Social Round-up #37

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams. 

This week: judges can Google; the Conservative's Great Social Media Adventure; and marketing on Chatroulette… in Lycra.

Plus: we'd still love your feedback on these updates: tweet Yay! or Boo! to @emodkate. It'll take ten seconds, promise. 


THE HEADLINES ...

THE LOWDOWN ...

NEWSBYTES ...


THE HEADLINES ...

So: after months of tossing and turning; of agonized grimaces and broken nights, Google has finally pulled the tooth that was ailing it, and quit China: an April 10 pullout is mooted. In an effort to continue offering uncensored results to its Chinese users (and not at all to cling on to the revenue potential attached to 800 million Chinese internet users – don’t be ridiculous), Google began redirecting users to their uncensored Hong Kong site, announcing that they’d be ‘carefully monitoring access issues’.Sure enough, the Chinese government began disabling certain search results, and China’s national mobile provider dropped Google as its default search engine. Chinese netizens found themselves back where they first began: censored.

But to be perfectly frank, they don’t seem all that fussed. China’s increasingly affluent middle class have, till now, been avid Googlers; but even amongst this key constituency there was little sympathy for Google’s position, with many, according to the Telegraph, feeling that the company had been disrespectful of local mores, a feeling even more pronounced amongst ‘mainstream’ Chinese. So when, for a short while on Tuesday morning, Google’s corporate pages were displayed in Chinese, many cried ‘hack’ - despite Google’s protestations.

Meanwhile, Dell and Go Daddy want to join the Leavin’ Train, with the latter telling a US Congress committee hearing that the company no longer had the stomach for domain-registrations in China, where new regulations now demand photo ID from anyone registering a .cn domain.

But Westside, Google’s self-penned profile as ‘stout defender of internet freedoms’ is increasingly under scrutiny. Co-founder Sergey Brin’s Guardian interview, in which he positioned Google as Poster Corp. for digital liberation whilst berating Microsoft for working within China’s rules, got backs a-bristling: several commentators pointed out that this was Google’s own strategy until – ooh, three months ago? Fred Teng in the Huffington Post, meanwhile, calls for tolerance for China, whose journey from feudal island to globally-connected digital nation has, he points out, been laudably swift.

There’s not many matters in this world upon which we can all agree – but the proposition ‘Nestle’s week has been a bit ...meh’ might, I suspect, be one of them. Item: their Facebook page was targeted by Greenpeace. Item: their response went from ‘placatory’ to ‘I’m deleting yo’ account’, then dashed back to ‘I never meant to hurt you’ - in what felt like moments, with bystanders gazing on in open-mouthed horror. At the time of going to press, Nestle’s Facebook page was best described as a sit-in - and this painful episode can’t fail to spotlight the huge variation in the quality of brands’ moderation policies. Jake McKee has some useful thoughts here – upon which we were delighted to comment.

Brace yourselves - Facebook’s latest privacy battle could have huge implications for all UGC platforms, potentially shifting the responsibility for protecting personal privacy away from users, and onto social networks. European regulators are investigating whether the privacy of people whose photos and videos are posted on social networks is being habitually breached.

There’s been a deal of huffing and puffing about the upcoming ‘Social Media Election’, with BBC journalists explaining Twitter to social slowpokes, and expounding on how both parties are utilizing it to sway voters. Facebook launched a new page called Democracy UK, where its posting news of a political nature for all and sundry to comment upon); our clients ITN hosted a live online debate during their Budget Special; and new tools for tracking party-political sentiment - like Yomego's, pictured here - are being launched Left, Right and Centre.

The Tories were first out of the gate: it emerged that they were outpacing Labour on Facebook by a ‘connection’ ratio of two to one. Alas, their social success went straight to their heads and, minded to build upon their initial victory, they launched a rather snazzy Facebook campaign which incorporated a Twitter feed of the hashtag #cashgordon.

Alas, opponents discovered that the feed was entirely unmoderated, and took the opportunity to bombard the site with an awful lot of – how to put it? - brand-negative comments. Worse still, they discovered that the site didn’t strip html, allowing those less-than-positive reviews to really, you know, shine out. The website was removed later that day.

Meanwhile, Gordon Brown has described ‘superfast’ broadband as the “electricity of the digital age”. Outlining Labour's plans, he promised ziptastic speeds for every citizen, as well as a webpage through which to manage their interactions with local government – a proposal which, according to the government, could slash billions from the public service budget, and generate a quarter of a million jobs.

Best not to mention, then, the ongoing brouhaha over the government’s plans for our digital future which, it must be said, are not meeting with unqualified support.

THE LOWDOWN ...

Following a tip-off from the FBI, French police arrested the man responsible for hacking Barack Obama’s Twitter account late last year - then released him, after he claimed that, far from being a master-criminal, he’d simply guessed the President’s password (His birthday? “ThePrezz”? or [gulp].. “password?”). All rather embarrassing for the man they’re calling the first president of the digital age.

Then, in an intriguing instance of plot-thickening, ReadWriteWeb revealed unconfirmed reports that the hacker was the very same bounder who leaked Twitter’s confidential business plans to TechCrunch, who chose to publish them, despite a flurry of controversy.

Truth is, there’s not much in digital life that can truthfully be called ‘secure’ – this was the takeaway from the annual Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest security show, which challenges hackers (sorry, ‘security experts’) to break into a roster of everyday devices and software. This year, the scallywags succeeded in hacking into nearly every major browser (Safari, Firefox and IE8), as well as stealing the entire SMS database of a non-jailbroken iPhone.


Eew. Director of Public Health Peter Kelly this week claimed that the rise of social networking has produced an alarming spike in reported cases of syphilis. Sites like Facebook, he said, were “making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex,” and several of the syphilis cases he’d seen “had met sexual partners through these sites.” Facebook, understandably keen to quash the ‘ridiculous’ idea, pointed out that correlation is not quite the same as causation. Nevertheless – yikes. 

Ah, hindsight is always 20:20; foresight - not so much. All the more impressive, then, is the inspired guess made by Nik Tyler, who a year ago registered three domain names: ipaddownload.com, ipaddownloads.com and ipaddownloads.net. They are now on the market; a million bucks will snag all three. 

You have your lycra tiger-suit ready? And your scary clown-mask? Good, then we’ll begin our ‘Marketing on Chatroulette’ 101, as taught by Stage Two Consulting. They advise marketing execs wishing to explore the potential of the latest social craze to “have several masks/outfits available in case the occasion arises.” Bless.

Facebook’s Gross National Happiness Index has landed in the UK, revealing the emotional ineptitude of the average Brit in all its glory - we are, it seems, only really free with our emotions in the matter of family, TV and the Weather. Disappointingly, the Index focuses on extremes of emotion – happiness, or sadness – and so fails to track those sentiments which, in my experience, are most frequently demonstrated by we Brits: ‘mild annoyance’, ‘qualified enthusiasm’, and ‘schadenfreude’. 

This is genuinely rather impressive – Franklin Page, a fleet-of-thumb employee of text-software company Swype, has beaten the World Record for texting at speed: you can watch and marvel here.

Huzzah – the astonishing and bizarre viral clip of a Russian lounge singer warbling something called ‘Trololo’ has been given it’s own iPhone app! If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, do take a look: you will be tickled pink, or horribly disturbed – one or t’other.  


NEWSBYTES ...

Online dating is now so mainstream an activity that it’s now bigger than the online adult industry, and is worth a humungous one billion dollars per year, according to this new infographic from Online Schools.

A US federal appeals court has ruled that a judge who is unsure about a matter of common knowledge may use Google. Never again will a member of the bench be flummoxed by the name of a popular beat combo.  

Analysts are predicting that Apple will bite 40% of the tablet and e-reader market this year, sending shares zooming. And the iPad is already attracting high-end and big-name advertisers to its apps, causing ripples of relief to bloom throughout an anxious ad industry. The New York Times reporting that the going rate is anywhere between $75,000 and $300,000, and adds that it’s already sold its first two months of post-launch inventory. 

Schoolkids in Japan will be using Nintendo DS's in class before the end of the year, the education authorities there having spotted the platforms wealth of educational titles. 

Global web use continues its relentless upward trajectory, with users on average spending 5.5 hours on social networks last month – up more than two hours on the previous year’s figures. 

New data from Hitwise suggests that users who come to news sites via Facebook are more loyal than those who are directed by Google news.

And finally, stop counting those Twitter stats. New research finds very little correlation between Twitter counts and actual influence – so there.  

That’s all folks!