Social Media:

The complexity of social media (german)
>> Netzwertig.com

Signs of an unsuccessfully social media campaign (german)
>> Connectedmarketing.de

Xing’s acquires Socialmedian – a social news site
>> Readwriteweb.com
>> Golem.de (german)

Miscellaneous:

new trend: Online-Sleepwalking?
>> Telegraph.co.uk

Mr. Yang on the “heat” spot
>> Valleywag.com

Reviews in Pictures (till now only Part 1 and 2 are available)
>> Boston.com Teil 1
>> Boston.com Teil 2

Still looking for a Christmas present?
>> Well, go get personal with  Scarlett Johansson’s tissue waste

Twitter specials:

• who spend, how much time with Twitter? >> Tweetwasters.com
• Twitter and Influence >> Twinfluence.com
• Die “wahren” Twitter-Freunde herausfinden >> Twitter-Friends

Another neat collection of Twitter tools with screenshots
>> Ibrahimevsan.de

Spiegel Online is twittering
>> Prblogger (german)

Happy Holidays and A Merry Christmas!

Twitter appears to be the “It” place for the application of company’s communication, both for external and internal purpose. A few weeks back, moms and women twittered avidly their outrage against Motrin campaign and recently there is another case making its appearance on Twitter, which proves once again how truly relevant this channel for company’s communication is. In this recent case, Ford – with the help of Twitter – has succeeded in preventing wide spread damages, which could have cost the company’s reputation. The starting point was a letter of notice sent by Ford’s legal department to a privately owned Ford fansite, demanding for $5000 or the site gets shut down. The copyright violations were the reason behind this demand.
The prominent warned platform was therangerstation.com. This fansite is dedicated to lovers of Ford’s small pick- up trucks. Based in Detroit, this fansite exists for more than 10 years. Well, the reactions regarding Ford’s legal demand were quick to come; the story appeared on the same day in two major car blogs like Jalopnik and Autoblog as well as on Twitter.

It was like a dark cloud of social media brewing over the online reputation of Ford. However, unlike Motrin, Ford has Scott Monty, who is the head of Ford’s social media and he actively reacted in a quick manner over criticisms voiced in Twitter – by continuously tweeting and promising to clear the issue as soon as possible.

Few hours later, Scot tweeted Ford’s official response and provided the link for the official statement of Ford over therangerstation.com controversy. This action was good enough to calm brands evangelists.

Hence, through quick and active reactions from Ford communicator, the virally spread of this issue and online reputation damages for the company were successfully prevented. Certainly, Motrin would have preferred this kind of success. Well, Scott Monty surely took all rules of social media communicator to heart: listen intensively, velocity, deal directly and personally.

In the U.S, Twitter has established itself as a channel for professional communicators. Unfortunately, the case is quite different here in Germany, the discussion revolving around Twitter and its adoption for the company’s communication has just yet to begin. Whether a company should be twittering or not, the examples of past times have definitely shown that Twitter should at least belong to a portfolio of a social media monitoring. However, company’s communicators should not wait too long to get actively engaged in the discussion of microblogging services, where so many multipliers are located like nowhere else.

Intel published Social Media Guidelines for employees
>> Intel.com

More than 100.000 downloads for Wordpress 2.7  within 20 hrs
>> Boren.nu

Courtesy of Kmart:  Bloggers on shopping spree
>> Mediapost.com

Corporate blogs, are they trustworthy?
>> Readwriteweb.com

40 million Americans using Social Networks
>> Readwriteweb.com

Twitter Specials:

Feed your own blog with tweets
>> Twitterfeed.com

List of German Startups Twitterers
>> Deutsche-Startups.de

Have a great weekend!

For Germany, the most popular searches are eBay, YouTube, Weather and GMX. The List is also shown in Google-Watchblog.
Furthermore, it’s quite interesting to see that five social networks are among the german top ten of Fastest Rising – Wer kennt wen (#1), Facebook (#3), followed by SchülerVZ (#4), StudiVZ (#5) and Jappy (#6).
Actually, I didn’t hear much about the last community Jappy, so I did a quick research and here what I got: Jappy is a portal for singles, which replaced the Singlestreffen.net in 2002.

Back to “Wer kennt wen”:
It’s such an impressive fact to see that globally “Wer kennt wen” is among the top ten of Fastest Rising and it even ranked on the 8th place.

If one looks at the current numbers of IVW in November, one can see that Wer kennt wen network has shown more page impressions than StudiVZ (4 billion vs. 3.9 billion). Although StudiVZ lies considerably ahead of Wer kennt Wen and other Social Networks in Germany – with 166 millions numbers of visits – and yet, SchülerVZ stays on the top with 4.9 billion PIs.
But we need to take into account that page impressions alone, are not the only significant indicator, given the fact that every single photo click can actually generate few more page impressions.

A Twitter search engine:
http://www.twitscoop.com

A Twitter – Tool, which concerns itself with “followers” of specific User:
http://tw33t.me

Tool, for auto Follow People on Twitter >> Twollow

A tool for ranking your twitter account and checking the twitter fame within your city >> Twitter Grade

Another tool, which picks, sums and ranks posted links of twitterers :
http://www.twitturls.com

Yet, another tool (kind of old actually but still interesting), which lists corporate twitterers:
http://blog.metaroll.de/2008/04/17/corporate-twitter-die-liste

Twittering as PR – Tools? Here are 2 available online presentations:
http://fly.ingsparks.de/2008-11-15/twitter-als-pr-tool

A quick guideline, on how a company should act on Twitter:
http://valleywag.com/5056678/how-to-keep-your-company-from-looking-stupid-on-twitter

The infamous Obama on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/barackobama
Watch out, two r’s are needed! http://twitter.com/barrackobama
One gets to read interesting statements such as: “Yes, President Bush is really every bit as intelligent in person as he appears on television when Barney lets him get a word in edgewise.”
That’d be all, have a great weekend!