The importance of being a good follower - and a bad dancer

Many of our clients are just starting to take advantage of social media for their internal projects. This is valuable food for thought.

Everything you need to know about social media in less than five minutes

If you only watch one video about social media this week/month/year (and don't mind Fatboy Slim), watch this one for a quick infoburst.

Greenpeace builds "Twitwall" outside Nestlé offices

Right NOW, you can write a tweet containing the word "Nestlé" and it will appear on the Twitwall outside Nestlé headquarters where the company's shareholders are meeting. To see the messages as they come in, click here.

For more on why Nestlé is bad, read our previous post. And click this link to see why Nestlé's real problem is customer relations.

Someone somewhere uses the word "Flashmob"

This is "geek comedian" Tom Scott talking at an Ignite event in London. The idea is that you get five minutes to give a 20-slide presentation on whatever you want.

What people thought about Twitter, before Twitter

The clip above was made in 2006, before anyone had ever heard of Twitter and mySpace was all the rage. Amazing, really.

The lesson: Even if you are web user but not a believer in Twitter, there will almost certainly be a web-based service suitable for you and beneficial to your business. That's a fact.

As ubiquitous social media site Mashable summarises, these services are genuinely useful:

Although previously unfamiliar with the service, the people in the video accurately describe nearly all the important aspects of Twitter – it’s web based (and therefore not spamming your phone), it’s a great way to scan your friends’ lifestream (i.e. what they’ve been up to all day), it’s a great way to share your location with everyone, it’s very much like a group SMS, and adding videos and pictures into the mix could improve the experience tremendously.

These might seem obvious today, but back in 2006. smartphones weren’t very popular, and Twitter has started seriously integrating location-based features in the last year or so. So, there you have it: sometimes you just need to ask people what they want, and they’ll give you great answers on how to evolve your service.

A Hunch about the future of social media

The wealth of user-generated content being posted to the web is just waiting to be harvested and put to new uses. Even the closed, old-media world of CNN is using Twitter as a quick way to gauge public opinion - rather than the (relatively) old system text messages and online polls. But technology can go much further than just playing with the results of Twitter searches including words like "good" and "bad" to generate data.

I first heard about Hunch some time ago when it was first launched, and it appears it has gained some traction since then. Despite being difficult to fathom at first, it appears to provide targeted user-generated advice with little or no direct interaction with actual other users. And because it sucks you in (in a good way), it might just work.

The site bases its results on a combination of user reviews and product data plus information on users gleaned from fun questions ranging from whether "you spoon or get spooned" in bed and the number of greeting cards you sent last year to whether you would bank with Google or vote liberal or conservative. Try it, it's fun.

And you can modify the results at any time by answering more questions about yourself, what you are looking for and stating your preferences. If you know about a subject, you can also add your comments and recommendations to other users - after all, it's nice to be helpful.

I tried searching for "bicycles" and received instant assistance not only in choosing the right type of bike, but also makes and models to fit my budget and preference. Football boots, the same, although the choice on offer is very limited. Hunch will even help you work out which (football or other) position is best for you. It's like those stupid questionnaires you get on Facebook, only far better.

The site is fun to browse around and the questions are engaging, but the proof of the pudding is when you are actually looking for useful information. Will it rival Google and Amazon, who revolutionised the web and e-commerce, through search and user comments respectively? I don't know, but I have a hunch... At the very least, it is a great example of how the web could work to engage users with your site.

Social media policies for your company

With employees blogging, using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to document their lives, this has major implications for companies who have traditionally wanted to keep their laundry, dirty or otherwise, private. Now they are faced with a choice - to ban talking about work online altogether or embracing it with some rules.

This site has collected a host of links to the social media policies of various companies to help you find the one for your company, from the BBC to IBM to the Harvard Business School.