Gov websites ‘should be hubs for debate’
Simon Dickson has drawn our attention to a statement made by new Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, in response to a parliamentary question raised by Tom Watson concerning the government’s future plans for the Number 10 and Cabinet Office websites.  Maude’s short answer has some big implications on the form and function for future UK e-government sites:

The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges…

Enabling the government’s websites to facilitate debate and dialogue would be a most welcome development.

Yelp goes head-to-head with Foursquare, adds badges & Royal hierarchy
Yelp has announced an updated iPhone app, placing itself in direct competition with location-based social network Foursquare. Having previously added the ability to ‘check-in’ at locations, Yelp has now updated its app with other Foursquare-inspired features such as ‘Yelp badges’ and the opportunity for users to attain a ‘Royal’ status at locations.

As for crowning royalty, Yelp is taking a medieval approach to Foursquare’s mayorship feature. If a user has the most check-ins at a business, they are bestowed with the title of Duke or Duchess. If a user racks up enough of these titles in a specific neighborhood, they become the Baron of that area, or the King at the city level.

Social networking heats up on ‘browsing phones’, according to ComScore
According to a new study from ComScore, social networking is the fastest growing activity among people with smartphones / feature phones that offer Web browsing.

ComScore estimate that approximately 20 percent of mobile users are now accessing social networking sites via their phone, either with a dedicated app or through the mobile browser.

Yahoo! and Facebook announce site tie-up
Yahoo! struck a deal with Facebook to make it easier for users who maintain presences on both sites to share what they do across them. So what does it all mean?

The deal means that people who maintain profiles on Yahoo and Facebook can link the two pages and cross-pollinate both with one update.  It will also mean that those who use Flickr, Yahoo Answers or the social site’s video and music services can pipe any media or data they create to friends who use only Facebook.

Twitter rolls out “You both follow” feature
About 10% of Twitter users have been given the chance to play with a new ‘You both follow ‘ feature when accessing the site via their web browser. “When you click on another user’s profile, you are now given a list of people you both follow.”

Over on The Wall Blog, Jennifer Whitehead notes another (perhaps more useful) use of the feature is to click on people whose profiles you DON’T follow already, so that you can see if you have friends in common: “not a mind-blowing development but useful if you see Twitter as a way to do a bit of marketing for yourself or to start conversations with people you’d like to know.”

Zappos lives up to its reputation for customer service
Over the past few years, online retailer Zappos has been highlighted alongside the likes of Ford, Dell or Comcast fairly regularly as a ‘go to’ case study for their use of social media for customer support. And it’s easy to see why with this example.

A pricing bug on a Zappos sister site called 6pm.com gave customers the ability to purchase any product online for no more than $49.99. The mistake was eventually caught 6 hours after it went live, but not before customers had taken advantage of the pricing bug to the tune of approximately $1.6m.

Balancing the backlash that might ensue online against the cost of eating the loss, Director of Brand Marketing Aaron Magness explained on the Zappos Blog that they would honour all purchases.

As Econsultancy’s Patricio Robles put it: “Zappos… clearly understands that its reputation is worth far more than $1.6m and that sometimes eating a loss is the smart thing to do. Interestingly, one might even suggest that Zappos will only boost its reputation and customer loyalty with this move.”

Independent blocks anonymous comments
The Independent dealt a blow to trolls everywhere by only allowing people to post comments if they sign in using their Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Open ID or Disqus accounts. Editor Martin King explained the move with the following:

Websites have been encouraging cowardice. They allow users to hide behind virtual anonymity to make hasty, ill-researched and often intemperate comments regardless of any consideration for personal hurt or corporate damage.

Well said. While this might not be able to stop individuals posting under a pseudonym using, say, a Disqus account, it is nonetheless a step in the right direction to try and deter those who seek only to defame or abuse in comments sections across the web.

BBC iPlayer adds Twitter and Facebook to socialise TV
The BBC’s video on demand service, iPlayer, is launching iPlayer Beta at the end of June, allowing users to link their Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger accounts to their ‘BBC ID.’

Users will more easily be able to share what they’re watching over social networks, while viewers using Windows Messenger can sync viewing with friends and chat about the show in realtime.

Buy lettuce, get virtual currency
Social gaming company Zynga and Green Giant have teamed up to offer purchasers of Green Giant vegetable products free virtual currency that can be used in Farmville.

At first glance, the promotion seems like a very good fit. Zynga will be able to easily track redemptions to determine if the promotion is a success, while Green Giant can (hopefully) get more people eating their ’5 a day.’ More importantly though, “the promotion highlights just how prominent virtual currency and games like Farmville have become in the mainstream.”

BP beaten in social media stakes by fake tweets
BP has had something of a mess on its hands lately in social media in the form of a tongue-and-cheek account:  @BPGlobalPR. The account has swelled to over 97,000 followers, eclipsing BP’s official @BP_America account by some 88,000, and claimed to be the oil giant’s official voice throughout the ecological crisis in the Gulf, while delivering a healthy dose of satire.

The anonymous Tweeter has since penned an editorial in the Guardian, been unmasked by Wired magazine and even given a book deal. There is also a T-Shirt range with proceeds going to benefit the Gulf Restoration Network. Long may it continue.

Dr Pepper rolls out Facebook status takeover for teens
Coca-Cola has launched a Facebook app for Dr. Pepper which gives consumers the chance to win £1,000 if they allow Dr Pepper to take control of their status update.

The app ties into their ‘What’s the Worst that Could Happen?’ creative, and chooses updates at random with varying degrees of embarrassment such as ‘what’s wrong with peeing in the shower?’ or ‘never heard of it described as “cute” before.’

Domino’s UK Rewards Foursquare Mayors, Yahoo acquires ‘Asian Foursquare’
Domino’s UK is starting a nationwide Foursquare promotion that rewards mayors with free pizza once a week, a deal similar to the one Starbucks announced not too long ago. Additionally, every Foursquare user will receive a free side dish when spending over £10.

In other location-based news, Yahoo has acquired Koprol which has been described affectionately by TechCrunch as the ‘Asian Foursquare.’

Google Moderator on YouTube enables real-time feedback from your audience
YouTube has integrated the use of Google Moderator into every single YouTube channel. Google Moderator is a social platform that allows users to solicit ideas, ask questions, and have their community vote for the best comments in real-time. Crucially, it also allows users channel owners the ability to remove any content that their audience has flagged as inappropriate.

Twitter passes 15 billion tweet mark
After reaching 10 billion tweets at the beginning of March, Twitter has now announced that it has delivered its 15 billionth tweet:

It took Twitter almost a year to hit five billion, but only four months to hit 10 billion. By adding another five billion tweets in three months it is now growing at more than one billion tweets a month, which means it should hit 20 billion before the summer is out.

Assuming we even get a summer in London this year…

It’s Monday, so as usual, have some Monday Mashup goodness, fresh from We Are Social towers.

Twitter to ban third-party ads
Breaking news from Twitter’s blog – they will be blocking any third-party paid Tweets service from using their API. Services such as ad.ly and Magpie are nascent attempts at direct advertising in Twitter – something we largely regard as unconversational and spammy. Twitter’s recent launch of promoted Tweets hopes to maintain the balance between revenue and conversation, and third-party ad services are an obvious threat. Is this heavy-handed monopolism or an attempt to keep the platform clean and spam-free? My view is towards the latter but no doubt detractors will say this is an unwanted restriction on third-party developers and will harm the Twitter ecosystem.

Zuckerberg responds to privacy concerns
Today Mark Zuckerberg made his first public comment in the ongoing controversy around Facebook’s privacy controls. In an email to Robert Scoble, he acknowledges that Facebook has “made a bunch of mistakes” but stops short of making an apology. However he promises “an improved product” which they might preview this week. We wait avidly to see what they will be.

Meanwhile, the continuing controversy isn’t distracting Facebook from pushing for expansion, especially in growing markets. Not happy with laying waste to competitors like StudiVZ in Germany, this week also saw the launch of Facebook Zero, a stripped-down version of the mobile site built for pay-as-you-go customers, which is free for users of more than 50 mobile providers in 45 countries – an attempt no doubt to push mobile access to Facebook beyond the iPhone and Blackberry markets, which are increasingly saturated these days. One place however where Facebook may have trouble expanding is Pakistan, which has recently blocked the site after groups encouraging drawing depictions of the Prophet Muhammad proliferated.

Diesel Cam brings social media into the store
A nice campaign from Diesel, providing Facebook Connect-enabled booths in stores to allow people to share photos of themselves wearing Diesel’s clothes with their friends on Facebook. Some of the most innovative campaigns are now blurring people’s “real” and “virtual” lives:

Lifehacks galore
Lots of useful tools received an update this week – Tweetdeck gained some powerful features, including that to filter out certain keywords (so no more being envious of people at #sxsw, hurrah!). Google Wave came out of beta to public use, although I’ve still not yet found a use for it that doesn’t just replicate existing apps’ functionality. And Twitter finally released an official app for iPhone, an upgrade to Tweetie, which they bought out last month (and by far the best and most stable iPhone app for Twitter I’ve used).

Maturing behaviours on social networks
As social networking takes a firm hold in our collective consciousness, perhaps it’s no surprise that people have grown more conscientious of placing too much sensitive information online or being too liberal with friend requests. A new survey out shows 74% of people are now careful about what pictures they upload, although 87% still believe their online and offline identities correspond with each other. There’s some nice detail on differences internationally – Brazilians have on average 360 friends on their profile (no doubt thanks to Orkut’s dominance there), while Brits have just 173. 1 in 3 Facebook users don’t trust the service, while 55% of users are blocked from using social networks at work – perhaps no surprise that personal social networks rather than professional ones such as LinkedIn enjoy more popularity. The full deck is worth a read.

Real-time influencing traditional media
An interesting report from warc on how television advertisers are increasingly becoming more flexible and innovative in producing their spots around live events. After major live events such as the Winter Olympics and Superbowl, American advertisers commissioned and adapted advertisements with the starring athletes – with feedback from social media playing a key part in which adverts got the heaviest rotation. Our friend Chris Stephenson has some further thoughts which are well worth picking through. While we might not have quite that level of responsiveness in the UK yet (although Simon Pegg got a reply to one of his Tweets by an eagle-eyed continuity announcer), with the World Cup coming up who knows what might come up?

Maybe it was a digital election after all
The new government’s boxes might have only just been unpacked but there’s already some studies on the effect of online on the UK election. A third of respondents to a survey said that online content had influenced their voting decision, although perhaps disappointingly for those arguing it was a ‘Twitter election’, only 5% of voters said they read political content on the site. A lack of comparative stats for the TV debates or newspapers makes this survey a little hard to place in the wider context, though.

Twitter reworks trending topic algorithms
And finally… Justin Bieber no longer features in the top ten trending topics on Twitter – something we should all be thankful for.

Facebook backlash reaches the tipping point?
We’ve reported before in Monday mashups about the growing Facebook privacy backlash, but it looks more and more like a tipping point may have been reached; May 31st has been declared Quit Facebook Day and “how do I delete my Facebook” has become one of the most-Googled search queries of recent times. danah boyd argues that Facebook is now a utility in the same sense that water and electricity are, and should be appropriately regulated as such, while Ben Parr argues in defence of Facebook.

It’s very easy to boil the whole controversy down into “Facebook should better protect its users” versus “users should learn how to protect themselves”, but the points raised are more complex and subtle than just that. Jeff Jarvis’s blog post on what exactly “public” means is a much more informative and nuanced approach to it.

…maybe not just yet
Don’t dismiss Facebook just yet – those pages could still be worth a lot to you and your brand. And then there’s Facebook’s Community Pages. There’s been some confusion about what they are, but Dave Fleet’s analysis is quite helpful – think of it as “earned media” rather than “owned media”. The difference between a Twitter search for your brand name, and your brand’s own Twitter profile, if you like. A brand owner has no control over these pages – which is a double-edged sword; great for finding out what your consumers think of you in realtime, but without any real control or interaction. Jeremiah Owyang points out it’s an example of Facebook’s “Innovation Means Asking For Forgiveness Later” strategy – and it could by no means last; we already have Groups and Pages, and yet another form of brand interaction may prove too confusing or redundant for it to take. Nevertheless Jeremiah’s advice is well worth taking.

Twitter’s Business Center launches
Twitter has been quietly rolling out business features of its own. The new Twitter Business Center offers facilities for brand owners. It allows multiple users to handle the same account (incredibly useful for anyone offering 24/7 support) and allows people to DM brands, even if they aren’t following them, so that sensitive info such as account details and email addresses can be safely exchanged. Meanwhile, the Promoted Tweets programme that was rolled out last month is reported to have been a success by the advertisers in the US who piloted it, with Virgin America recording its fifth-highest sales day in its history the day it went live.

In a separate move, Twitter is now parsing short URLs for keywords in searches, allowing you to get back not just Tweets, but matching URLs for your query. Great news for publishers but also for anyone gathering insights into what relevant conversations are linking to. In both cases, these are useful and timely improvements to the system, and a prime example of what Twitter does very well – innovating iteratively to meet the demands of the community as they evolve, as this excellent presentation by Jack Dorsey discusses.

Engagement rising as brand loyalty falters
Two very interesting surveys caught our attention this week. The first from comScore charts how brand loyalty is dropping compared to two years ago, with consumers deserting their traditional brands; this phenomenon is now spreading to sectors where it has not been previously seen, possibly because of the economic downturn. It looks like brands can no longer count on loyal customers as a base, which ties in with a separate survey by Hall and Partners which notes a positive correlation between engagement and profits. Of particular interest is the growing emphasis on integrity and corporate responsibility as part of brand identity, something which has been shown as evidence by the recent Nestle palm oil furore; it’s further evidence of how integrity is an important factor in how a brand should engage online.

Travelocity: “ChatRoulette FTW!”
Apparently Travelocity’s social marketing team have been hanging around on ChatRoulette a lot. Although they skimp a little on the details, they apparently entail having their mascot hang around and pitching to random people. Spamming? You be the judge of that. But this is the crucial bit for me:

No one in the wider world will know it was ever associated with those elements, unlike on Twitter or Facebook where a negative or disturbing Wall post or tweet can be read by everyone.

Problem is, this means nothing positive can remain permanent either. So when the person they’ve pitched is booking their holiday and trying to remember, or try and tell direct their friends to it, with no permalink, nor any way of finding it on Google, the recall factor is lost.

Finding the right fit between brand and community
News that Ford [disclosure: a We Are Social client] are testing their new cars with Mumsnet brought this revealing post from Reputation Online, advocating that these tie-ins only work if the audience are a perfect fit. While I don’t think they have to be an exact fit (good marketing should never be just about preaching to the converted), the discussion of iVillage was very interesting – they have turned down offers from several brands as they didn’t feel appropriate to the audience. They felt the importance of keeping the community outweighed the advertising revenue – something anyone considering a buy-in to a community site needs to keep in mind, especially when dealing with more traditional buying philosophies.

TopTable gets flak for censoring reviews
An example of how not to meet your community’s needs is TopTable’s recent admission that they delete negative reviews of restaurants. The reason given is that they could face libel accusations – which is no doubt a possibility if the reviews turn out to be maliciously false. But to censor negative reviews altogether destroys the point of the site – people join a reviews community is to give honest opinions about places; being able to get balanced reviews is central to its authenticity. Whether this is common practice across all restaurant review sites is not clear, but we really hope it’s not the case.

Bloggers disagree with one another; film at 11
A PR blogger got annoyed this week at an ill-advised pitch he received. He blogged about it. A lot of other PR bloggers held a different opinion. They blogged about it too. Heated debate followed. That’s it. Move along folks, nothing to see here. But if this a topic that particularly interests you then I recommend the Inconvenient PR Truth survey that is going round right now.

Choose Your Own Adventure on Twitter
And finally… we really liked this innovative “Choose Your Own Adventure” use of Twitter by French Connection – even though the chap in the background looks a bit like Sébastien Chabal…

Facebook unveils Open Graph protocol
At last week’s f8 developer’s conference, Facebook unveiled the next stage of their platform’s evolution, the Open Graph protocol. Described as “Web 3.0”, “winning the Internet”, “advancing the semantic web” or “a great crusade of colonization” depending on which pundit you’ve been reading.

As Stefano detailed so well here last week, the Open Graph effectively extends Facebook to any page on the web. Up until now external tools on a website typically extended to social bookmarking or sharing via services like Buzz, but by accessing Facebook’s vast collection of social interaction data, you can find out who else in your friend group likes the site, and what else they read and like on the site, thus turning Facebook into a mediator of information all over the web.

Already we’re seeing interesting implementations of the protocol come up, such as likebutton.me – a site that tracks what your friends have been liking on popular sites such as YouTube, CNN and Techcrunch. And we wouldn’t want We Are Social’s fans to miss out on the action either – which is why you can now find Facebook like buttons on the bottom of all our posts (including this one).

Every time Facebook releases a new feature there is an inevitable privacy backlash, usually the domain of a few choice experts, but it’s interesting to note that this is extending into the wider Facebook audience as well. A survey out today details how Facebook users are increasingly aware of the privacy implications of the site, with 77% (of an admittedly small sample) having used the site’s privacy tools to customise their privacy options. Could the new Open Graph become hamstrung as more users become privacy aware and opt-out?

It’s not just Facebook

While Facebook makes it all about conquering the web, location-based services are having a flying start in conquering meatspace. This week saw Foursquare hit a million users just over a year since it launched (even Arnold Schwarzenegger is on it). It took Twitter two years to do the same, and as sure as night follows day, this has meant Foursquare becoming the latest startup to be christened “the new Twitter” (seriously guys, can we get this decided once and for all, so the rest of us can get back to enjoying ourselves?).

Pointless analogies aside, the growth of Foursquare and its competitor Gowalla come under more and more scrutiny. This infographic from Mashable shows an interesting trend – Foursquare has far outpaced Gowalla in the popularity stakes since SXSW in terms of mentions, but the feedback on Gowalla is more positive and less negative. As the two continue to slug it out we could be witnessing one of the best case studies possible in whether sheer numbers or member affection is key to a vibrant and profitable social network.

Blogging – for the young and self-expressive
With all the talk of Web 3.0 it can be easy to dismiss blogging as “so 2004″. Yet new research from eMarketer show that the biggest age group amongst those who blog is 18-25; 40.4% of those who write a blog compared to 28.1% from the much larger 26-42 age group. More tellingly, the reasons given were primarily for self-expression rather than making money:

Bloggers of all ages polled by BlogHer and iVillage overwhelmingly blogged for pleasure, with self-expression the No. 1 reason, followed by “fun.” One-half of bloggers wanted to give advice, and fewer than one-third hoped to earn money with their efforts.

A lesson there for anybody wishing to engage with bloggers – understand what drives them to write and engage with their topic rather than consider them as the same as paid-for writers.

#socialmediasfault
As the election campaign in the UK grinds on, the past week saw an interesting divergence in how old and social media have been treating the leaders. After what most commentators have regarded as a strong performance in the new TV debates, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has been heavily criticised in the mainstream press – so much so even Conservative bloggers such as Iain Dale voiced their concern. Twitter had different ideas, though. The hashtag, #nickcleggsfault, coined off-handedly by Justin McKeating, spread like wildfire as Twitterers all over the UK came up with ever-more sarcastic and nonsensical things to “blame” on Nick Clegg as a parody of the media backlash. While it’s clear this election won’t just be won on social media, it’s a clear sign of the disconnect between the traditional and new media – and this is an issue that will last long beyond the election.

Today’s Monday Mashup coming at you with the help of Melina Hägglund. Let’s get to it.

Hot off the press: Twitter announces @anywhere platform
In his keynote at the South by Southwest festival in Austin today, Evan William (@ev) has announced a new platform, called @Anywhere:

The service will add a range of functionality, such as allowing users to login to third-party websites using their Twitter account – similar to Facebook Connect – and to follow a columnist on Twitter, for example, by clicking on their byline.

Over on the official Twitter blog, they describe the move as adding the Twitter experience anywhere on the web:

Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com… Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Twitter will be launching @anywhere with several major websites, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

CNN says Facebook is its biggest rival
Although Fox News is currently beating CNN as the most-watched cable news network in the US, CNN’s president Jonathan Klein considers its main challengers not to be rival TV news stations, but social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Speaking at the 2010 Media Summit in New York, Klein said:

I’m more worried about the 500m people on Facebook versus the 2m on Fox. The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news. That’s a challenge and we have to rise to that challenge.

Though the average number of primetime viewers has shrunk for CNN over the years, they maintain a very strong online presence.

With recent data from Hitwise showing that Facebook is the fourth-biggest source of US traffic to news sites (behind Google, MSN and Yahoo!), it’s easy its easy to see why Facebook might be keeping CNN up at night.

Twitter, Facebook and Geolocation
The big thing at SXSW this year has been geolocation, and sure enough, Twitter rolled out their geolocation function on twitter.com ahead of this year’s conference. While it’s been possible to access geolocation through Twitter’s API since November last year, only now is it being integrated into Twitter.com for tweets tagged with a location. That said, the integration doesn’t appear to have lasted too long, and it looks like Twitter has just turned off the location functionality. Hopefully we will see it back up again soon.

Meanwhile, Facebook seems to be moving in the same direction. An anonymous source said to be involved in their geolocation project claims that the functionality will be launched at f8, Facebooks’ yearly developer conference.  An update to Facebook’s privacy policy late last year, seems to support this claim:

When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.

According to the source, Facebook is not out to compete with services like Foursquare or Gowalla, but with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. As ever, we’ll be watching this closely.

Facebook vs. The Daily Mail
“The Daily Mail and Facebook are at war, with new media accused of failing to protect children – and old media in the dock for shoddy journalism”. So read the opening paragraph written by Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC where he recapped a high profile battle between one of Britain’s most influential daily newspapers and the world’s most popular social network.

Last week The Daily Mail featured a ‘ghosted’ article by a child-protection expert Mark Williams-Thomas with the headline “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.” In the article, it was claimed that Williams-Thomas attracted sexually motivated messages from series of men when he posed as a teenager on Facebook.

The only problem, however, was that this experiment was not actually conducted on Facebook at all but another unnamed social networking site.

The Daily Mail has since amended the web article, and made a rare concession by printing an apology on page 4 of the paper. It remains to be seen whether Facebook will take legal action for the “false and defamatory statements in the article”, which it had threatened to do when this story first broke.

Sky creates first head of social media position
In a move that demonstrates its social media savvy, Britain’s biggest spender on digital advertsing, Sky, has announced that it is seeking its first head of social media in its marketing team.

The lucky person who steps into the job will be responsible for all social media activity in its brand marketing department and encouraging audience engagement. A Sky spokesman said: “The aim of this position is to offer an in-house specialist to develop digital strategies alongside above-the-line planning”.

Very nicely timed with the announcement by CNN’s President that he’s more worried about social networks than FOX, the first video installment of a unique Facebook documentary called Goa Hippy Tribe has been released.

Goa Hippy Tribe is using Facebook in a number of ways: as subject matter (in particular the re-connection of the eponymous Goan Hippies via the social network); in part for research, production and content, and also as a platform for marketing and distribution.

Whilst the story behind the film itself highlights the role that networks such as Facebook play in creating new stories for documentary to cover, what’s really interesting is the way Facebook is being used to shape the content and format of the work.

The filmmaker, Darius Devas, has been interacting with the community of people who were part of the scene in Goa as he makes the film, not only shaping the way the film evolves, but building a community that is a part of the filmmaking process.

Interviews and other items of ‘micro-content’ have been posted over time, sparking conversations, building shared connections between the audience and involving everyone in the journey of the filmmaker and the film. There’s even a lively discussion on a separate Goa Hippy Tribe Group page considering the role of Facebook as an enabler, versus the inevitable privacy concerns when old photos and stories are made public.

This kind of collaboration would not previously have been possible, and it’s a particularly effective way of increasing the emotional involvement of the audience, who will be more likely to share links and recommend the film to their friends, especially as Facebook provides the means to easily do so.

All of this starts to change the way we think about broadcast. This project has an obvious community interested in the subject, but there are just as many niche audiences outside of hippies in Goa. As CNN’s President, Jonathan Klein puts it: “The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information.” As these “trusted sources” – our friends – become our audience(s), and we involve them the narrative of our own status updates, the relevance and role of the one-way broadcast media comes into question.

BitchBuzz.com founder calls for rethink of blogger relations

PR Week’s video podcast sparked some debate last week on the state of blogger relations in the UK, when Cate Sevilla, founding editor of BitchBuzz.com, told the publication that she wanted PR professionals and bloggers to hold a serious discussion, rather than simply ranting about one another all the time.

It seems that (some) PR practitioners continue to miss the mark when outreaching to bloggers, and have been accused of bad pitches, not doing their research, not reading the target blog, or generally not ‘getting’ bloggers in some cases.

The call for honest and professional feedback by Sevilla is an important one, in order for the industry and this debate to move forward. “Professional bloggers and PROs need each other, so instead of ranting about one another on Twitter, we need to have a serious discussion.”

Bing’s Facebook Page Gets 400,000 New Fans in a Day Through Ad Offer in Farmville
Microsoft ran an advertising offer for Bing within Zynga’s hit game FarmVille, which according to Inside Facebook, netted Bing over 400,000 new fans to their Fan Page in a single day.

Gamers who became a fan of Bing on Facebook earned 3 Farm Cash (the virtual currency used in the game) and caused the page’s popularity to skyrocket from 100,000 to more than 500,000 fans in 24 hours. For those unfamiliar with FarmVille, the Facebook game has over 83.1 million monthly active users, and 28.7 million daily active users according to AppData.

To be sure, the tactic was wildly successful but has attracted criticism from some. Griffin Farley points out:

[the success of the incentive was] very impressive but what is the value of the fan that was bought? Sure the cash was only virtual money but don’t you want true advocates in a Facebook community? I don’t want to have to pay my loyal fans every time I want to engage the community. I want fans that want to be fans of a brand or a branded movement for the sure pleasure of being involved with a bigger community of people.

The Bing Fan Page now has over 592,000 fans. It will be interesting to see what they do with them.

UK ad industry to extend self-regulatory remit to social media
Today it was announced that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) are extending their self-regulatory rules for non-broadcast media (known as the ‘CAP Code’) to ensure that: “marketing communications on advertisers’ own websites and other non paid-for space online, such as in social media, comes within the scope of the code.”

As Mark Sweeney from the Guardian puts it: “the extension to the ad code will ensure that all online marketing will have to be responsible, legal, honest and truthful under the same regulations as, say, press and poster ads.

The new rules are expected to come into force during the third quarter of this year and have the backing of the whole advertising ecosystem (including us!).

Facebook and Twitter mobile users soar according to comScore
Access to social networks via mobile phone has increased rapidly in the last year, according to new research from comScore:

The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.

Much of the growth of mobile social networking has been driven by smartphone users, as better functionality enables millions to access social networking sites via a mobile browser or dedicated apps.

Burson-Marsteller Fortune Global 100 Social Media Study

Burson-Marsteller released the findings of their Fortune Global 100 Social Media Study which looked at the social media usage of the 100 biggest companies on the Fortune 500 list. The study found that 79% of the companies use at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.

Like the Fortune 100 study found, Twitter is the social media platform of choice among the Fortune Global 100. The study found that 65 percent of the largest 100 international companies have active accounts on Twitter, 54 percent have a Facebook fan page, 50 percent have a YouTube channel, and one-third (33 percent) have corporate blogs. Only 20 percent of the major international companies are utilizing all four platforms to engage with stakeholders.

Social media participation by companies varied globally by region, and it appears that large firms are getting more comfortable using social media and are broadcasting less, and engaging more. You can download the complete analysis of these findings as a PDF.

Sony generates over £1m in sales through Twitter
Speaking at the Marketing Week Social Media for Brand Building event, Sony revealed that they generated over £1m in sales through Twitter. Nick Sharples, head of corporate communications has said that Sony sees Twitter “as a viable sales platform, as well as a tool to amplify PR activity.” This revelation by the tech giant echoes the headlines made last December, when Dell announced they had driven US$6.5 million in revenue thanks to Twitter.

Facebook page updates to appear in Google
Last week, Google began indexing status updates from Facebook Pages and including them in its real-time search results. This marks the first time that Google has integrated information from Facebook, and follows similar announcements in recent months that Google had integrated Twitter and MySpace updates in its results.

The information it is allowed to integrate is more limited than the deal the social network has in place with Microsoft’s Bing. Google can only index status updates from Facebook Pages – which are ‘for organisations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner’, according to the network’s own definition, and act more as marketing tools.

Yahoo! signed a deal its own last week with Twitter, “which not only takes in search, but also a deeper integration of the microblogging service’s tools.”