’s privacy policies and practices.”

“The acclaimed web theorist, Mark Earls, says that the death of Michael Jackson unleashed the extremes of collective action: mass mourning and sick jokes.”

This is the slide deck from my WOMMA webinar yesterday about web literacy and brands. Will link to the audio when WOMMA posts it…

Some interesting debate on NMA about the Moonfruit campaign on Twitter using hashtags….

Dell is moving its community to this platform.

A look at lessons learned from three years of one of the world’s best corporate social media programmes. Connecting, curating and aggregating realtime content looks like Dell’s next move..

After a visit to the UK, the founder of Craigslist thinks our business culture should be more failure tolerant.:

“I was struck by the repeated comment that failure is stigmatized in UK business culture. In Silicon Valley, failure is just a normal phase of one’s career. You might succeed in your first endeavor, probably not, so you’re ready to persist in subsequent efforts.

“That is, there’s some expectation of failure and the expectation that you’ll get over it.

“This is not unique to Silicon Valley, but it’s far more expected here than anywhere I’ve heard. The attitude is the norm here, but in a lot of places failure continues to be stigmatized, and it’s hard to recover.

“It seems that widespread innovation and success requires the acceptance of failure, and then a readiness to move on.”

Those rules in brief:

1. Appeal to what people love the most – themselves?2. Measurement is very important, but don’t lose the forest for the trees?3. Plan for success, but know you won’t always hit homeruns?4. What they are saying is true; Social media is about conversations?5. Know thy customer?

Oddly reminiscent of teen magazines fro the 80s, AndersonAnalytics asks: “What kind of a social media user are you?” with this quiz…. I’m a business user apparently. Ho hum.

News media held on the Michael Jackson story long after anyone else was still talking about it… Jeff Jarvis has the stats.

Alex Massie takes apart yet another dismal attack on blogging by a newspaper journalist:

“In fairness, some of the newspaper commentary on the blogosphere is dictated by a) the need to fill the pages and b) the requirement to take a contrarian view of current events. Hence griping outbursts from Stephen Glover and Stephen Pollard. The problem for newspapers is that they deal in generalities; the internet by contrast, is about niche and specialisation.”

“Goldman Sachs has caved in and allowed a critical blogger to continue airing his negative views about the investment bank on a controversially-named website.”

Lloyd Davis reports on the first Crowds/Tribes/Teams method of consultancy – an approach I find incredibly compelling:

“Everyone is creative, capable of creation in one way or another. Categorising people as creatives or managers is fake and doesn’t serve us well, especially in a space where we require innovation and change. People are amazing.

“It is possible to bring thirty people together and have a productive conversation without constantly telling them what to do.”

And now they are Tweeting popular passages… love it.

Google is begin to use its Google Book Search to identify passages which, meme-like, are built upon, ideas that spread. Fascinating…

Euan Semple on markeitng Flash Mobs, a tactic that is surely heading for over-exposure: “I guess marketers and advertisers have become adept at playing on human emotion in all sorts of ways over the years and getting me to associate – however unconsciously or unwillingly – the emotional impact of a flash mob with a particular brand is just more of the same. Hopefully the balance of trust is shifting and we are much less likely to accept being manipulated if that manipulation feels too overt or too direct – much as witty and entertaining TV ads feel more acceptable than out and out sales pitches. Its a fine line though!”

A brilliant essay on new media literacy.

"It challenges the idea that the youth are the only people who are "digital natives". Charlie Beckett, director of journalism thinktank POLIS at the London School of Economics, challenges the whole idea of the digital native:

'As Matthew Robson describes, most teenagers use a variety of digital devices, but when you talk to people who work with teenagers they describe a much more complex picture of what they actually do.

'The same teenagers who have literacy problems have media literacy problems. Many of the teenagers apparently comfortable with new media are in fact only using a very limited range of applications and in a very limited way.'"

Tesco opens up its shopping service for all to play…

The story of the tampax social media / transmedia campaign about a boy who starts menstruating. As BusinessWeek puts it: "I’m not sure if this will sell more Tampax. But it’s interesting"

Great use of YouTube and storytelling as a surrogate website.

Good looking "realtime search engine".

Second installment of an excellent, useful set of tips about managing your social networks presence online.