Welcome
to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in
the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams.  For more social
media snippets, follow her on @emodkate  – or for general twittery
@KateVWilliams.

In this update: Will Buzz fly? MySpace gets WD40; and Beaker’s Ballad.

THE HEADLINES …

A proud week for Google, as it presented to the world its latest social media baby:
the sweetly-named Google Buzz. Google is clearly very, very keen to
socialize its offer, and, as a follow-up to its recent launch of Social
Search, it’s effectively turned Gmail into a social network – in the
process delivering what Mashable is calling a “hybrid of Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Yelp.”

Gmail is already the third largest email provider globally – and now
lets users post updates, including YouTube video and Flickr photos, as
well as aggregating other services to enable users to hear their own social circle
above the digital din. Comments on users’ updates will go straight to
their inbox, and friends’ updates will be ranked according to whether
other users have ‘liked’ them or not – so far, so Google.

Both Microsoft (who you’ll recall has a considerable chunk invested in Facebook) and Yahoo were predictably scathing,
with Microsoft sniffing that “busy people don’t want another social
network” and Yahoo needily insisting they’d launched “Yahoo Buzz” years ago. More worrying for Google, though, is its previous form in the social space – if the words Orkut and Jaiku mean nothing to you, the point is made.

Observers call our attention to the fact that Buzz’s Twitter
integration is only half-hearted, and – worse – that the search giant
has not invited the Facebook fairy to the feast: as Mashable continues,
Buzz won’t fly
without Facebook connectivity. Finally, in what is now a rite of
passage for any aspirant social network (though admittedly rarely
before the poor wee thing is a week old) a ‘Huge Privacy Flaw’ has been
identified by Business Insider.

Over at MySpace’s office, it seems the revolving door
has had an enthusiastic application of WD40: Owen Van Natta, announced
as CEO last April, is out after less than a year at the helm.
Commentators had noted that his simultaneous appointment
with Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn amounted to leadership in
triplicate – and parent company News Corp, who last week reported
digital earnings down by some $32million, clearly agrees.

The Digital Economy Bill is insufficiently clear on the detail of its
‘three-strikes’ rule for illegal file-sharers, according to the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights.
The government hasn’t shown how they plan to cut the broadband of
illegal down-loaders without affecting other members of the household,
and may therefore be violating human rights law. The committee was also
troubled by the “over-broad” powers that the bill would give the
authorities.

Meanwhile, in news which will have privacy hawks a-squawk, the FBI has said
it wants ISPs to hold information on every IP address, domain and
website that individuals visit – for two long years. The Feds insist
this is a simple matter of updating the rights they already have over
telephone networks – now largely superceded by the internet – and that
new powers would cover only points of contact, rather than actual
content. Nevertheless, any attempt at legislation is likely to spark a
ferocious response from the US’s hefty privacy lobby.

The Australian government this week suffered a co-ordinated hacktivist attack,
in protest at its plans to lay a comprehensive filter across the
Aussies’ bit of the internet. Hackers papered the PM’s home page with
pornography, and crashed the Australian parliamentary website for
nearly an hour, to express their opposition to the filter.

In an intriguing twist to Google’s Chinese saga,
government authorities claim to have nixed a popular ‘how-to’ site for
cyber-hackers, which they say was responsible for ‘thousands’ of
attacks. Google had responded to the recent hack of activists’ emails
with a refusal to censor its Chinese results – it’s not yet clear if
the government’s announcement is an attempt at a rapprochement.

The Iranian government imposed an info-blockade
on its citizens in the run-up to this week’s anniversary of the Iranian
revolution, during which opposition forces were calling for protestors
to take to the streets. The US State Dept did not mince its words: “It
is clear that the Iranian government fears its own people.”

THE LOWDOWN …

Last week the Facebook page of Colin Gunn – who is serving a 35-year
sentence for conspiracy to murder – was taken down, after police
revealed that he’d been using it to intimidate his old associates. This week the Times reports that Jack Straw has asked Facebook to pull the pages of a further 30 prisoners who’ve been harassing victims and their families via social media.

Young People in ‘Not As Thorough As They Might Be’ Shocker! The Telegraph reports
that, in comparison with older users, youngsters are more likely to
‘flit around’ the net, and less likely to thoroughly research a topic
in depth. They conclude that the internet is rewiring teen’s brains –
though a quick flick through our own school exercise books might have
set them right.

Am I living in a box? Why yes, I am!
‘Controversial’ media personality Tim Shaw will soon be spending 30
days locked alone in a box, unaware of his location, live-streaming
every second to an awestruck world. Since its aims are charitable, it
seems impolite to point out that this box-thing was rather tedious when
that Blaine chap did something similar several years ago. So instead we
will tell you that the person who correctly deduces Tim Shaw’s location
via daily web clues and Google Map references will win £30K and unlock
the box. If no-one does he stays for the full 30 days. In a box.

If you have ever idly wondered whether it’s possible to update an 80s
puppet-based phenomenon for a social media age, we have the answer you
seek: the Muppets present “Beaker’s Ballad,” which is well on its way to becoming a soaraway internet sensation.

With big eyes and comparatively small head, 14-year-old Rebecca Flint from The Isle of Man bears an uncanny resemblance
to a Japanese anime character. Now, in a peculiarly post-modern
variation on the Cinderella fable, she has become a Japanese YouTube
sensation. Videos of Rebecca dancing to J-pop in her bedroom while
dressed as a giant cartoon character have already had 8 million hits –
and now canny promoters have renamed her Beckii Cruel and released a
DVD, which looks set to go straight to number one in the Japanese
charts.

If you are approaching Valentine’s Day with some trepidation – perhaps
anticipating your beloved’s baleful glances across the restaurant
table, as you surreptitiously check Twitter beneath it – then the
following news will be useful. Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher, the world’s longest-married couple, will spend V-day on Twitter, responding to your questions on the secret of sustaining romance. (@longestmarried).

As their entry to a competition by Fireworks Popcorn, Dave Britt and Justin Goeres have created Popcorn Tweets.
Software combs Twitter for the hashtag #popcorn, then launches a
Heath-Robinson-with-robotics contraption which cooks …some popcorn.
Like me, you may be struggling to spot precisely which gap in the
market these fellows are seeking to plug – but it behoves us to
remember that the history of digital innovation is strewn with
successes which met initially with scepticism.

IN OTHER NEWS …

Google has warned the creators of lookey-likey Chinese search engine Goojje
that their logo, which is indeed very similar to the one we all know
and love, infringes their trademark rights, and must therefore go.

The most popular ad shown during the US Super Bowl – traditionally a Big Deal in the Stateside ad industry – was user-generated.
The Doritos ‘Underdog’ ad, which won competition-winner Joshua Svoboda
$600,000 for an initial outlay of $200, prompted the New York Times to
warn: “Be afraid, Madison Avenue. Be very afraid.”

Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer
reveals some surprising findings in the matter of whom we trust online.
According to its latest research, those who believe that their friends
and peers will give reliable information about any given brand has
dropped by nearly half, from 45% two years ago, to only 25% now.

Here’s rather crushing news for Apple – the percentage of consumers who
have heard of the iPad, but are not interested in buying one, has
doubled since its launch – from 26% to a crunchy 52%. Retrovo expresses
the stats in a pretty graphic here.

Commentators have long predicted that the coming election will be
fought on two key battle-grounds: at the school gates, and in social
media. Now both Labour and the Conservatives are running ads on parenting website Mumsnet, which has hosted webchats with all three party leaders. Here, The Telegraph explores how social media is changing the terrain of politics.

New research from the Advertising Association show that UK online advertising spend grew by 4.2% during 2009
– one of only two sectors to do so in the grimmest ad recession since
their quarterly survey began in 1982. The internet’s gain was press
advertising’s loss – it fell by an identical 4.2 percentage points.

Finally, Tuesday was Safer Internet Day,
with a host of launches aimed at keeping kids safe online. CEOP
targeted 5-7 year olds (80% of whom are estimated by Ofcom to use the
net) with a cartoon
aimed at teaching them about trust and what content to put online. The
UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) launched a three-step
campaign called Zip It, Block It, Flag It –including press ads to encourage parents to tell kids to “zip it” when it comes to keeping their passwords private. And Microsoft launched a version of IE8
which allows kids to report worrying websites and to get advice on
cyber-bullying – part of the ‘Click Clever, Click Safe’ campaign which
was launched in December. eModeration’s Tia Fisher gives her thoughtful take on SID2010 here.


That’s all folks!

David Ogilvy is a bit of an icon around our offices.  His basic principles of advertising are a great reminder for anyone in the industry to keep them on the straight and narrow when so many new concepts and trends are buzzing around.

So it was nice to hear about Ogvily London’s pop-up agency in Brixton – designed to help local Brixton businesses get to grips with advertising at a local level, and help fight the recession.

The great thing about working with small businesses is the immediate your work can have.  Ideas can be implemented quickly, and without compromise, and results / feedback quickly felt.  It’s perhaps the rawness of the relationship between advertising and small businesses that is most exciting.  A good idea shifts product.  A bad one keeps product on the shelf.

I’m not sure how many businesses in Brixton took up Ogilvy’s offer, but one of the nicest examples is their consultancy for Brixton Cycles – an institution amongst two-wheeled Brixtonians.  I particularly liked Ogilvy’s suggestion to crowd-source ideas from their customers.  Crowd-sourcing has become a bit of a buzz word, however when it’s implemented in such a small and localised way (as getting ideas for what bike accessories to stock) it actually shows the immediate usefullness of such a concept – something that often gets lost when applied to big corporations.

Applying big ideas (like crowd-sourcing) to small businesses is really satisfying – and something I’ve been trying to do in the last few months whilst advising my father’s specialist security company “The Alarm Monitoring Company” – a small but perfectly formed company specialising in monitored alarm systems.

The approach I’ve been taking is a mix between relationship and social media marketing – so picking up on some of David Ogilvy’s basics – I’ve even created Hathaway man-esque brand character “Chairman Quigley” – whilst at the same time focusing in on slowly optimising word-of-mouth opportunities, and using blogging to increase SEO.

I’ve kept most big ideas under-wraps for the moment, focusing in on getting the basics right, however I have some big ideas planned for the next 6 months to really help my Dad’s company punch above its weight and shift more product in these tough times.  David Ogilvy would be proud  . . .

@Rubber_Republic

After
what feels like an inordinately long labour (mostly because Facebook
kept on changing), we’re proud to give birth to our latest white paper:
‘Moderation in Social Networks’ – free to download from our website.

Marketing to consumers on social networks is a fast-growing area for
brands, who now want to “fish where the fishes are” as Coca-Cola’s
recent social media strategy put it.   The aim of this guide is to arm
brands and agencies with the knowledge they need to deal with
user-generated content on social network pages.

We’ve been moderating an increasing number of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace
and YouTube pages and channels on behalf of agencies and brands, and,
to be honest, it’s not as simple as it might at first appear.

To start with, social networks (and we deal in our white paper with the
‘big four’: MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and YouTube) were not primarily
designed as marketing tools: the rules that govern them are not clear,
and the rapidly-evolving nature of the platforms makes it difficult to
keep abreast of the latest developments. There is little or no
consistency between the processes of the major social networks and this
can be a minefield for brands.

The paper, written by eModeration’s CEO, Tamara Littleton, guides brands through the following issues:

• The status quo: is content safe on social networks? This
  includes a brief look at some of the complex legal issues surrounding
  the responsibility for areas including users’ safety and defamation.
  
• Who is responsible for keeping users safe? This lays out what brands should know about what the big four networks are doing to ensure safety on their sites.
• What is the risk to a brand? This section takes brands
  through the potential risks and pitfalls of a social network campaign
  (focusing on user safety and brand reputation).
• The rules on social networks. Each of the big four social
  networks has a different set of rules and processes to follow when
  engaging with users. This section gives a detailed breakdown of what
  each of the four sites does and doesn’t allow; and a guide to best
  practice for brands on moderating content on each.
• Should a brand moderate a third-party site? This is the big
  question for many brands. This section of the paper lays out questions
  brands should ask themselves, such as how far it knows (and trusts) its
  audience; what the risk might be to a brand’s reputation of being
  associated with negative content; and how to protect users.
• Can brands stop people saying negative things about them?
  There is a very clear difference between moderation and censorship.
  Brands must be prepared to take negative comments on the chin, but they
  don’t have to put up with abusive posts.
• What should a brand look for when moderating content? The
  obvious areas are bullying, abuse or illegal content. But there are
  other, less obvious pitfalls such as avatar images, swear-words in user
  names, harassment messages, spam and off-topic posts.

Keeping it updated:  We’re not pretending that this is an
exhaustive guide, and we know that changes are likely to happen which
will make it out-of-date quite quickly.  That’s why we’re going to ask
for your help to keep it updated, so it will remain a valuable resource
for brands and agencies.  Please add comment below or email me at
tia@emoderation.com with any updates or edits, and we’ll revise it
periodically.

Thanks in advance, and we hope Moderation in Social Networks proves useful to you – let us know!

So I was sent the new Old Spice ad.  It made me laugh.  It made me laugh a lot. LOL,  FTW and the rest.  The problem is it didn’t massively want me to buy Old Spice – it just made me laugh.  So, I thought I’d check out the old Old Spice ads – the ones I grew up with, and the ones that first embedded the brand in my conscious and firmly embedded a bottle of Old Spice on my father’s 80′s style dresser table.

And you know what, I think the old ads are better than the new ones.  And the reason is largely because not only did they make me laugh, but they also made me want to buy Old Spice – out of necessity, after all when a lovely lady in a film feeds you lines like “Old Spice, he sure knows what he’s doing” and then ends with the epic line “Girls like it.  Is there a better reason to wear Old Spice”.  Damn straight there isn’t.  I’m off like a shot to shock up . . .

The challenge of non-interuptive forms of modern / social advertising is to get that balance between entertainment and sell.  The sell in a viral, is largely now largely viewed downstream in the marketing funnel.  The trick is to look at how you can bring that conversion upstream a little something that I’m not sure New Spice gets 100% bang on . . .
New Spice

Old Spice

@Rubber_Republic

Everyone’s  done it.  Whether out of malice or light-hearted ribbing, everyone’s made fun of a ginger.  Or should I say GINGAAAAA.  A couple of weeks back, all this ginger-baiting got too much for one young (and disturbingly angry) American kid who decided to unleash his fury on YouTube by filming an anti-ginger-bashing diatribe in his back yard.

Cue massive YouTube hit and new internet meme.  That’s the “Gingers have souls” meme, with 100′s of YouTubers remixing and parodying our young ginger friend’s video rant to the tune of 3 million+ views.

The thing that fascinates me most is the sheer scale of remixing and “replying” as well as how this meme’s spread so quickly.  And the answer to this seems to lie in a mixture of the film’s subject matter – “life as a persecuted ginger” -  and its execution – a mixture of LOL and WTF.  The fact that everyone knows a Ginger in their email address-book, and that the film is genuinely disturbing/amusing in equal doses, means that it has a defined relevant well-connected community and reasons to share within the community – the two key ingredients to creating true virality. 

My favourite – the Dubstep remix

In a report in Adweek asking how effective Twitter is as a marketing tool it cites several marketers saying they do not think it has anything (or very little to offer them). As well as the three above the piece names other examples of brands that have racked up big fails using Twitter like Delta Airlines (barely updating its account for six months).

What’s interesting about some of those cited like Hyundai is that they don’t think it is for them when rivals (Ford for instance) have had so much success using Twitter.

Joel Ewanick, group vp of marketing for Hyundai told the US ad magazine that: “I’m not a big fan of Twitter. My Twitter meter has gone down.”

He added that for him Facebook is much more useful. He said Twitter had become the butt of a joke. “You start seeing in popular culture people making fun of Twitter.”

Geoff Cottrill, CMO for the Nike-owned Converse (neither brand has much presence on Twitter added to that saying Twitter was overrated.

“Twitter is a little bit overrated. There will be a new media toy that will replace it in a year or two.”

Both put more faith in Facebook as does Procter & Gamble. Last month VentureBlog reported from an event sponsored by P&G the FMCG giant was sceptical about Twitter but had a love of Facebook.

“They described Twitter as much more like television than one might think. To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium — it is best for one to many communications that are short bursts of timely information — but as good as it is for timely information, the P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand building and advertising side.

“For those things that Proctor & Gamble thinks are most interesting and important, they do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook. But they are open to looking at other alternatives that will have more of the engagement and brand building attributes that they hope to exploit in Facebook.”

That could all be true. With all three, but I also wonder if part of it is that they just haven’t found the right way in to get any momentum on Twitter in the way they have on Facebook.

What’s interesting for example about Hyundai and these other examples is that you know (or at least can guess) that unlike Ford, which has been successful, that they have not invested the budget or the time in developing their Twitter activities in the same way.

Ford has made headlines not only with its head of social media Scott Monty, but with the fact that it is investing 25% of its marketing budget into social media. That means not only cash, but time, resource, hard work and some interesting ideas. On the back of that Ford has won a well publicised return.

Twitter as part of a larger social media campaign can work for everyone, but you still need to apply some thought and creativity to how it is being used. Why I’m convinced of that is partly because of the number of examples of markets where there is a dominant player losing out smaller players (Hallmark and Somecards; JetBlue and Delta are two examples). The question is why are they losing out (with Delta we already know that answer — and its failure brings with it a lot of clues to the success of others).

Even the most basic of activity on Twitter such as news and customer updates doesn’t have to be done in the most basic of fashions. Interesting things can be done with just about anything. I think that’s what people using it very successfully have come to understand.

 Welcome
to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in
the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).

In this update: Now Facebook Is Six; ITN’s German Celeb-Channel; and YouTube’s rental predicament.

ON FACEBOOK …

As we briefly noted on Friday, it was Facebook’s 6th Birthday
last week – and (after the piñata and the scary clown) it emerged that
the little tike had scooted past the 400-million-user mark with barely
a grazed knee.

And hasn’t he grown! The ‘Book now rivals Yahoo’s position as the third largest web entity in the world, which would rank it second only to Google and Microsoft.

Monthly users now number more than 108 million – most of whom will now have seen the Book’s revamped homepage,
comprising upscaled photo display, a far easier messaging facility and
rationalized notifications – all messages, updates and alerts are now
pulled together into the top navigation panel.

Most intriguingly though, the search pane has come right out of its
shell – it’s bigger and better and – crucially – more social.
Confirming its centrality
to Facebook’s Bigger Picture, search now auto-completes the names of
those with whom you share the most connections, and indexes items like
Pages and Applications to two degrees – so your friends’ friends
content is now indexed.

What’s more, Facebook’s new payment system, launched last week, is out of the gate like a skinny hound on a fat rabbit.
Initial research suggests users are choosing Facebook’s payment service
over alternatives, and the Book is clawing a whopping 30% from
publishers – revenue from this first year alone looks set to rake in
$125-250 million, if not more. Seems Facebook has Paypal locked in its
sights.

And look! eMarketer calculates
that ads will earn Facebook a stonking $605 million globally this year,
a 39% hike on last year’s figures. And that’s before analytics -
“Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of consumer information” according
to their analyst.

It’s not all Polyanna-this and ‘bright future’-that, however. Last week it was Tim “Made By Many” Malbon’s turn to toll a son’rous bell
for Facebook’s future: he detects hubris, and prophesies doom.
“Facebook is gambling on owning the one social graph (the data about
me, my contacts and what we all do) to rule them all,” he writes. “The
problem is that they don’t.”

ON TWITTER …

For the second week in a row, there is no meaningful Twitter News this
week. Oh, hold on; there’s something scrunched up at the back here…
okay, goddit: Ah yes, only 8% of US teens use Twitter,
and only 1 in 10 school-age kids – shockingly low in the context of
other social networks’ stats. Of this small cohort, the girls are
marginally keener: 13% of 14-17 year old girls are microblogging.

ON YOUTUBE …

ITN is solidifying its YouTube alliance with its first international offering – a German showbiz channel named Promi411. Good news indeed for fans of Claudia Schiffer and.. erm, The Hoff
- but also for those of the broader global celebretariat: the channel
will feature international celebrity news, packaged by a German
producer based at ITN, with all revenue split between ITN and Google.

YouTube’s Great Sundance Rental Experiment – you’ll remember that users
could rent festival entries at $3.99 a pop – has not been an
unmitigated success: they made $10,709.16. From this (or indeed any)
angle, the numbers aren’t great; nevertheless it might be worth casting
your eye over this piece from Venturebeat, which suggest that YouTube rental might just prove itself yet.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL …

Domino’s Pizza has sponsored a “Superfan” Facebook app
which challenges their fans to recruit their own friends to Domino’s
fan page, and doles out pizza-based treats to all, as stats rise.

Pringles is dusting off its “Can Creator”
website, which it launched a couple of years ago to push cause-related
campaigns. For each customized design submitted by the public, they’ll
donate 50 cents to the US Winter Olympics team, to a maximum of $40k.

Honda Europe has launched ‘Live Every Litre’,
a crowd-sourced campaign which asks users to pitch for funding to film
their own extraordinary journeys. Hopefuls will be able to promote
their entries via social networks from the campaign site, and the
winners will be chosen by public vote, with additional input from an
independent panel of bloggers. The campaign coincides with Honda’s
sponsorship of Channel 4 documentaries.

Dunkin’ Donuts recently completed its quirky ‘Twinter Games’
campaign: users tweeted entries to hashtags like
“#3WordsAfterIcedCoffee” to win a fifty-buck gift card. Facebook fans
uploaded photos of themselves cradling iced-coffees, to feature as
‘YeDDi of the Week’. (It’s an initial-based pun on the brand name, in
case you’re reading this first thing before brain kicks in.)

Oh Lord, is it really Valentine’s Day already? [slumps] To keep our
minds off the postman’s knock, Target is offering customers the chance
to choose how it splits the $1million it’s pledged to 5 educational
charities. Its Facebook app, “Super Love Sender” allows users to create interactive cards for their darlings, and to nominate one of the five organizations while doing so.

JetBlue is trying to boost its Facebook fan numbers, in order to match
their million-plus Twitter followers. They’ve launched a sweepstake on
Facebook – the self-explanatory ‘All You Can Jet’ campaign.

Visa’s Go World YouTube channel is having a makeover,
and will platform six new Winter Olympics ads featuring US team
athletes. Their Facebook page will also feature behind-the-scenes
Olympic snippets, and athletes’ own photos and footage.

Benetton is hosting an online casting
- those who think they could become the 2010 face of its brand can
upload photos and video describing their style on YouTube, for an
online casting. The finalists will be chosen by a public/panel combo,
and will be whisked to NYC for an A/W 2010 fashion shoot.

American Greetings is asking its Twitter followers to answer daily questions in their ‘Follow the Love’ contest, for a chance to win cash gift-cards.

Sara Lee’s site offers an interactive tool which shows users the positive environmental impact
of choosing the brand’s EarthGrains bread. To encourage fans towards
its Facebook page, they’re also pledging $1 towards farmer outreach for
each new fan.

Budweiser, to support its big Superbowl buy-in, ran a multi-layered Facebook campaign which asked fans to vote for the ad they wanted to see aired during the game.

Coke Zero is crowd-sourcing basketball fans,
in the newly-launched ‘Dept of Fannovation’ section of their website.
The brand wants fans to come up with creative ways to experience NCAA’s
March Madness (bi-i-ig tournament, for those Brits who don’t know). The
top 64 submissions will compete for $10,000 and game tickets, with the
online fan community voting for the most intriguing ideas.


Jim Beam Bourbon is asking the friends and families of US servicemen and women
to nominate them to win VIP event trip packages, through their Facebook
Fan Page. It’s an extension of their relationship with Operation
Homefront – which helps returning U.S. soldiers adjust.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES …

Linden Lab is in the process of shutting down its barely-used Second Life forums,
and replacing them with new discussion areas in its Clearspace
blog/forum hybrid. The Labs announced that “the forums have become
jammed with cruft over the years” – previously-released figures showed
that as few as 700 of 18.1 million registered users had ever posted in
the forums.

Sid Meier’s Civilization is coming Facebook,
in what Mashable predicts may well be an excellent game/platform
hook-up. The beta will be along ‘soon’ – the full game, not till next
year.

What might be the implications of Google’s new StreetView patent on ad
overlays? Dan Misener discusses the impact on real/virtual world
advertising in this podcast.

THINKING …

If you have pondering time this week, might we suggest the following?

A concise and to-the-point pep-talk from Aliza Freud to get your community-building juices pumping.

On which topic, Radian6’s recently published e-book Building and Sustaining Brand Communities looks as though it might be a rewarding read.

That’s all folks!

Ok, so they may never win a Cannes Lion. I’m not too cool to admit I love the Budweiser Clydesdales.

And I am not alone. You’ve probably heard that Budweiser reversed a decision not to run a Clydesdales spot this year based on fan demand. Although I suspect the initial ‘no’ was just an engineered Facebook page traffic driver.

But no harm, no foul. Why shouldn’t a mass market brand pander to the tastes of the mass market in their ads as they do in their beer? These ads are classics. I’m American, but I don’t think you have to be to get misty at the post 9/11 one, or my own favorite called ‘The American Dream’ where a young colt gets an unseen assist from his parents. There are some fun silly ones too. Do you have a favorite?

Take my TweetSwell poll via Twitter: What team will win Super Bowl XLIV?

Welcome
to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in
the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).

In this update: Do U Haiku?; Facebook in ‘News’ news; and Engadget’s off-switch.

And do remember to check back later in the week, when we’ll be casting
a perky eye over Facebook, Twitter, and the most social brands.

THE HEADLINES …

Hillary Clinton this week dispensed a blunt warning:
the West urgently needs to develop its virtual defences against cyber
terrorism. The US Secretary of State declared that tanks, bombers and
missiles were “no longer sufficient” to protect cyber and energy
networks – nor to neutralise ‘threats of terrorism and destructive
ideologies.’

A Tory government would apply market-based thinking
to deliver superfast broadband speeds of ‘up to 100 Mbps’, the Shadow
Chancellor George Osborne said this week. He’d let private investors
piggy-back BT’s ‘local loop monopoly’ to fund cabling upgrades – and
would happily extend the current 3.5% levy on the license fee if
private investment failed. But Labour critics crowed
that the move would be cheering news for both Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, and
The Carphone Warehouse – whose cofounder has donated £150,000 to Tory
Party coffers.

Ach, they grow so fast! You look away for five minutes and the next
thing you know, your little social network (bear with me) has grown
into a strapping news portal! Facebook this week celebrated its 6th (I know!) birthday by crossing the 400m user mark, updating its look
- and becoming a player in online news. Last week, 3.5% of visits to
sites in the news and media category came from Facebook – up from just
1% this time last year, and comfortably outranking Google News to claim
fourth place in the Big List of News Portals. (Intriguingly, Venturebeat here analyses the extent that Facebook could administer First Aid to newspapers.)

Elsewhere in the world of online news, a steely-jawed (bear with me again) Rupert Murdoch reiterated his attachment
to paywalls – and simultaneously delivered a sideswipe at The
Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger, who recently said that news-subscriptions
were akin to “sleepwalking to oblivion”. Murdoch’s response: a John
Wayne-esque “sounds like BS to me”.

Meanwhile, NewsCorp’s strategy is attracting renewed attention, after Star TV’s head honcho was bussed in
to oversee News International’s online sites. Commentators are
intrigued by the possibility that Mr Murdoch is contemplating an extra
50p a week on Sky subscriptions, to help pull off his putative paywall
plans – and they cite magazine rival Newsday’s recently-averted paywall disaster,
in which a laughable 35 initial subscribers to Newsday.com was
translated into a respectable 1.5m users by bundling online news in
with cable subscriptions.

Mega-tech site Engadget took action
this week, after a mass Trollathon broke out on their comments pages,
following their coverage of the iPad launch. After page upon page of
abusive posts – many of which accused the site of being Apple stooges –
Engadget’s weary editor Joshua Topolsky took action, and flicked the
‘comments’ switch to OFF. Whilst the strategy does not feature heavily
in the book of social media best practice, it’s hard not to admire his
grit (though we’d love you to come and have a word with us next time,
Josh…)

THE LOWDOWN …

Three elegiac cheers for Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who poignantly tweeted
his resignation haiku this week: “Financial crisis / Stalled too many
customers / CEO no more.” Here at the Round-up we feel that Haiku – a
form beloved of all rilly-deep (but also rilly time-poor) thinkers
everywhere – should certainly be more widely employed; join us in
agitating loudly for Twitter to formally adopt a five-seven-five
syllable rhyme-scheme for its outage notices.

She’s in and out like a fiddler’s elbow, that Lily Allen. The Sun reports that the headstrong songstress has at last returned to Twitter,
after an interruption of four whole months. “Hello, I’m back” was her
re-opening gambit – and she promises “exciting news” to come. Out of
chaos, comes order.

In confirmation that there’s nothing we Websters like more than a
snifter of salacious tittle-tattle with our morning tea, Forbes
magazine has crowned Perez Hilton King of the Web
- news which cannot but conjure visions of Michael Arrington (2nd),
Pete Cashmore (3rd), and those Twitter guys (4th) all doing brave
smiles, whilst furiously penning Op Eds deploring the rise of Sleb-Web
culture.

Facebook has rushed to nix the page belonging to notorious underworld boss
Colin Gunn, after he used the network to make not-even-thinly-veiled
threats against former associates. The gangster – who is currently
serving a 35-year sentence for conspiracy to murder – managed to
maintain a Facebook page despite rules which say prisoner’s access to
the internet must be strictly supervised.

And in Incontrovertible Proof that the coming general election will be
all about social media (well, maybe a bit about the Economy, and Tax,
and other stuff), Labour MP Derek Wyatt has launched an iPhone app
to let voters tell their local MP what they think. Currently, Mr Wyatt
is the only member using the service – and he’s stepping down at the
next election – but we’re quite sure more will be along presently.

IN OTHER NEWS …

In an admirably imaginative collaboration, Childline has partnered
with teen girls’ social net Stardoll to encourage young women to
express their emotions, through a range of online tools. The move
follows an earlier partnership during National Beat Bullying Week – a
contest which attracted 250,000 votes. Read more here on the eModeration Blog.

In a comprehensive rundown of the social media habits of teens and young adults, the Pew Research Centre reports that 62% of US teens
head online for news and current affairs – rising to a mammoth 77%
during a major event like an election; a massive 86% of social
networking teens post comments on friend’s pages; and teen blogging has
dropped from 28% to 14%. For the full monty, Pew’s research is here.

Meanwhile, another study finds a link between excessive internet use and depression – but doesn’t say which comes first. Researchers from Leeds University
found that small proportion of teenage web users could be classed as
‘addicts’ – and that this group were more likely to also suffer from
depressive illness.

Speculation mounts that Amazon is planning to upgrade
its e-reader Kindle with touch-screen tech, to go head to head with the
iPad. The company this week acquired New York start-up Toucho, which
has recently been working on an interpolated, pressure-based – and
cheap – touch-screen capability.

In other Amazon news, the e-tail giant was this week forced to back down
in its standoff with publisher Macmillan, and accede to the publisher’s
demands for a higher cover price for bestseller and hardback releases.
Macmillan’s titles – including the current Man Booker winner – were
briefly removed from Amazon’s virtual shelves as the two tussled over a
disputed price hike.

Skittles.com – whose social media makeover
gained much industry attention last year for its inclusion of a live
stream of Tweets on the brand, whether or not they were positive – has
stepped back from a strategy of absolute transparency. The new site
offers users a range of ‘offbeat’ shareable content including YouTube
videos and quirky photos – but the ‘chatter’ stream has now gone.

That’s all folks!