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Ben Rudolph is what tech companies like to call an “evangelist”. Personally, I think a more realistic term is “paid fanboy”, but there you go. He works for Microsoft, specifically focusing on the Windows Phone 7 brand. But why’s he appearing in the news this week?

Well, it’s because he’s giving Windows 7 handsets to those who tweet their Android issues at him, and use the hashtag #droidrage. Yes, that’s correct. Tell him why your Android phone sucks, and he’ll send you a Windows 7 phone. Doesn’t sound like a bad deal. Unless you’re Google.

This is essentially the equivalent of being at school and offering anyone who calls Jimmy “fat legs” a chocolate bar. Few people are actually doing it because Jimmy has fat legs; they’re doing it for the free chocolate. But regardless of what their motivation is, Jimmy gets a load of bad press.

#droidrage could potentially become a trending topic in the United States today, and that’s going to cause Google a fair few PR problems. But what’s the right response? Offering Android handsets to those who tweet using the hashtag #wp7hasnoapps? Or being a little more mature and weathering the storm of bad-press anecdotes, some of them potentially fabricated?

It might be a new approach Microsoft are testing to see whether they can shake things up a little bit. Given that as I write this, news is going out that the head of Windows Phone 7 has been replaced, a new direction might actually be on the cards.

The legality of the issue is a little hazy, because neither the fans or Rudolph are saying anything libellous. But I think anyone who’s not waiting for Google’s reaction with bated breath clearly doesn’t have much interest in the future of the smartphone market. Android has a whopping market share (51%) simply because it’s not tied to one brand, as iOS is, and that’s its primary advantage. But if it starts to appear flawed in any way, all it will take is the average user becoming aware of the flaws, and Android’s grip on the market may begin to slip.

It’s a dangerous approach to marketing Windows 7 phones, but who knows? It just might work, provided Microsoft can get away with it. Thoughts?

We all wish that our businesses was talked about as much as the headline news or the next big election. The key to getting noticed, of course, is to increase publicity – to somehow wangle our brand into the eye of the public. One good way to achieve this is  by becoming a popular and trending topic on Twitter. But how can we reach these heady heights?

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It’s arguable that in recent years, the “buzz” has overtaken traditional channels of promotion. But what about news, and journalism? Is it faster to glean the headlines from your feeds, or from the front pages of whatever eclectic mish-mash of physical and digital content providers you’ve gone to, regular as clockwork, for years?

If you look at the hashtags for anything from Libya to The X-Factor, it’s clear as day that people are happy to inform each other and keep everyone up to speed, because what they’d tell five people around the water-cooler is now something they can tell hundreds of millions by tweeting – and both take less than a minute. In an astonishing turn around, journalism – a discipline that champions brevity and concise description above all else – has, in some aspects, been usurped by the popularity of a big old chat. Or has it?

The For

News has become stale. That’s not because it’s badly written, but because news, in its infancy, was about bringing people the facts as soon as possible. There’s an age-old saying in print journalism that your first paragraph should contain everything someone needs to know. Not only is this common sense, but it also means that if your article gets chopped down during the editing process, it doesn’t “break”.

In 2011, it’s possible to go one better, and present someone with an entire article’s worth of information in 140 characters, which trumps content several times the length. It’s said often during technological discussion, but we’re becoming an extremely impatient people, and seeing “Libya liberated, Gaddafi dead” flood my feed, rather than it hitting me once at six ‘o’ clock – rather than taking time out to read the news during the day – is what matters, to me.

If you’re a business, it also means that you’re able to reach into a space you couldn’t before – consumer’s personal information spheres. By doing so (tweeting at them, talking to them, and generally not being an old-fashioned “we only tweet promo content and never retweet or reply) you enable yourself to impress them directly, rather than through the love-hate filter of the press.

The Against

Twitter, Facebook – they’re far from perfect, and what’s worse is that they’re like blogs and their impact on online journalism – suddenly, everyone’s an journalist, and with Twitter, everyone’s an informant. As most people are a) prone to gossip, and b) not trained journalists, and will therefore proceed to repeatedly provide their followers with hearsay cast as fact, and hashtag relentlessly in order to flood key searches with irrelevant statements.

It can also be used alongside traditional journalism, or online – simply by delving into it and using it as a promotional tool, and if your business happens to deal in information, news, reviews and other media, there is no platform more prone to content going viral than social media. But to replace long-form content entirely would be a horrendous miss-step, especially given the long-established place in the media that journalism has, in comparison to the fly-by-night nature of social media – even Facebook’s losing members.

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It’s certainly a tough topic, and I think a mix of the two is best – read your long-form stuff, but grab your water-cooler headlines from Twitter or other mediums, such as Reddit. But for those businesses who are wondering whether their product press releases are going to be required reading for anyone in the near future when we’re social to a fault online, I’d keep your cards close to your chest until we see where Twitter and the like end up in 2021. Time will tell.

Developing a new products can be difficult especially if you are trying to gear it towards a specific market, which most companies are. There is one area that some people overlook, and this is the growing world of social media. We would do well not to overlook it as most of our customers use it on a daily basis.

Online presence

As customers become better versed in Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and the rest, they will expect companies to be doing the same. In 10 to 15 years’ time, most customers will be within the ‘Facebook generation’, and have grown up with social media as a prominent part of their lives. These sites are where they will share experiences, socialise with friends and most importantly they will talk about products and services, and recommending them too. If businesses want to get ahead of the game, then infiltrating that world and building an online presence is essential. Keeping in touch with customers in a more personal way, providing them with useful updates and facts to keep them interested is invaluable. Adaptability is key to keeping a business successful in this day and age.

Know your market

Social media is really useful not only for keeping in touch with customers, but for conducting product research and development. If businesses keep track of conversations and comments on social media sites, then they can gain an impression of the way that their customers think and plan accordingly. The Social Media Examiner expands upon this idea with some great tips for ways to use social media can help make a business seem more accessible to customers and if they feel able to communicate with it on a more personal level, then they are more likely to remain loyal.

Getting your recruiting right

If a company is looking for new additions to their team, chances are they will want to find people who are in touch with the modern age of technology and the web, who can move with the times and bring something fresh to the company. Where do you find these people? Well, chances are they are all using social media sites already. If you are looking for a certain type of person, one who is proficient in internet use and social media language, then look for them in this way as well. If the company uses their Twitter page of LinkedIn to advertise a vacancy, then the only people who will apply will be those who know how to use these sites already. This raises the chances of finding the right person for the job.

At the end of the day, everyone should be aware of the rising interest and use of social media. Recent research has suggested that a surprising number of CEOs do not use social networking sites and as this article on CNET shows, “the most admired CEOs had a greater online presence…than those who were less admired.” Social media is not going anywhere and those who keep up with it will be able to keep up with the marketplace.

For some time, it’s been argued that the social network every business should be tapping into is Facebook, but is this really the case?

Social Media Examiner states that “with 500 million people on Facebook, chances are more of your customers are active on Facebook than any other network.” Aliza Sherman of GigaOM claims that in terms of advertising, “there’s no question that Facebook wins.”

It all appears so clean-cut, and it’s interesting reading when you get into the reasoning behind their championing of Zuckerberg’s platform. The ease of viral promotion, the size of the existing community, and the way in which Facebook constantly pulls users in towards it because it’s so central to modern social communication.

However, a recent study by Three_D, the social media arm of PR company Threepipe Communications, has revealed that 65 companies on the FTSE 100 use Twitter instead of Facebook. While they may only represent sixty-five companies out of countless millions across the globe, a majority vote for the small blue bird from a hundred of the most successful companies in the UK is a significant statistic.

Twitter is no longer the novel concept it was in 2006. It now has over 300 million accounts – a growth of 60 million a year. This stands in comparison to Facebook’s 500 million accounts, accumulated since 2004, a growth of 71 million. The difference isn’t all that great, relatively speaking, and the immediate accessibility of the Twitter platform means it takes minutes to set up a company account, rather than the longer period required to adequately establish a Facebook fan page.

Sherman concedes similar points within her article, and her differentiation between the two platforms is key to understanding what some businesses prioritising their Facebook presence are missing: the reasons consumers connect to your company. “The way you accumulate page fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter is different,” states Sherman. “You might gain a fan on Facebook just because someone sees someone they know becoming your fan. You gain followers on Twitter — genuine and engaged followers — because they actually want to hear what you have to say.”

Twitter is a feed of information that the user selects themselves, rather than another group affiliation or sign of consumer appreciation to be hung on the Wall of a Facebook user. Businesses are no longer seeking those who are willing to give them no more than a nod of approval; they want people to connect with the company out of personal interest.

It’s also not surprising to learn that potential customers are leaving Facebook along with the companies now devoting themselves to the 140-character marketing effort. The New York Times suggests that there are several factors at work driving people away from the social networking site, amongst them the overlapping of personal and business relationships, and the “inevitable” Orwellian undertones of Facebook’s aspirations to usurp Google as the central hub of today’s online society.

Twitter certainly seems like the better option, at least from my own perspective. There’s a sole purpose to a Twitter account – to tweet i.e. to communicate. There’s little else to do, nothing in fact, if you discard personalising your display picture, your small bio or your website link. It’s a streamlined experience that separates itself from the Facebook morass of Mafia Wars, Wall comments, privacy paranoia, and the endless struggle for the consumer’s “like” click. Perhaps the pro-Twitter trend will extend beyond the FTSE 100 in future. If the New York Times’ exodus analysis is anything to go by, it’s almost certain.

A wee while back, someone on my Twitter feed linked to an ebook review that I can only describe as constructively negative. The book, from what I could tell, was shoddily written, with little thought given to grammar, punctuation, sentence structure or even common sense. All in all, the concept was fine, but the execution was horrendous, and with one bad review comes a few good ones, surely?

No. With one bad review comes the author, and she was not impressed.

As you can see, she went completely berserk. Attacks directed towards the reviewer soon expanded to encompass the entire wealth of commentators delving into a writhing morass of criticism and defensive attitudes that became the pitiful sight of a debut author going down in flames. There’s little else to say. Within a few hours her comments had gone from long and badly written to profanity, and it didn’t take much to provoke her.

Some people say that it was unfair for everyone to jump on the bandwagon, but is it? In this day and age, being an idiot on the internet is generally a bad idea, especially if you’re selling a product, running a business, or you have some form of celebrity status, either online or not. Her mistake was doing this publicly, as the moment it hit the Twitterverse, even esteemed fantasy author Neil Gaiman was weighing in with his bafflement at her approach to a negative review, stating that this was how not to self-promote.

I decided to do some research, as she initially claimed she’d had a fair few five-star reviews. All of them jokes, apart from a couple which are written by either the author under quite an obvious pseudonym (given that the review itself contains the exact same grammar mistakes found in her magnum opus) or a relative who couldn’t even be bothered to change her surname. Astonishing stuff, really.

Sure, it’s a little disheartening to get a bad review, and of course the amount of people ripping into her must have hurt, but what would you do when someone’s lashing out with four-letter-words at you for agreeing that their book was bad? In the age of the instant search, there’s no longer room for error. Once you’re done, you’re done, and it seems like a harsh judgement to pass on someone, but if you’re going to upload an extremely short novel clearly written during NaNoWriMo, without any editing whatsoever, when why should people bother? Why pay for a product you’re selling as an independent creative entity?

I’d love to see someone try and pull this again. I think she stands as a strong warning to authors about to flip over a harsh few words from a critic. Pro Tip: people will never like everything. If your book had bad grammar, it had bad grammar. Suck it up and edit properly. But in an era where I could tweet about your bad reaction and have it appear on ten thousand accounts within a few minutes, I am the Consumer-Peasant, and you are the Unruly Sovereign. And the peasants will revolt.

Well, it’s been a big rush, but after a brief chat today, me and Jason have accepted that convincing the many, many people who viewed the video of his proposal to fiancée Stephanie to actually vote for the happy couple to enjoy a free, luxury honeymoon was just too difficult. The three of us made an effort to make this work, but unfortunately there are some people out there who have colossal resources when it comes to click-happy online friends who don’t mind a five-minutes-or-less registration process when voting for someone they care about.

I commented earlier today that it says a lot about people when there’s 4,104 views on the counter, and only 570 votes. Sure, there were quite a lot of people who would’ve viewed it to double check (I probably account for almost a hundred visits to that page, not so sure about views though) but that’s not the point. It’s, if anything, a commentary on how unwilling some people are to spend a few minutes registering or logging in via Facebook to help a friend towards their dream honeymoon.

Am I disappointed that our little Twitter and Facebook campaign failed? Yeah, of course I am, and I feel bad knowing Jason and Stephanie are going to have to work out what they’ll do instead. But it’s taught me that there’s a lot more to social media campaigns than I previously believed. You can’t just say “jump” and expect trampolines. You need to own a few, first. Internet users are like children – if you want something from them, you have to give them an incentive and a means to claim their reward all within a minute or less, or they lose interest.

I don’t know if I’ll ever do a Twitter campaign of this kind again, but I will say that it was definitely nice to use a few tools to help someone and make them happy. I think you can offer a lot to someone in today’s economy – vouchers for HMV could be domain-name registrations, if you’re geeky enough. But a nice wedding present would’ve been the honeymoon. For anyone who’s been following the progress on this blog, don’t lose heart, because it is possible for these things to work. You’ve just got to really take it on as a full-time job, and that’s something neither myself nor the happy couple were able to do.

Until the next time, and once again – congratulations to a happy couple who may not have won, but are still happily planning a wedding and the rest of their lives together, because the latter is really the thing that matters.

I’ll be honest, had it been April 1st, I might have dismissed this news as a joke, but it’s mid-March and it’s not only a very smart approach to communication, but a forward-thinking one, too. This year, for the first time in UK history, a solicitor has issued a court summons via Facebook.

No, seriously.

Debtors, as you can well imagine, are probably slightly reluctant to delve into the legal morass of court visits and other inconveniences that come with owing people a significant amount of money. However, this also means you’re not likely to find them responding to any letters or phone-calls. However, upon proving to Hastings County Court in Essex that the slippery individual was a bit of a Facebook user, solicitor Hilary Thorpe was allowed to jump on the site and put the fear of Zuckerberg in them.

Away went the summons, and assumably they’ve either now responded or are considering finding another, similar social network with their mates on (yeah, good luck with that one). It was a tactic that was used once before in a similar cause Down Under, and that particular Australian couple found their legally binding documents served to them via the social networking site.

If anything, it proves that there really are no limits to the uses of Facebook and Twitter. Yesterday, author Adam Christopher found that using Twitter to befriend publisher Angry Robot resulted in them offering him his dream career, after many years of effort. Social media is no longer a distraction from your career, but a tool you can use to take it even further. Not to mention that if your legal career is being impeded by someone’s unresponsive nature, you can start tracking them down via their status updates.

It’ll be interesting to see what other landmarks social media sees in 2011, though don’t be surprised if people start conducting lectures or broadcasting them through Twitter. I recently saw the novel idea of tweeting a live surgery, demonstrated by the cast of Grey’s Anatomy. Other doctor’s joined in, offered suggestions and even a loan of their medical equipment during an operation that wasn’t going well. There are so many possibilities that it encourages those who’ve not joined in to join in, or so I’d like to think.

Even if you’re not going to use Twitter to talk, it might not be a bad idea to just use it to listen, considering it’s none too interested in your real name. Think of it as an RSS Reader that’s evolved into something else entirely. Social media is rapidly becoming the preferred method of communication, conducting business and even bringing lawbreakers to justice. The first two uses are pretty great. The third one is just downright cool. Now all Judge Dredd needs is a login and he’s good to go.

Okay, so, this could be going better.

It’s week four of the campaign (no update last week due to the huge interview with Michael Chorost which resulted in four posts over the regular three), and Jason’s video is just out of qualifying for a holiday by sitting in fourth place. However, this is not the end of the world, as an interesting opportunity is arising.

With three and a bit weeks to go before the competition ends, there are two videos each with just over 500 votes taking first and second place. However, there is also a video in third that only has 400 votes. Jason has around 370. The gap has closed once again, and if we can take it now, we’re fine. The main strategy would be to get to 1,000 votes, so far in the lead that it’s tough to usurp him, let alone have him finish outside the winning trio of happy honeymoon couples.

A lot of tactics have been discussed, and unfortunately it’s come to light that due to the lack of any campaigns on behalf of some of the other videos, we may be competing against people that are either manufacturing votes, or simply using their Facebook and a rather unique community angle. The angle is simply a stronger sense of community than ours – namely, that two of the top three video posters are devout and active members of the American Christian community, and out of them and Jason and my journalist circle, we’d wager the former are more likely to go the distance for someone who has their respect. This, in itself, is really quite sweet and I wish I had this behind me, but I don’t, because I’m not introducing God to universities campuses across the American Northwest.

But how do you manufacture that kind of popularity? Jason’s Facebook and Twitter have been ablaze with requests for votes, and I’ve done a fair bit of work with Twuffer and the MoreDigital Twitter, in addition to my own and retweeting his. The hash-tagging does help, but do hash-tags sometimes make it seem a tad less inviting, and more like spam? I’m not sure. But I will have to approach the people I know who have the pull to really draw some attention to this, and ensure that he stays in the running.

It’s not about the fact that the blog’s been following this, because if we didn’t succeed, I’ll write about what we may have done wrong, what we did right, and I’ll still have a blogpost. But this is also Jason’s honeymoon, something that won’t happen again in his or his fiancée’s lives. We need to crush the opposition, and I only have to say it once:

Battle stations.

I’ve seen some really interesting variations on the idea of crowd-sourcing information, lately. The first was at Chuck Wendig’s blog, where he speaks about his attempt to find out just how many chilli con carne recipes exist in the Twitterverse, simply by using the microblogging network, and then blogging about the responses he had. The responses were varied, and of course almost every possible variation on the idea, from recipes incorporating beef, to lime juice, to black coffee were suggested. Seriously, I’m not joking. Black coffee. In fact, I think that was Chuck himself.

It’s a stimulating idea, and it shows that someone with reach on Twitter (Chuck’s blog and Twitter do very well, and he’s seen as one of the best blogging authors around by a considerable amount of people, including myself), can do with just 140 characters’ worth of space and a question. Chuck refers to his followers in this instance as a “human Google”, and he’s right – ask people about the things they put up on the web anyway, and they’re likely to tell you. Succinctly too, given the 140-character limit and multiple linked tweets being a little harder to read and write. But would it work on a corporate scale?

Yes, of course it would, and the people taking advantage (intelligently, in my opinion) of this are Twitter developers themselves – the second example of novel crowd-sourcing. Translating Twitter into as many languages as possible is an extremely time-consuming task – think about the fact that Google Translate hasn’t managed it yet, either – and in order to make this happen faster, who better to speak to then than those motivated by the idea of Twitter in their language?

“But, Christos, couldn’t you just hire a bunch of translators?” Sure, why do it for free using millions of fluent speakers when you could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying an entire department of translators? Yeah. Exactly. Twitter is a site built around community, and Wikipedia made its name by allowing the average visitor to say “hey, I had a part in the success of this site”, so why not other sites? If people are willing to get involved for free, and have the required skills, why aren’t you taking them on already?

It needs to be managed. Translating the second biggest social network on the planet into many different languages is not as easily controlled, regulated and quality-assured as Chuck’s chilli recipe drive. But at the same time, if he received four million responses, the traffic to his blog would be so large he’d need to find a better way of coping – chillirecipes.com would be a good start. It’s all about the scale. The more fans you have, the more crowd-sourced information you get, and the more data management time slots you’ll need, as a direct result.

I’d love to test out crowd-sourcing. In terms of a small business, however, the thing with using it in that capacity is that you’ve got to have a really solid connection with your followers, or nothing will come back to you bar a tidal wave of spam, and the odd gem. Twitter are huge, and people want to contribute because it’s cool. Chuck’s fans want to contribute because they, also, see him as cool. The similarity between the two? They are both, to some degree, a brand. Twitter’s a brand in the traditional sense. Chuck is an individual, but an author who needs to market his own products to some degree.

By cutting costs on data influxes like these, more time can be devoted to external output, and crowd-sourcing becomes your crowd-pleaser as more of your time gets spent connecting with the market rather than fuelling the company’s self-sustaining engine. So test it out – ask people things. Ask for opinions. Nothing pleases the average person more than being able to answer someone else’s question or offer knowledge. It’s a human trait. So is the social sharing of information. So use it.