This week Gordon Brown made a major announcement on YouTube that totally backfired. That he used YouTube to do it is a sideshow. It’s the same for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and online communities. There can be an unhealthy obsession with getting a brand page up on Facebook or being sure to have a company Twitter account. The UK press has been right to jump on this poor use of social media as a disaster for the Prime Minister. But let’s be clear, this is an example of how not to use a social media tool, it is not an example of the tool being

This week I was asked to talk to the Marketing Directors Network in London about how organisations are using Twitter. We’ve written before about how celebrities are using Twitter and how organisations are using Twitter as an engagement tool . In both cases, perhaps the best advice is just to try using Twitter and to see what happens. Image by MartinPhotoSport via Flickr As a rapidly growing site , Twitter is changing on a daily basis.

Again this week, Twitter has been high on the media agenda. As is always the case during a time of innovation, brands are experimenting with lots of different ways of using Twitter. Time will tell which are the most appropriate and which have the highest return on investment, but it is worth all brands learning the basics of Twitter usage for marketing purposes and in particular for PR. Some successfully and some less so. That’s why Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks is Conner Weisgerber ’s presentation on Twitter for PR.

Here’s a counter that displays growth of Twitter, money spent on Facebook gifts, number of SMS’s sent worldwide second by second. Technorati Tags: counter , Facebook , Gary Hayes , numbers , Online Communities , social media , social networks , statistics , Twitter , youtube ...Tags: Tags: Online Communities social media social networks statistics counter Social Media statistics: Ever wondered how many people are blogging, uploading videos, tweeting right at this very minute ? Social Network activity

Just ignore all the people joining Facebook, uploading YouTube videos and writing blog posts while we chatter here about whether journalists do it  better. In fact as more world leaders move onto Twitter, the horses mouth has never been so evident. Or a Twitterer? I spoke at Media140 Sydney – I want to highlight some of the “arguments” used against social media by the panels, also focus on Everybody co-creating The Human Narrative and the diminishing role of journalists who take news from one part  of the community and deliver it to another part:  It’s not YOUR content.

Facebook would be the fourth largest country in the world, several top Twitter people have more followers than many countries have people, and 24 of the top 25 newspapers have seen significant drops in print circulation.& Here is an interesting video on the social media revolution that I learned through my friend Don Lesser .  Many 0160;Many of you may have seen it as it had over 1.3

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. And they can suggest ideas by video by tagging on YouTube in the same manner. In parts it is not dissimilar to the California Governor’s use of Twitter to harvest ideas for MyIdea4CA in 2009. Image by Kaptain Kobold via Flickr 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

This time around with something really exciting and truly innovative that has been going on in my mind the entire day, ever since I watched a specific YouTube video that I bumped into from an earlier tweet from the always insightful Mike Wesch referencing an experiment done by Dr . Then you must watch The Twitter Experiment by Dr. After a couple of days off from my regular blogging activities, as I went on a business trip to Madrid for a couple of days end of last week to share some more thoughts and insights on social software adoption at an internal event, I am now back once more.

This is really one of the best explanations I’ve seen on the underlying dynamics of Twitter! Kevin Marks: “ Flow : At it heart Twitter is a flow - it doesn’t present an unread count of messages, just a list of recent ones, so you don’t have email’s inbox problem - the implicit pressure to turn bold things plain and get that unread number down. Phatic : The key to Twitter is that it is phatic - full of social gestures that are like apes grooming Instead, you can dip in and out of it, when you have time, and what you see is notes from people you care about.

I have been using Twitter now for over two and a half years and, all along, if you have been following some of my recent twitterings , you would know how I seem to keep having a love / hate relationship with it. So when Bill Ives just recently questioned whether you could make use of Twitter as a Personal Knowledge Management tool I couldn’t help but wonder myself whether I am using it as well as my PKM tool of choice, along with my own personal business blog and a couple of other tools. It still remains one of my favourite Web 2.0 tools out there on