More Digital blog

When it was announced that BBC 6 Music was to be axed, a resounding cry echoed through the land (or more correctly, ‘through the social media’): ‘How can they do this?’ ‘We are the ones paying, so we should have our say!’ Along with loads of indignation and brouhaha like it.

This is all very well, but I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone talk about the station before the closure was announced, except perhaps my geeky brother and brainy co- worker. Let’s remember it was a digital station (only 32.1% of households own a DAB set) with only had an audience of 70,000. So, what was it that made the public get together and start an almighty social media campaign to Save 6 Music (not to mention helpsave6music. and love6music)?

John Morter, the man behind the Rage Against the Machine Christmas Number One campaign, immediately set up a new Facebook campaign on hearing news of the cuts.

Judging by Morter’s previous successful campaign, the BBC brass were probably quaking in their boots at the campaign. Probably more so by this outbreak of online fury, than by the discussion of the matter in parliament.

Anyway, as you have probably heard, it was announced yesterday that BBC 6 Music, would not be closed, but whether this is due to the social media campaigns or other powers we will never know (unless they tell us).

As Guardian blogger Steve Bushfield, pointed out, in the past a few letters would have been sent, which could easily be ignored. Today however 180,00 people joined the Save 6 Music campaigns and millions of tweets were hash-tagged #save6music. There was still a few old fashioned letters, 250 to be precise, but at the same time there were over 25,000 emails.

On the digital space people can react very easily to things they don’t like, they can just retweet things or ‘like’ something with very little effort. They don’t need to sit down and write a letter. Could it be that the support for 6 Music had actually very little to do with the station itself, but more to do with people climbing on board the latest trending topic?

This ties in with the idea that people are more likely to buy something if they see their friends like it, so if they see them tweet about 6 Music, will it make them want to be part of the action as well? Think about the Rage Against The Machine campaign, did all those who bought the single really like them, or was it more to do with getting one up on ‘the man’? And in this case is ‘the man’ the BBC? Even if people haven’t listened to BBC 6 before, many may not like the idea that they have no say over something which they pay money towards. Figures show that twice as many people listen to 6 Music now as did prior to the campaign.

Social media may not have played the whole part in this, but we know from previous campaigns that social media can be successful.

Take the election of Obama aka the ‘First Social Media President’ for example. During his campaign his team posted 1,800 videos to YouTube, which if you think in comparison to Gordon Brown’s campaign is an extraordinary number. He also used Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and various blogs as a way to connect with people and communicate with them.

Then there was the Compare the Meerkat campaign. They took the meerkat from their TV adverts, Aleksandr Orlov, gave him a twitter account with witty tweets, a Facebook fanpage and ‘simples’, you have a phenomenon.

6 Music, in many people’s minds is a very good station, but perhaps it just hadn’t been publicised well enough to get the amount of listeners it needed to look like a money making station to the BBC. After this ‘will they, won’t they axe the show’ hoo haa, it looks like it now has the audience it deserves.

Now what remains to be seen is if the product is as good as the marketing campaign, even if it is a very modern social media marketing campaign.

So you’ve got a small business, it’s coming up to a year old and things have kind of come to stand still. All the exciting plans you had for social media marketing have pretty much amounted to nothing and in your depression you haven’t logged on to Twitter in over a month.

Do not panic. This is much more common than you may think. With everybody talking about the power of social media it’s easy to think that it solves everything and brings in thousands of new clients daily.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Achieving results from using social media actually requires hours of patience and persistence, it definitely doesn’t happen over night.

Here are a few tips and ideas I’ve come up with to help keep your social media campaign moving forward but also how to keep it fresh and exciting and drawing in visitors.

1. Remember that even though you are using social media to help your business, it is not business media. The key word is ” social”, so you have to be social. Communicate with as many people as you can, look alive not just a corporate machine churning out tweets at the same time every day.

2. Assign a part of your day for purely social media work. Don’t leave it until the last part of your day and likewise don’t do it as the first. Use it as a break from your normal work and then it won’t seem like a chore but something fun to do.

I would personally recommend spending 15 minutes a day at least on each social media site. That time should be divided up. To be successful in the online world you need to a) spend time listening and checking out what is going on, whether it’s your rival, your fans or the news. You need to know what is happening, keep your finger on the pulse so you can react accordingly. b) Reply to the things people say to you, let them know you are real. Retweet some of their tweets, comment on their things. Again it comes down to interaction. c) you need to add new content, this is what gets you noticed by the search engines.

3. Be consistent with all of the above. If you talk to your followers on a regular basis they will soon become loyal . Just a small lapse will send them into the arms of another company, it’s a fickle and fast moving world where you have to communicate to stay ahead of the game.

4. Do something a little quirky, try something no one else has done, it may not work but it will get you noticed. Why not try something like having a guest tweeter for the week?

5. Find ways to engage the internet savvy generation. It’s not going to work offering them things that take ages to collect like vouchers. Pizza Express have the right idea, they send emails out offering 2 for 1 main meals. You can print it off there and then.

Or what about the app Foursquare, their recent collaboration with 8coupons in New York meant that Foursquare users received automatic notifications with discounts when they were in a 3 block radius of an 8coupon deal. This went down pretty well because it was relevant and instant, two things that are crucial to bear in mind as they are the two things people want most.

And finally link all your social media sites together and start to communicate, communicate, communicate. Be patient, you won’t see results straight away  but with a bit of perseverance you will.

The World Cup 2010 is exciting for a number of reasons, firstly we all love a good game of footie and pretending that England is in with a chance, secondly because of the wags, they have all been banned this year, ha and lastly because it will unite the world of social media with the masses.

If you think back to the last World Cup 2006 (I know it wasn’t that long ago but many of us spent it in a drunken stupor) the concept of social media was pretty unformed.

In fact most of the things we use daily now, didn’t even exist. We had YouTube but it wasn’t used nearly as much as it is today. Facebook existed but wasn’t open to the general public until that September, and Twitter, well that was just an apple in it’s mother’s (or Jack Dorsey’s) eye.

So, basically it just didn’t really exist. There was no updating your status every time someone scored a goal, no tweet about who played well and definitely no revealing the squad before it was officially announced. It’s not like today where 50 million tweets are sent daily and Facebook boasts more than 400 million active users.

A few days ago the Twittersphere was going crazy. The Football Association’s website crashed due to the number of desperate fans trying to find out the squad. So where did they turn? Twitter to speculate and spy.

The Daily Express’s Matt Law was one of the first to break the news of Walcott’s omission “Walcott out of England World Cup squad,” he tweeted. “Gutted for him.” Naughty naughty, this was before the FA or Fabio Capello had made an official statement. It wasn’t long until other members of the media tweeted about who was in and who was out.

Not a good start for the FA but it clearly shows the way that football commentary for this year is going to go.

CNN recently poitned out that the World Cup is the biggest thing to ever hit Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Every website these days has links to their social media pages, so whenever the World Cup is written about this year, it will lead to major traffic and huge usage of the sites.

The head of new media for FIFA told CNN “Football is the world’s biggest sport, so the world will practically stop for the month of the World Cup. There will be so much more media consumed, used and published in 2010 than in 2006. Social media can bring fans closer together and give fans more opportunity to communicate with each other,”

Robin Sloan, who works for Twitter on media partnership confirmed this saying: “Our notion is that [the World Cup] will eclipse everything we have seen so far [on Twitter] including the U.S. election, the Oscars or the Super Bowl, simply because it is so international.”

And lets not forget it’s won’t only be the fans using social media during the World Cup. It is thought that advertisers will use it for marketing rather than more traditional methods.

Callum MacDougal, the director of global marketing partnerships for Sony Ericsson, the official handset makers of the 2010 finals tells Reuters.com: “We have made the conscious decision to steer away from the traditional branding route… Instead we are going straight to online fan communities through popular social networking channels.”

And if you think about it, why wouldn’t they use it? It’s much cheaper than more traditional advertising, it’s current, it gets the public involved and it is proven to work.

So, those of you who love football and love social media this is a match made in heaven. If you aren’t a big user of social media this may be the time to get involved, especially if you like football because it is bound to be the best way to keep up to date with what is going on and to have your say.
It’s officially the summer of social media and South Africa. Come on England!

Have you ever submitted your well-written, thoroughly-researched article through to an aggregate site and watched it flounder as endless top-tens and ridiculous controversy soars to the top of people’s reading lists? I can identify with you if you’re one of the many suffering from what I’d like to call “aggregate aggravation syndrome.” It’s a tough disorder to crack, but with the right content and the right attitude to summarising and pitching your content to a global, news-hungry audience, this can all change easily enough.

Realistically, it’s just a case of making sure your article looks more interesting than all the others, and I’m sure we’d all love to think it was as simple as that. Unfortunately, it’s not. Your article remains a needle in a haystack, and it’s your job to make sure it reaches the eyes and ears of every single industry-related party and all the genre-disinterested browsers it can. It’s a tough gig but there are possibilities you may have overlooked, and of course, contraversial strategies you may be using that are, much to your shock, having the opposite effect.

Bigger than Elvis

So, say you’ve written a long, sprawling article on SEO, and it encompasses research, interviews, and a level of writing rarely seen since The Guardian was released that morning. You’re happy with the work, MS Word is letting it go without so much as a single squiggly red or green line, and you’re so into your own work that sharing it with the world seems like the only viable option. So where to go from here? Why, to an aggregate site, of course!

Let me explain this logic with a sobering fact. If you’re blogging, right now, on a WordPress.com account, there are over 300’000 new posts today alone. That’s somewhere in the region of thirty new books full of articles, and you know at least one of them is likely to be similar to yours over the course of the week. Three hundred thousand. Let that sink in for a moment. What chance does yours have, even with tags and that awesome graph you made in Excel? Not many. In fact, one of my highest-traffic articles of all time on my personal blog was a random rant about a LEGO version of a Harry Potter videogame. A year or more later, and it’s ranked thousands of hits, and it was never submitted.

The point I’m making is that the internet is a seriously fickle thing. Take a look at the front page of Digg and tell me what you see. Today, for example, there are a range of articles, but most of them focus on three key elements of global-appeal news: danger, drama and pictures. If we drift into the technology section, as this is where you’re far more likely to turn up (or browse – all news bar the exclusive is, to some degree, regurgitation), then we begin to see a different pattern: humour, heated debate, and leaked intel on new tech. The reason the pattens change is because as news and articles become more specialist, more niche, readers are absorbing writing whose mindset, tone and texture more closely reflect their target audience.

I’d just like to say a few words

Every time you write a new article, think of how you’d pitch it as a freelance piece. I’m serious. I know no one wants to voluntarily pitch freelance pieces ever again if they can avoid it, as it’s something of a humiliating, degrading, grinding process that kills the soul and maims the ego. But it’s also a brilliant acid test – if you could pitch your article to me in ten words, using as much or as little jargon as possible, I can tell you whether or not it’ll work. Let’s take a look at a few high-ranking examples of more opinion-based pieces.

Now, to start with, I found an article that I think is relevant to anyone who works on websites that use Adobe’s wonder-project, Flash. The title is “Is Flash Dead? The Future of Adobe’s Plug-In.” Now, this is a fairly controversial thing to say, but what’s clever is the question mark placed after the opening statement itself. This is key – if you’re debating something about social media, and you had the choice between “Twitter is Pointless” and “Is Twitter Pointless?”, choose the second option. The reason for this is you’re posing as a neutral party, even if this isn’t the case. The decision as to whether or not to invest ten minutes reading an article of considerable depth and debate, and then responding in the comments thread, is often one made in the opening few moments of reading an article’s title and subtitle. By phrasing the controversial statement as a question, it invites debate without inviting wrath or apathy and zero click-throughs from offended parties who see you as a prejudiced commentator.

The second example I’d like to give as a great example of effective aggregate-site-management is “Fortune 100 Companies Leveraging Social Media (Infographic)“. Now, this may seem a tad deep and a little too serious, but this is currently the top Digg article on a search for “social media”. Social media’s a relaxed sport, at best, and not something you can cover without being a little relaxed. This is also a graph site, which suits that industry perfectly – anyone using FaceBook and Twitter is going to want new-age ways of communicating information, and nothing does this better than indicating to them that all they’re in for is a slick diagram rather than 1000 words of prosaic musing on the subject.

It also has stick figures.

Seriously, though, it’s a great way of dragging people in. Entertain them. Tempt them. Make them curious or make them mad, and let them click through to shower you with praise or hatred. One of the most irritating sites in the universe, in my games journalism days, was also one of the most successful, because it kept encouraging heated, angry debate between Sony loyalists and Microsoft fan-soldiers. With social media, why not talk about the advantages of Twitter over Facebook, or why Bebo’s a lost, pointless art? Tempt them in with your tag-line the same way you would if you were designing a film poster, and watch your Diggs soar.

The recent BP oil spill has created two different disasters, firstly the devastation to the ocean and surrounding environment but secondly the ruining of BP’s image.

There is no two ways about it, the PR has been terrible and could possibly have affected the company beyond repair, perhaps more than the spill itself.

It took BP seven days to tweet a response to the situation and even when they did it was a mundane, impersonal tweet. There was no reaching out to the victims and those affected or even some reassurance that they were doing what they could to rectify the situation.

Why did it take them seven days? In a situation like this social media could have been a great way to get in the public’s good books, constant tweeting with apologies and updates would surely have been appreciated.

What they did finally come up with was a website sponsored by Deepwater Horizon Response. I say sponsored but there is in fact very little evidence that BP is even involved with it. It is this web-page that is using social media to it’s advantage and encouraging people to interact. I can’t help but think it’s all come a bit to late and the lack of apparent BP involvement isn’t helping the brand.

Although this case is on a much larger scale than we will hopefully ever have to deal with, there is quite a lot that companies can take away from this to avoid a similar disaster.

Firstly be quick- if there is a problem, try and beat the more traditional forms of media with your social media sites. That way you can say what you want to first without the facts being blurred in anyway.

Apologize straight away- if you use Twitter or Facebook to immediately admit it when you make a mistake people will be much quicker to forgive you. The public like to know that it is a human behind a brand or company. The more you engage with them and the more vulnerable you are the more comfortable they will feel with you.

Don’t be afraid- one argument I’ve heard is that BP were worried that by using social media to talk about the problem it would trivialize it. This is not the case, we live in an age where so much is determined by what we read on social media sites. It is often people’s first port of call for information. It is how we communicate, share ideas and build up business. If we use it to promote the good things, we must also use it to say sorry when we have made a mistake.

The oil spill is still causing major problems and extreme worry. Unfortunately I don’t think anything BP say now will make the public believe in them as company again.

When venturing into the world of social media for the first time, with the intention of increasing your business growth as a result, it’s sometimes a daunting and slow process, with a lot of uncertainty and insecurity thrown in for extra discomfort. But a look into the effect of social media on small businesses is sometimes enough to turn even the most archaic workplace into a haven of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Let me hit you with a scary statistic. The world’s most widely read newspaper – and this will come as a shock to devotees of USA Today – is the Times of India, with over three million copies read every day. Add to that the rest of the top ten and their respective circulation figures and you’re looking at around 18.7 million papers being read on a daily basis in the top ten around the world. That’s almost twenty million pairs of eyes looking at advertising, news, gossip and other sources of information that would, surely, cancel out any effect of word-of-mouth product, service and business recommendations. Right?

Wrong. Twitter, as of January this year, has 75 million users and climbing. Say each of those users don’t post more than once a day, but they read the hundred or more tweets of other people. That’s a 300%-plus advantage over the papers we read, filled with adverts that are never taken is as readily as a friend’s opinion, be it positive or negative. In fact, Buzz Agent is commonly quoted as indicating that a word-of-mouth recommendation will do more for brand awareness than 200 TV adverts. When you consider the budget involved in producing and maintaining a run of 200 ads on television, and compare it to the non-price of a few good tweets supporting a recent product or service you offer, the choice is clear.

Jack and the Digital Beanstalk

But statistics and opinion are nothing without examples. A mere several months ago, a man called Ramon DeLeon was simply a manager of seven Domino’s outlets across Chicago. A regular manager of a small group of franchises, advertised globally but still never seeing any major changes in operation or surges in demand across the year. However, when an unsatisfied customer turned to Twitter to berate one of his outlets for delivering a cold, incorrectly-made pizza, he took to social media to apologise. The resulting video was then embedded almost 100,000 times – everywhere from blogs to major newspaper outlets.

Social media is all about the individual. Twittering as a business is a great way to interface with the public in a more relaxed forum than, say, a one-way TV advert or sponsoring a sports event. Even so, allow the public to put a name to the person behind the businesses’ Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn page. These people will have opinions, visit industry events, and become an ambassador for your business in the new era of the first online source of digitised interactivity to outrank the pornography industry. Of course, there are risks, and these usually come with careless employees who aren’t as well-read on social media as their peers, but chosen to be the businesses’ digital ambassador simply because they’re young and hip.

For small businesses, it’s an important first step. Twenty years ago, starting out as an entrepreneur with a dream was a risky venture, and usually ended in tears. For those of you involved in one of the many, many dot com collapses in the early millennium, it seemed like a risk to attempt to launch an online business. However, what most people missed out on until the rise of sites like the IKEA online store or your local florist was that we were looking at the problem from the wrong angle. It wasn’t necessary to build a business as an online-only entity when it was in its starting phases. The key was to develop the business as physical presence – an office, a shop-front – and then build its online presence alongside it to maximise potential customers.

I Came, I Saw, I Hash-Tagged

Men and women striking out on their own and winning big is a common fairytale, and one we’re reminded of all too well by Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne and the like. But when we take the plumber uncle we see at a family gathering and the business cards of his we give out to locals who are suffering a broken pipe after a holiday, and transpose it onto Twitter, Facebook etc, it stops becoming a willfull word-of-mouth in person, and becomes a series of online adverts.

Anyone who insists the internet isn’t viral is lying through their teeth. Every single successful site on the web was put there by customers, and the same can be said for any physical business. Amazon, Twitter – these things are spoken about on forums, in bars, on iPhones, and in chatrooms. They spread faster than wildfire, and you’re never waiting for the newspaper the following day to see if your shop launch was a success – as of late, that make-or-break announcement will be coming to you directly through social media sources.

Of course, there’s a trend to be noticed, and one covered well by many social media industry sources: you’re relying heavily on the customer to do your work for you. Word-of-mouth is a fickle beast – either something goes viral and explodes across the web, or it fizzles out within a few re-tweets. The main thing you have to remember is that Twitter is not a replacement for a good reputation – keep satisfying customers, and more importantly let them know that your avenues of feedback have expanded to incorporate social media and the web. The ability to tell someone my pizza is not only cold, but has anchovies instead of chicken on it, and have them respond with a video watched by hundreds of thousands of people, is a pretty good indication that business cares about its customers. And when did you last hear of Domino’s Pizza going bust? Tweet away and remember: it’s not what you’re selling, but how you’re selling it.

Twitter seems to be a rising star in the medium of new-age social communication. Everyone from major business CEOs to Stephen Fry are building large followings, and it’s all to see several sentences fly from their fingers a day as the world’s shortest blog format continues to take over the world. But what if we want to use this same technique not to inform people of where our band is playing next, or what we’re watching on TV at the moment, but what products and services we offer as a business? Of course, it’s tempting just to set up a Twitter account for your business and start following everyone in sight whilst posting your company’s homepage URL every five minutes, but that’ll just lead to an identity as a blocked online irritant, which isn’t what you’re after. Here’s a list of tips for engaging with the world run by the small blue birdie:

1. Network. Don’t expect people to follow you and retweet everything you say just because you’re a business they might deal with from time to time. Advertise what they’re saying to other people and discuss their tweets with them via replies and your own little @company is going to gain a reputation as a social, interested party.
2. Retweet. When thinking about how to best advertise concepts, ideas and news you’re interested in as a company, think about retweeting specific people. If you’re a business that specialises in finance and the Financial Times has just done a piece on the Base Rate changing, consider a quick “RT @financialtimes: “Base Interest Rate – our thoughts: [link]” and you’ll be surprised at how many people will start to view you as someone to follow for information as well as getting in touch.
3. Update. Don’t turn your Twitter page into a failed foray into social media: if you’re going to commit to a regularly updated Twitter account, even if it’s once a day, you have to meet the minimum you’ve set for yourself. Ideally it won’t just be 140 characters a day of information, but if your output begins to decrease, people will view your Twitter account as an experiment and not a reliable side of your company’s identity.
4. Ask. Ask questions – don’t feel that because you’re a company, you’re not entitled to be curious about other people’s ideas and activities. To have the Twitter account of an entire business ask an expert a question is often a flattering experience, and they’re not only likely to respond quickly and in detail, but their responses mean people following them are going to start seeing your company’s @username more frequently and investigate out of curiosity.
5. Link. In every tweet you send out into the digital realm, think about putting someone’s @username into the tweet. By connecting with someone every time you say something, you’re not only appearing as someone who’s aware of specific industry figureheads and sources of information, but you’re going to start appearing on hundreds, if not thousands of people’s Twitter readers every week.
6. Verify. If you’re looking into making announcements or predictions in your industry (or others, but this is risky for the following reason), then make sure you’ve got your facts straight. One typo or bad statistic and news of the mistake will fly around the Twitterverse fairly rapidly. Hell hath no fury like a web community scorned.
7. Smile. Be polite and friendly. I know this seems like a tall order in 140 characters, but simply sounding enthusiastic with the odd exclamation mark – or if you’re a person and not a company on Twitter, even a smiley – can lead to people viewing you as more than just another corporate face. There are people behind every company logo, and it’s important to bring this across in a medium where even sarcasm is difficult to get across.
8. Compact. If there’s one thing that people who rarely read individual Twitter pages can’t stand, it has to be messages that run on for several Tweets, as more often than not they’ll be broken up by other people’s – even if you’re Tweeting the next portion every twenty seconds. Try and keep everything compact and succinct – the ability to communicate in 140 characters is actually a skill, and one you’ll develop over time in Twitter, but the sooner the better.
9. Decorate. People will occasionally read your Twitter page individually, so make sure you’ve got a custom background that tiles well on higher resolution monitors and that represents your company. Silly pictures and bright, clashing colours are for teenager’s bedrooms. Keep it mature, and you’ll gain respect for making the effort to individualise your page.
10. Expand. Keep track of everything you’ve said and that people have said about you. I’m sure if everyone had the funds there’d be a Twitter-only employee for every company trying to gain a larger market share. Of course, try and get your employees to reference the company’s Tweets and Twitter page whenever they mention work, and encourage them to spread your identity as a company as far and wide as possible while remaining casual about the whole affair, lest they all seem too robotic and forced in their praise.

Here’s hoping some of this helps. Twitter is a mad, furious rush of energy condensed into 140 collections of pixels and fired out at a rate of thousands upon thousands every second of the day, and the numbers are increasing all the time. Gain your foothold and your following now, and you’ll never risk missing what could be the biggest boat in the history of online marketing.

Ok seriously. You turn your head for two seconds and there it is: another product from Google. As it happens, I was thinking about creating an entry based on an article I read about Googling v Binging when BUZZ, out of seemingly nowhere, pops up. Following the Tweets and FB comments along the way, the biggest questions seem to be ‘What is it?’ and ‘Are you going to use it?’

Upon its release and my discovery of said release, Buzz had not been activated on my Gmail account, but within about an hour it was (upping my Google paranoia). Since then (it’s been three days) the majority of posts I’ve seen have come from Mashable. Mashable and I are really developing quite a relationship, I’d say. Good old Pete. I commented on a couple of their posts, read a bunch of the articles about Buzz that they have posted, read a couple more articles from other sources and have basically been sitting on the topic for a couple of days.

I must admit that I’m starting to feel anxiety over the pressure to ‘get’ new products and understand their usefulness. This anxiety is greatly reduced as I read comments on FB status and within Twitter – my personal fave at the moment is from John_Cleese: ‘Do not, I repeat, do not, confuse me with this Buzz stuff’. You said it, John. First reviews indicate that it doesn’t integrate with FB, as Twitter does, and as AOL is starting to as well. However, Buzz does integrate with Twitter so your Twitter posts can automatically go out to your Buzz contacts, but that’s not 100% integration so you still have to have both accounts. The question remains, why would I start using Buzz when I already have Twitter? Because it’s integrated into my gmail? Well…hmmm. I’m already annoyed that the few responses to comments I have made have gone directly into my email (you can set up a filter and that won’t happen, but I think messages should, by default, land in a separate location. This makes me want to treat Buzz like email, or IM. And, as if to illustrate this, when I posted ‘Why would I use Buzz over Twitter?’ the response I got was from a friend (who doesn’t use Twitter) saying ‘So we can talk like this now, too’. I had to explain that if she wanted to talk, we could IM through gmail, email through gmail, or even speak through gmail, but that Buzz was meant for a different purpose. The purpose that Twitter has already established, I think. Why didn’t Google just BUY Twitter? Furthermore? Visually, Buzz is messy. Following Mashable means that I have to scroll, forever, to get to other posts from my other contacts. On top of Mashable’s posts, I also see all of the 458 comments on said post. Seriously? No thanks.

Interestingly, while Twitter’s inception was based on the question ‘What are you doing?’, it seems to have evolved into ‘What’s going on?’. That seems to be where it’s most useful. Not to digress TOO much, but this morning, from the window of my hotel room, I could see a massive plume of smoke (that was precipitated by a huge flame) and wondered if it was a fire or if I was seeing things, again. Within 10 minutes of noting it, Newyorkology retweeted a post that there had been a transformer explosion, causing a fire in the exact location where I had seen the smoke (and fire). Further proof I can be as nosy (and lazy) as I want from the couch of the hotel room.

All this to say that if Twitter can deliver that to me – faster than a Domino’s pizza? Why would I switch to Buzz. Just so I could start saying “I’m going to Buzz that”, I guess. I never have been a fan of the Twitter usage of the word ‘Tweet’.

There have been a lot of faith-restoring stories coming out of the social media world of late. Last week I wrote about the Facebook campaign that has helped save the life of young British student Philip Pain who fell seven-stories in Mexico and was in desperate need of blood. This week I want to acknowledge the huge effort made by social networking pages to help the people of Haiti.

Only minutes after the devastating earthquake floored the tiny Caribbean nation last Tuesday, the online world was mobilised and ready to help in any way it could.

One of the organisations leading the way was The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) who have now raised over £25 million after their appeal was announced on Twitter on last Wednesday.

The DEC has utilised Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube over the past week and their Chief Executive, Brendan Gormley, has publicly praised the significant role these social media sites have had in their campaign.

Mr. Gormley said, “Social networking has proven itself as a valuable addition to the fundraising machine. I’m thrilled that we have been able to quickly communicate and engage the UK public, who have in turn responded with tremendous generosity to help the people of Haiti who so urgently need our help.

“Their donations mean our member agencies can continue to source and deliver the emergency supplies needed like safe water, shelter, medicine and food. We hope people will continue to give their support so that more emergency aid can be added to what will be a massive humanitarian effort.”

DEC reported on Facebook that Flickr has been used to host images from the DEC’s member agencies, with 34,000 views of the DEC account on Friday, while a video of the DEC broadcast appeal has attracted nearly 4,000 views on YouTube.

Not only has social media been an outstanding tool to stimulate aid and increase donations, it has also played a vital role in spreading news and remarkably, locating victims.

“This is the first example we’ve seen where that sense of global community has been expressed in action, for example using social media technology to get the story out faster, to locate victims, and to give instantaneous donations,” said James Norrie, a media professor at RTS’s School of IT Management. “That’s an amazing use of a social media tool.”

The events in Haiti, while both shocking and saddening, have reinforced social media’s undoubted ability for social good.

I think Tom Brown, writing for The Burlington Free Press, captured it well when he wrote, “I’ve heard critics of social media say that users of communication tools such as Twitter and Facebook only want to talk to, and about, themselves and their friends. The earthquake in Haiti might help change the minds of some of those critics”.

“When people can respond that quickly and in such numbers to help their fellow man, then there certainly is hope”.

To make a donation to the DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal visit www.dec.org.uk or call 0370 60 60 900, donate over the counter at any post office or high street bank, send a cheque made payable to ‘DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal’ to ‘PO Box 999, London, EC3A 3AA’ or text GIVE to 70077 to donate £5. £5 goes to DEC. You pay £5 plus your standard network SMS rate.

So, Rage Against The Machine has snatched UK’s beloved Christmas number one spot from X-Factor winner Joe McElderry.

When Jon and Tracy Morter organised a Facebook group last month their sole aim was to end the monopoly Simon Cowell and his X-Factor buddies had on the coveted UK Christmas single. What it turned out to be was something slightly bigger.

For those of you who somehow missed this story. Jon and Tracy Morter are a couple from Essex who started a Facebook group called “Rage Against The Machine For Christmas Number 1” because they were “fed up” with X-Factor’s four-year chart dominance during festive season.

“Fed up of Simon Cowell’s latest karaoke act being Christmas No 1? Me too … So who’s up for a mass-purchase of the track ‘KILLING IN THE NAME’ from December 13^th as a protest to the X Factor monotony?”. With these words, the battle began.

The idea was to encourage ‘real music’ fans to buy American rock-rappers Rage Against the Machine’s expletive-filled 1992 single “Killing in the Name Of” in the lead up to Christmas in order to beat McElderry’s “The Climb” to the Christmas number one spot.

So, why did they choose a 17 year-old song with the words “’F— YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME” repeated 17 times over a more appropriately-angled, perhaps family-friendly, song for the festive period?

“It’s a rallying cry,” Mr Morter told NME.COM. “It’s been taken on by thousands in the group as a defiance to Simon Cowell’s ‘music machine’.”

“We picked a song that was controversial and has a strong message, and it just seems to have captured everyone’s imagination,” Mrs Morter added.

When he first heard of the campaign, Cowell labeled it as “stupid” and “cynical” and claimed it was specifically directed at him. In the end though, Cowell was gracious in defeat and called Jon and Tracy personally to congratulate them on a “well-deserved win” and a “great fight”.

A great fight it was.

In the beginning, no one really expected them to actually pull this thing off. How could two, relatively average, people from the small town of South Woodham Ferrers in Essex possibly defeat the multi-million dollar empire of music mogul Cowell?

The thing is, this little Facebook group struck a cord with people. It was time to make a stand. It was time stick it to ‘the man’.

What this campaign demonstrated was, by using social media as the medium the ‘little guy’ can make a real difference in this world. When enough people get together and are motivated to really give something a shake, anything is possible.

“The campaign behind RATM is interesting in its own right. If only because, once again, it demonstrates the power — if it can be called that — of the emergent internet radicalism,” writes Phil BC at A Very Public Sociologist.

“With very little time and cost, people are able to register their protest/opposition without the rigmarole of standing in the rain, listening to boring speeches, and beating off the desperate efforts of Trot paper sellers.”

Captain Jako at Frank Owen’s Paintbrush has a similar view on the campaign, “It once again points to the democratic potential of the internet. A grassroots effort coordinated over social networking sites and with zilch budget has proved more effective than the largely traditional marketing techniques used by wealthy industry bigwigs like Simon Cowell to get even more money out of UK consumers.”

Just five years ago, a campaign like Jon and Tracy Morter’s was almost impossible to achieve. However, in Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites, society now has a very real vehicle for change.