Since just before Christmas we’ve been working with Amnesty UK’s web team on a project to optimise the use of external social media services. This involved an audit, mapping and optimisation exercise of all official (Amnesty-run) and supporter-run groups and pages on Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and blogs. The case study below provides some real data (often missing in social media case studies) Made by Many has worked with Amnesty UK since January ‘08, and helped them design and build ProtectTheHuman.com - their digital activism community.

Image by Kaptain Kobold via Flickr Now they have continued their innovative approaches to engagement and embraced social media. What makes this site particularly interesting, though, is its use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr as a way of generating content for the site and promoting participation. The LEGO CLICK community is a great example of the hub-and-spoke model of social LEGO is a brand that many people are very passionate about, a brand people love and we’ve written before about how they use segmentation to engage their consumer base from children to enthusiasts in an innovative way.

Recently I wrote a post that received a lot of attention - more than I would have expected: How I use social media . At At the end of the post, I promised to write about WHAT social media I currently use. started making a list of all the social media I use.  So here it is. I

This afternoon I’m spending a half hour on a Skype video conversation to share a bit of how I use social media. figured it would be good to exercise my memory a bit and unearth some of the key stories that led me to to my social media use today, and perhaps surface some of my patterns. The history approach also shows that while the term “social media” was not in play when I jumped in, the social use of online media has been growing for many years - well I These roots are significant because our patterns of use, our ways of embracing or rejecting technology

In this episode of Social Media Business podcast, the concept of freemium is introduced – what it is, how Flickr, LinkedIn, SecondLife are making millions of dollars from giving stuff away for free. This podcast comes from an overview of social media monetization revenues presentations and courses that I’ve been running for the last few years. We look at Freemium revenue in social networks and online communities including asking that: if freemium is the business model of giving it all (or most) of the services away for free , how can you then charge for it?

Thanks to Clay McDaniel in 13 Essential Social-Media 'Listening Tools': MarketingProfs Articles , and Jake Hird for his post on econsultancy.com Free Apps · Addict-o-matic – Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results · BackType - a comments search and tracking engine · Bloglines - A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client · Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere. · BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within

Image by late night movie via Flickr In our last post we looked at why every business needs a social media policy . But if you’re writing your social media policy for employees, what should it include? Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. And the fact that the most important thing for any business is to have a policy in the first place. What kind of guidelines should you give the people who work at your business.

Image by ajburgess via Flickr have a client who once said to me: “We want to use social media to attract more complaints” . This may seem an odd thing to say, all to often attracting complaints is a reason people cite for being anxious about using social media . People use social media for lots of things, but they often use it to express their opinion I But this client knew that one part of there service didn’t always perform as well as they might hope.

It is the insight into the attitudes to branded content, pages and applications that is, however, most interesting from a social media marketing perspective. Rather than a brand trying to engage people separately in Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and every other social network and forum site, it is better to use these as gateways to somewhere else. Components of Social Media Marketing: The Moogis Case Research released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK suggests that people are growing increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages or install brand applications in Facebook and other social networks .

Image by koalazymonkey via Flickr One clear and valuable use for them has become clear – as a free social media monitoring tool. Twitter Lists for social media monitoring Social media monitoring is the best way for brands to understand who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. We’ve posted before about why Twitter lists are great and some of the uses that can be made with them. Over the last few weeks since they were launched to all users, we have been experimenting with them at FreshNetworks and