Twitter creates exclusive page to celebrate Indian festival Diwali
India is the world’s third most socially engaged country, with its users showing a preference for Twitter over Facebook. Paying homage to the fastest growing online market in the world, Twitter created an exclusive landing page for the #Diwali hashtag to celebrate the start of the 5-day Festival of Lights yesterday. Adorned with a background image of a lit traditional oil lamp, the page streams live tweets and pictures relating to the festival. Mashing up an array of tweets about Diwali by brands, celebrities, influencers and other users, the page is a virtual smorgasbord of online sentiments and trending thoughts during the festive period.

Indian fashion label launches Twitter auction
Bombay High, an Indian fashion label, celebrated Diwali in a fun way by launching an online auction where Tweets serve as currency to fund bids. Over a period of 3 days, Bombay High will hold 2 auctions for 2 different products on a daily basis. Up for auction were some of Bombay High’s finest formal and casual wear. Users will need to connect their Twitter accounts with the microsite as only tweets posted from it will be counted as bids. Participants with the most tweets win the auction item whilst two runner-ups will receive gift vouchers.

Chinese users spent S$1.96 billion in 14 hours on Taobao.com on 11 Nov
November 11 (touted as Singles’ Day in China because of the confluence of four “1″s in the date) was a big day for e-commerce in China as over 10 million netizens flocked to Taobao.com to partake in its 24-hour half-price online shopping carnival. Sales volume exceeded last year’s figures of 5.2 billion yuan (S$1.02 billion) to hit 10 billion yuan (S$1.96 billion) at 1.38pm – achieving the sales target 10 hours early. The overwhelming volume placed strains on bank and express delivery systems as they struggle to cope with the demand. Online shopping in China presents a great opportunity for growth as it rises in popularity. With a penetration rate of only 36.5% vs 70% in Western countries like the US, the world’s largest wired nation looks poised for an e-commerce boom.

Lee Jeans gets more social to drive e-commerce volumes
Lee Jeans has embarked on a new influencer-centric brand campaign in China in an effort to drive online sales on its e-commerce platform. Named “Free Your Night Side”, the campaign engaged key online leaders, top bloggers and celebrities in a surprise live, interactive theatre event replete with 80 professional actors clad in Lee’s autumn and winter range. The influencers’ spontaneous reactions were recorded on video and shared on Lee’s branded Tudou videosharing and Weibo microblog platforms in addition to the bloggers’ own social media channels. The campaign generated alot of interest and 200,000 views within a week of releasing the 40 online videos.

Businesses that have embraced digital are more profitable
Companies that have jumped on board with digital and social media marketing and analytics are more profitable, new research from MIT has found. These companies are outperforming their less tech-savvy peers by 26% in terms of increased profits and 12% higher market valuations. Making this change often comes from digital leadership at the top, and while the banking and travel sectors are attracting top talent, retail seems to be struggling.

54% of top brands are active on Instagram
A new study has shown that more and more brands are signing up for Instagram, with 54% of the world’s top brands now active on the platform, a 35% growth since the beginning of August. MTV holds the top slot for the most followers for a brand, and its follower count stands at nearly 1 million. Starbucks, Burberry and Nike are a bit further behind but are sure to catch up with MTV soon.

24% of Brits Instagram all of the photos they share online
A new study says that nearly a quarter of Brits with smartphones are 100% faithful to Instagram when it comes to sharing their photos online, and this 24% rely solely on that platform. An impressive 96% said they share all of their photos online in some way, but almost half said they thought it was annoying when their friends posted too many photos.

Instagram rolls out user profiles on the web
Instagram has introduced web profiles for its users, the first real move away from the platform being mobile-only. The profiles look very Facebook-like, with a Timeline-esque cover photo and small square profile image. It makes sense for Instagram to use the visual cues from its parent company, but even if they look lovely, will anyone bother to visit users’ or brands’ pages on the web?

Facebook’s iPhone app adds photo filters, gifts and faster messages
Was Facebook’s Camera and Messenger apps just testing grounds? A big update has now landed for the original Facebook app, which had added the main features of Facebook Camera: photo filters and sharing multiple photos at once. That means Twitter has been left in the dust, as it was just leaked last week that the site was looking into integrating filters into its mobile apps, but hasn’t managed to do so yet. Facebook has also rolled out Facebook Gifts, which has been in beta for a few months, meaning that mobile users can buy presents for their Facebook friends through the app. Facebook has also migrated some of the features from its Messenger app into the main Facebook app, including a list of frequently contacted friends and friends who are online, which can be accessed by swiping left across the screen.

ThingLink adds interactive images to Tweets
Sometimes 140 characters isn’t enough, and a company called ThingLink has developed a way to include interactive images in tweets, that show when a user expands a tweet. Small circular tags appear dotted around an image, which then expand to a small preview window and can then click through to a site. ThingLink already has partnerships with Soundcloud, Spotify and Eventbrite, so it’s easy to click through to audio clips, events, videos or your brand’s eCommerce site. It’s still early days for this feature, but it will be interesting to see how brands use it to its fullest.

Tumblr reaches 20 billion pageviews per month
Tumblr has hit 20 billion pageviews every month, up from a still-impressive 15 billion at the beginning of this year. As the company continues to grow, its CEO David Karp says Tumblr is doing its best to maintain the balance between giving paid advertisers space and maintaining Tumblr’s close-knit community. And Tumblr does that by treating brands just like any other user, without specially-dedicated brand pages.

Pinterest launches private boards, as brands try to link sales to pins
Pinterest is still the world’s fourth largest driver of web traffic, standing above Yahoo, Bing and even Twitter. But how often do those visits mean sales? The jury is still out on that question, but eCommerce company Shopify says that Pinterest users are 10% more likely to make a purchase. On the other hand, Zappos discovered that Pinterest users spent less than visitors coming from Facebook or Twitter, even though they shared more from the site. And just in time for the year’s biggest buying season, Pinterest has unveiled ‘secret boards,’ a place to privately pin your holiday gift ideas, but users are limited to just three private boards at the moment. Will this holiday season push Pinterest to the forefront of eCommerce?

Google+’s top 100 brands have just 23 million followers combined
Brand pages have been around for about a year now, and the number of people following these pages has increased, but very, very slowly. Brand adoption of the platform has grown from 64% six months ago to 72% in this most recent analysis, and brands with more than 5,000 followers now stand at 44% of the group, up from 35% six months ago. But engagement is down from six months ago, even as the pages keep growing in followers.

Venue ratings, Facebook friend tags arrive in Foursquare’s iPhone app
Foursquare recently added a ratings system, as simple as clicking a heart or a broken heart on a venue page, which has now been incorporated into the mobile version of the app as a rating out of 10. Foursquare’s ratings take more than hearts and heart-nots into account though, and the app also looks into popularity, loyalty and tips left by users. Foursquare has also introduced a new friend tagging system that allows users to mention any of their Facebook friends in checkins, not just the ones using Foursquare. Friends will get a notification that they’ve been mentioned, increasing Foursquare’s exposure.

Getting out the vote for Election 2012 on social media
Four years ago, Twitter was a mere fraction of what it is today, and research is starting to come in about how much of an effect it has had on the elections in the US last week. The teams for First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were frantically sending out direct messages on Twitter in the hours before the end of the presidential election, encouraging their followers to find their polling stations and get their friends out to vote. Team Obama also bought Promoted Tweets and a Promoted Trend for Election Day, coming in at about $120,000 per day. New research from Pew has found that social media is one of the main tools, especially for people under 30, that people use to encourage their friends to vote. Almost half of 18 to 29 year olds said friends or family had encouraged them to vote via social media, with 34% saying they had been doing the encouraging as well.

When Election Night finally came around last week, social media went crazy, hitting a peak of 327,452 tweets per minute as news organizations started to reveal the results. Instagram users posted 250,000 Election Day photos, and President Barack Obama’s “Four More Years” tweet that included a picture of him hugging his wife was retweeted more than 680,000 times in just 24 hours. His team posted the same image on Facebook, which was liked 3.9 million times and shared 550,000 times, possibly making it the most shared image on social media ever.

Romney’s Facebook page might be losing the election worse than he did, as his former fans abandon his page in droves. Disappearing Romney’s Like counter is measuring the exodus in real time, and if you leave the page open for a few hours, you can see exactly how many fans have disappeared in that time.

Durex’s election ad on Chinese social networks goes viral
The condom brand Durex posted a funny ad on China’s Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo on Election Night in the US, and now the ad has been forwarded more than 43,000 times and got 12,750 comments. It somehow passed the corporate filters as well as the government’s, so we’ll leave the image here, but you’ll have to click through for the translation…

FedEx launches ‘Ship to Friends’ app on Facebook
The parcel company FedEx has created a Facebook app that allows users to create address labels for parcels based on their friends’ profiles, and it notifies friends when they’re about to receive a package. This isn’t much different than what FedEx’s website already offers, but integrating its services with Facebook is sure to get even more users.

ASOS creates ‘shop-able’ video
Online clothing shop ASOS has released a series of videos that feature a running stream of items as they appear in the video that can be pinned to Pinterest or added to your ASOS shopping bag in just a few clicks. Retailers have finally started realizing the amazing potential of shareable and shop-able videos, and this looks like a big trend that’s about to take hold.

Pret asks for help to feed the homeless with Foursquare badge
Pret A Manger shops in the UK are donating 5p to charities that help the homeless when Foursquare users check in or when food from Pret’s special Christmas menu is ordered. Earning the badge on Foursquare is as simple as checking into any of their stores, and the shop says it hopes to donate £300,000.

And finally (we hope): ‘Cakes Are Like Facebook’
Is there anything that isn’t like Facebook? First, it was chairs and then pools, and now apparently, Cakes Are Like Facebook. Facebook posted an update that read, “Birthday cakes are made for people to be together. They give friends a place to gather and celebrate. But too much cake probably isn’t healthy. So birthday cake is a lot like Facebook.” We hope we don’t have to make this a weekly segment, so knock it off, FB.

Sina Weibo upgrades real-name verification system
In its latest effort to keep it real at Sina Weibo, the company has upgraded its real-name verification system to support overseas users. Tech In Asia tested the system and found various loopholes. They were able to register a new user in the US as “Tech in Asia” with passport number “123456789″; the same passport number was used to verify an existing account for one of the reporters, who had cheekily named himself after a historical figure, “Zhuge Liang”. Sina reports that it has more than 520,000 verified users, a very small number relative to their userbase of more than 300 million. The system upgrade includes a feature allowing users to snitch on falsely-verified users, in an effort to stamp out fake accounts.

Tencent’s WeChat App may offer coupons and local deals
China-grown Tencent WeChat is unstoppable. The rumour mill has been buzzing about the possibility of the hybrid social networking cum messaging app offering discount coupons following the acquisition of TongCard by Tencent. TongCard is one of China’s top online-to-offline (O2O) companies offering promotions and coupons from more than 6,000 retailers to 5 million active daily users. The tie-up, which will expand the reach to WeChat’s 200 million users, is expected to bring exponential growth to Tencent’s O2O market share and help it to overtake rivals such as Baidu.

Chinese Pinterest clone Mogujie secures C funding
We mentioned in August that Mogujie, China’s most popular Pinterest clone, was looking to raise US$ 200 million in C funding. That has finally come to pass, although the company declined to reveal the exact investment amount except to state that they’re now effectively valued at US$200 million (S$244.89 million). Touted earlier this year as a successful driver of referral traffic, the social pinboard site was earning more than RMB100,000 (S$19,437.50) daily in ad referral revenue for clickthroughs to Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce site.

LinkedIn partners with India’s top business school
With the new partnership between IIM-A, a top Indian business school, and LinkedIn, recruitment has become easier for companies and the school’s graduating students. Students are required to sign up for a LinkedIn account to enjoy the service. The professional social networking site has registered 31,000 users at IIM-A out of a total of 17 million users in India so far and much remains to be seen if the same approach will be applied to other colleges within Asia.

Instagram rolls out web profiles
Within the next week or so, Instagram users can expect to see their new web profiles featuring a selection of recently shared photographs, profile picture and bio. This forms part of a development to supplement the mobile app with web functionality that will enable users to view, like, share and comment on each other’s photos online instead of using the app. Our profiles haven’t been updated yet but do let us know when your Instagram profile page is up.

Customers up to 30% more likely to buy when engaged on social
Customers who interacted with a brand on social media increased their purchases by up to 30%, according to a new study. It also found that there’s a direct correlation between how much a customer participated in the social conversation and how much more likely they were to buy.

Executives use social media themselves but keep it out of the office
New research from Stanford University has discovered that even though 90% of CEOs, senior executives and corporate directors claim to understand the effects of social media on their organizations, only 32% actually monitor and measure their social performance. The majority of these execs, who are from both public and private companies, said that they had personal LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, but just 59% of their companies use social media to interact with customers. Sadly, the figures drop off quickly when asked if they use social media to advertise (49%), research customers (35%) or research competitors (30%), and most executives seem unsure what to do in this space.

91% of UK PR agencies admit they can’t reliably monitor social media
Halloween might be over, but here’s a terrifying stat for you: 91% of PR agencies in the UK admit that they don’t have reliable social media monitoring service. If you fear you’re one of their clients, you know where to find us…

Facebook lets businesses swap check-ins for free Wifi
Facebook is trialling a new service that lets local businesses offer free Wifi to their customers after they’ve checked in on the social network. Customers will be directed to the business’ Facebook page to check in and can then browse elsewhere on the web for free. Page owners will be able to track how many ‘Likes’ their page gets from this test. As usual, there’s no word yet on whether this service will become a full-fledged offering to businesses outside of this small test group.

Facebook is like … weird ads
When Facebook hit 1 billion users, it released its first ad, which compared the site to lots of random objects, most memorably to chairs. But now Facebook has released a second ‘version’ of this, thankfully just an image this time, but it’s just as odd as the first. The social network posted a status update with an image of a pool, and the update says, “Swimming pools are filled with people. Some you know. Some you don’t. And every once in a while you see something that maybe you shouldn’t. That’s why swimming pools are a little like Facebook.” Dig through the resulting comments for a good laugh.

Twitter to add Instagram-like photo filters
Twitter is planning to add photo filters to its mobile apps to encourage users to give up Instagram. So far, it sounds like there are only two filters in the works at the moment, so you’ll soon be able to color your photos in 1960s Kodachrome or an 1890s sepia tone. Twitter has been in the market for a photo service similar to Instagram ever since Facebook snapped it up, and it seems like it didn’t find any suitable contenders and decided to build its own version instead.

Google makes Google+ Hangouts look pretty
Google has redesigned Google+ Hangouts and added a hide-able sidebar that makes apps easier to manage and colorful notifications. Although this is a good step toward a cleaner and easier-to-use format, are all of these minor changes too little too late for the fledgling social network?

Twitter reveals beautiful visualization of 2012 Election issues
Twitter has done some data crunching and has created an interactive map of the US that shows engagement rates with the presidential candidates’ tweets and which topics in this election resonate most in certain states. See which of Barack Obama’s or Mitt Romney’s tweets had the most interactions and where those interactions came from. Twitter is stacking up with the best of the pollsters by finding out what topics are most important to New Yorkers vs. North Dakotans from the sources themselves.

Walmart launches themed ’12 days of giving’ app
Walmart has created a Facebook app that gives back to local communities through a series of themed donations to selected nonprofits, including military assistance and disaster relief. Walmart’s Facebook fans can nominate a nonprofit of their choice with a 200-word description of its work, and a panel from Walmart will select 12 organizations to get a slice of the $1.5 million fund. The app is also filled with short quotes from the winners from last year’s similar app to show how much the donations meant.

Man City releases ‘sticker swap’ Facebook app
Fans of Manchester City’s Facebook page can become the players themselves by swapping their favorite footballer’s face with their own to create a ‘sticker’ to be shared on Facebook and Twitter. Choose one of six City players and let the app do all the photoshopping work.

‘X Factor’ judge wears a Twitter dress for 4G launch
Nicole Scherzinger, a judge from the UK’s version of ‘X Factor’, wore a Twitter-powered dress for the launch of EE’s 4G mobile service. The dress displayed tweets in real-time during the event that used the hashtag #tweetthedress. 140 characters is definitely limiting, but displaying them on a dress a few characters at a time is even more so.

Royal British Legion asks for social media silence on Remembrance Day
A British charity is asking social media users to take a break from the noise on November 11 for two minutes to remember the fallen on Remembrance Day. When you visit the Royal British Legion’s website, you can authorize the organization to send a message from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, which will automatically tweet from those accounts on Remembrance Sunday. This service is run by Thunderclap, which did a similar campaign for World Humanitarian Day in August.

Foursquare shows the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy
Sandy wreaked havoc on the East Coast of the US last week, and Foursquare showed a telling check-in map of Manhattan that demonstrated how quickly the area was abandoned. Central Park was nearly empty of all online activity, and a lack of check-ins certainly means that stores in the area are having trouble getting on their feet after the storm.

Twitter sees 20 million mentions of Sandy, proves itself as a ‘truth machine’
During the Frankenstorm, many turned to Twitter as their source for news, as The New York Times lifted its paywall, and Twitter made a special #Sandy landing page as a one-stop news destination. More than 20 million Sandy-related tweets were sent over the five days in the lead up and landfall of the storm. The term “Sandy” also peaked at 20% of all searches on Twitter. Mobile usage hit a high on October 29 when many in the New York area lost electricity. The storm also seems to have knocked the sass out of tweeting New Yorkers (temporarily), and people in the land of sarcasm giants Buzzfeed and Gawker had a big attitude shift when bad weather arrived. Twitter users dropped the usual snark and went into information mode, and the majority of trending topic were Sandy-related. Buzzfeed even publicly outed a user who was spreading false information during the storm, showing Twitter’s amazing ability to be a ‘truth machine.’

How did brands react to Hurricane Sandy?
Turning to how brands reacted, airlines were some of the biggest companies affected by Sandy, but it’s not an industry known for being very responsive in social. Socialbakers found that American Airlines was the most responsive airline on Twitter and answered 602 out of 711 tweets from its followers, with an average response time of 16 minutes. Lufthansa performed the best on Facebook, responding to almost 80% of comments. Most other brands didn’t post anything during the storm, which is probably for the best, as a few that did used it to promote online shopping or other salesy updates that were distasteful in the wake of the storm’s destruction. A few brands that did post wished their fans the best or told them where to find emergency information about their services.

Videos hit the advertising sweet spot in China
Much has been written and said about economic powerhouse China and the promise its massive wired userbase holds for marketers. Here are some numbers that reflect the size of the potential market as at the end of 2011: 500 million internet users, 325 million online video viewers, 250 million microbloggers and 244 million social media users. User numbers only tell one part of the story; the demographics reveal that the average Chinese internet user is under 30 years of age with the most active online video viewers aged between 19 and 24, and coming from middle-class income households. The Chinese are prolific online video viewers and luxury brands have found videos to be the most effective way to engage the Chinese consumer.

Facebook sets sights on Japan’s advertising market
Dominant social network Facebook has added another feather to its cap after it overtook rival Mixi and hit 15 million active users in Japan. The company is looking to grow its share of Japan’s advertising market, ranked as the second largest advertising market in the world. Whilst Mixi has 26 million registered users, its active monthly userbase of 14.5 million users was surpassed by Facebook, which grew from 10 million to 15 million active users between March and August 2012. Data showed that 80% of Mixi’s traffic was from mobile devices, an area which Facebook is looking to tap on as it seeks to deepen engagement with users. With this rate of growth, Facebook could possibly wrest dominance from Twitter, which has 18 million registered users in Japan, in the near future.

Uber brands lead in social media conversations
Coke and Apple topped the charts in a report on social media impressions for the top 100 consumer brands during the month of July 2012. Coke registered 1.48 billion impressions, nearly 14% of the 10.6 billion generated by the top 100 brands and twice that of Apple at 761 million impressions. Although the U.S. accounts for about half of worldwide ad spending, the world’s largest advertising market only generated 44% of social media impressions. The reach offered by social media is especially noticeable outside of the U.S. with Coke generating 87% and Apple 72% of their impressions overseas.

Instagram passes 100 million users mark
Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg told CrunchFund that Instagram has just passed a major milestone of 100 million users. Instagram has been growing exponentially at a rate of more than 10 million users per month and passed its 5 billion photo milestone on 6 September 2012, when Facebook announced the success of its acquisition. What’s next for Instagram? Rumours are rife that Instagram will have a web presence and will be available on Windows Phone later this year.

Facebook Sponsored Results take off
Advertisers take note as the early results for Facebook’s Sponsored Results program look promising, according to Optimal. The product is meant to help marketers reach untapped potential customers. Optimal compared the number of people that would have been reached through targeting a designated search term against the brand’s Facebook fans (or those who could have been targeted with existing ads). During a seven-day period, “Facebook” turned up in 24,800 searches in the US out of which, only 21.9% were fans of Facebook’s page. The results were similar to searches for other top brands such as YouTube (20.8%), Coca-Cola (2.7%), Disney (22.3%) and MTV (17.4%). Optimal found that clickthrough rates ranged from 0.7% to 4.1% whilst on the lower-end of the scale, the campaigns outperformed Facebook Marketplace ads by 10x. The expectation is that the disparity will even out eventually though the initial data suggests that Facebook Sponsored Results can be a good tool to grow a brand’s audience quickly.

Picture-perfect social commerce
Asian consumers in Singapore and Hong Kong are flocking to niche social networks Pinterest and Instagram in droves but what’s really making retailers sit up and notice is the rate at which consumers’ are spending after visiting these sites. Researchers found that Singapore-based users visit both international and local social commerce sites whilst Hong Kong users visit global and Chinese e-commerce sites after surfing Pinterest and Instagram. It’s interesting to note that whilst Facebook drove 47% of traffic to Instagram in the US, 33% in Australia and 22% in Singapore, the largest source of Instagram traffic in Singapore came from Twitter at 42%.

More Asian consumers make purchases online weekly
A Nielson study of more than 28,000 ecommerce consumers in 56 countries uncovered that 62% of Asian consumers made online purchases on a weekly basis. This is higher than the global average of 52%. A quick glance at the chart below revealed an interesting statistic; it appears that 81% of Asian consumers provide feedback about a grocery category using social media on a weekly basis.

How will Facebook’s purchase affect Instagram in China?
With Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram on track for completion, there’s a risk that the latter will be blocked in mainland China. This will certainly bring Instagram’s growth of 100,000 downloads per week within China to a screeching halt. That would be a pity especially since the cross-posting functionality offered by Instagram puts it on the path to phenomenal growth in China, especially since it’s one of a handful of applications that supports posting to Sina Weibo (over 350 million registered users) in addition to Twitter and Facebook. Here are some numbers to ruminate over: Instagram has over  80 million registered users and saw more than 4 billion photos uploaded globally since its launch in October 2010. More than 50,000 Sina Weibo users signed up and 100,000 photos were shared to Weibo from Instagram since March 2012. Consider too the number of pictures uploaded to Instagram with China-related hashtags: 120,000 photos with the hashtag #Beijing, 125,000 with the hashtag #Shanghai, and 440,000 with the hashtag #China.

Social media risk management
Social media is a double-edged sword. When well-managed, it can be a powerful tool to propel your brand or product to international success and recognition as it allows brands to connect with consumers virtually seamlessly. Unfortunately the reverse is true in a crisis. Recent surveys reveal that social media is ranked as one of the top 5 risk factors to corporate performance. Here’s how social media measures up in a rundown of risks: 41% of US executives surveyed said global economic environment was a risk, 32% found government spending and budgets risky, 30% felt regulatory changes were a risk, and 27% said social media was a risk. It is significant to note that social media risk tops the list after broader economic and regulatory concerns. As for the top platforms in the rapidly expanding social media world with the largest potential to damage a brand, the top 3 were Facebook, which 35% of marketers considered presented a significant risk, 25% for Twitter, and 15% for YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

In a study of the types of risk social media posed to brands, 66% of respondents to Altimeter’s survey said reputational damage to the brand was a critical or significant risk. Release of confidential information was the next biggest concern with 32% of respondents citing it as a significant or critical risk.

Age in the time of social media
Death may be the great equalizer of men but the Internet and social media has likewise levelled information barriers for many users around the world. The sheer magnitude of the number of social media users are but one part of the story; demographics such as age, gender and income levels are significant factors for consideration in targeted marketing. Dispelling the notion that social media is the domain of the very young, studies have shown that the average age of a social media user in the US is just under 37. Here’s how the top social media platforms stack up in terms of users aged 35 and above: 55% of Twitter users are 35 and above, 63% on Pinterest, 65% on Facebook, and 79% on LinkedIn. Interestingly, the average age of Facebook users has increased in the past 2 years whilst the reverse is true for Twitter.

Sina Weibo launches discussion forums
Challenging China’s popular Tieba discussion platform run by the nation’s largest search engine Baidu, microblogging service Sina Weibo has launched its own forum called ‘Weiba‘. Following Sina’s extended features – Tumblr-like blogs and social gaming – Sina Weibo has diversified once again with Weiba. However, with the discussion forum, Sina has a bigger responsibility in terms of censorship just as Tieba did when it had to take down some of its forums earlier this year. Weiba is open to all 350 million Sina Weibo users where they can hold discussions on niche subjects from the Olympics to Technology in more than 140 characters. The page emulates a Bulletin Board System (BBS) with Twitter-like functionalities by allowing users to ‘follow’ forums and post discussions.

Japan’s Prime Minister’s Office on Sina Weibo
The Japanese Prime Minister’s Office are an active user of social media platforms Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in reaching out to the English-speaking audience. Their presence on Twitter and Facebook were particularly well received over last year’s earthquake. The Japanese media has reported that the Prime Minister’s Office have now decided to establish a presence on popular Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo to reach out to the Chinese-speaking audience.  Posting on the account has yet to officially begin but a welcome note was left on the URL as shown below (translated):

To our Chinese friends, hello! The Japanese Prime Minister’s Office has opened a pilot Sina microblog. We will soon officially begin. We hope it can become a window through which our Chinese friends can come to understand information from the Prime Minister’s Office.

This is not the first time foreign politicians have taken to Sina Weibo to reach Chinese audience. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who actually speaks Chinese joined Weibo in April this year while politicians from Victoria, Australia Ted Baillieu and Daniel Andrews jumped onto the platform back in March.

China’s e-commerce giant gets social
China’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba is hoping to win over its hundreds of millions of online shoppers to its new social network app Laiwang. Though the network is late to the social media scene in China, it has a leverage with its focus on online shopping. Rather than ‘retweet’ options such as in Weibo and Twitter, the Laiwang app calls for interactions such as ‘get togethers’ which is a collection of mentions that look like a micro-forum as shown on the right-hand corner below. The app has yet to tap on the online shopping aspect and cater to e-commerce, brands, or Taobao shopping; at the moment it looks like yet another social media platform.

Indian operator Bharti wants a slice of Google and Facebook’s revenue pie
India’s telecom giant Bharti has called the situation “unfair” that Facebook, Twitter and Google, who account for nearly 40% of its overall data traffic, reap the revenue of the infrastructure that the network operator provides. This argument isn’t new but Bharti, which has 250 million subscribers, are amongst the more explicit ones.

YouTube bus tours India streaming Olympic games
The YouTube bus hits the streets of India where there is no internet connection. Google India announced that the bus will be streaming the Olympic games, and educating the people on how they can watch it online and be part of the online community if they have access to a decent internet speed. The YouTube bus initiative also aims to educate the public on India’s history in the games – quite literally bringing localised content to their doorstep.

The best and the worst of the ‘Social Games’.
Danny Boyle’s extraordinary Opening Ceremony in London attracted nearly 10 million tweets inside five hours. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, saw his post re-tweeted over 10,000 times. But the social focus of the Games is not receiving positivity from all quarters: The IOC has reportedly requested that spectators only send urgent texts and tweets after data-networks were overloaded during the road-cycling which resulted in poor Radio coverage.

After round one of the ‘Socialympics’ CocaCola appears to be leading the way when it comes to brand performance with (our client) adidas also proving to be very successful. EDF are demonstrating the most potential. Is all this engagement postitive? Not necessarily. In fact, much of the engagement is in response to criticism.

In a more sinister event, the Greeks saw their Olympic squad reduced from 105 to 104 before the Opening Ceremony when an entirely tasteless tweet from Voula Papachristou ruined her chances of competing.

Voula is not the only one to have been expelled through racism on Twitter however. Switzerland’s Michael Morganella was also expelled for a tweet which “discriminated against, insulted and violated the dignity of the South Korea football team as well as the South Korean people” said Swiss Olympic team chief Gian Gilli.

Facebook inches towards 1 billion active users
Facebook has just posted its Q2 earnings release with some pretty amazing growth figures. The number of monthly and daily active users has nearly doubled since this time just two years ago, but what has really skyrocketed is the number of monthly users on mobile, which has increased 3.5 times since 2010.

And of those 955 million active users, Facebook says 85% of them are creating content, which has a rather broad definition, but includes everything from uploading a photo to clicking ‘Like’ on a brand’s page. These numbers all show that Facebook’s userbase is massive, but also pretty massively engaged.

Facebook tests ‘Subscribe’ button for pages
Facebook could expand its ‘Subscribe’ button that we’ve seen on personal accounts. This button allows users to get updates from the page without actually liking it. No word yet on how ads can be targeted differently to likers vs. subscribers, and page admins cannot see how many users are subscribed.

Facebook’s Recommendations Bar emerges from beta
When a user reaches the end of a story, this plugin dishes up new articles for readers and asks them to comment on or like the story. The plugin has already been integrated into Mashable, Wetpaint, and The Mirror, as Facebook continues to extend its “frictionless sharing” across more of the web; however, the site did shy away from making this a social reader app and thought this format would fit with more apps and websites.

LinkedIn enters the Office
LinkedIn has announced a partnership with Microsoft to make it easier to see your contacts’ LinkedIn activity as you’re e-mailing them. Called the ‘Outlook Social Connector’, the feature will show what your contacts are talking about, their photos and contact information, all without leaving your inbox. While this is a good move from LinkedIn, it’s seems a little late in a world where a lot of people are using Gmail and Rapportive.

Instagram hits 80 million users, but Twitter pulls API
That’s a 30 million increase since April, thanks to its Android app and integration into Facebook’s Open Graph. Despite that, Twitter has pulled its API, as it continues to tighten down on where it can be used (and recently pulled it from LinkedIn as well). Users will see in the latest update that they can no longer find people they follow on Twitter on Instagram.

Google+ populating the ‘ghost-town’.
Nine months ago Google+ was the laughing-stock of the social world but Google seemed strangely relaxed about the situation. It seems that their confidence was well-placed. ComScore has revealed that the number of unique visitors to Google+ has increased by 66% in the last 9 months with over 110 million non-US visitors in June. Statistics also appear to be showing a Facebook plateau.

On the right Path?
New Path users will now be able to import all Instagrams, Foursquare check-insand Facebook statuses in a move that is likely to attract far more interest to the app.

Social gets serious in the Premier League.
After continuous reprimanding of Premier League players in the 2011-2012 season thePremier League has responded to the request of the Clubs to provide guidelines for Social Media activity:

Advice is offered on the endorsement of brands, goods and services, while confidential information about team selection, injuries or tactics is prohibited from being disclosed on social media.

Whilst giving the players a clear outline of their Social behaviour it also shows that the Premier League are taking the use of Social Media seriously.

Interactive weather?
The Weather Channel has demonstrated how most websites can embrace social to become more personable with their audience. After connecting The Weather Channel with Facebook, the site will let visitors know about any severe weather that might be affecting their friends in other locations. The Weather Channel is also attempting to tap into Open Graph to make the site actions, such as the love or urgh features, more shareable.

Intel ‘Musical-ises’ your life.
After the success of Intel’s first major Facebook campaign, they are back with a song and a dance. ‘Me The Musical’, after gaining permissions, charts your Facebook history and builds a musical of your life in an impressive new campaign.

Gala Bingo uses social data to find best celebrity match for campaign
Gala Bingo chose Peter Andre to front its website relaunch campaign after using a social audience indexing tool to look at the desired Gala Bingo fan and then look at a celebrity that over-indexed on that particular demographic.

McArthurGlen Group brings We Are Social on board.
Our Pan-European reputation has encouraged McArthurGlen Group to appoint We Are Social to oversee the 21 current Facebook pages and new social strategies in the UK, Germany, France, Greece, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands. The first major project for We Are Social will be the launch of the McArthurGlen Spring/Summer campaign.

‘Twitter Bomber’ has the last laugh
28 year old Paul Chambers has won a high-court appeal over convictions for tweeting his girlfriend suggesting he would ‘blow-up’ Robin Hood airport – It was a joke. This is just another in a long line of trials involved ill-judged tweets and although it has progressed to a ridiculous stage, it is another warning to ‘think before you tweet’.

Chinese marketers to increase digital spend, but request accountability
A joint study by R3 and independent ad tracking company Admaster reveal that Chinese marketers intend to increase their digital spend in 2012 by 26.9%, compared to 18% in 2011. 25% of those surveyed have budgets between RMB 5 to 10 million or S$990,150 to S$1.98 million, while 6% have budgets above RMB 50 million or S$9.9 million  The focus will be on online video with a share of digital spend of more than 23%, followed by microblogs with 20% and social networks with 16%. Only 16% of the 150 companies surveyed believe that they are actually getting competitive digital media buying rates, with fewer than 40% satisfied with the reliability and quality of measurement of their campaigns. This certainly bodes well for digital agencies.

Sina Weibo launches Weibo Places
Sina Weibo has launched a new location service that will collect and arrange posts that a user has made on Sina Weibo that contains a geo-tag into a timeline that includes maps of each location. It also allows users to check-in at specific locations, or search for new places to visit which they can then mark as ‘want to visit’. The latter functionality sounds similar to what Chinese location-based app Jiepang already offers, even though Weibo Places appears to be more an aggregator tracking the history of a user’s location-based posts. In addition to the web application, Sina Weibo has also partnered with several third-party mobile applications such as photo-sharing app Tuding001.

China’s e-commerce site Tmall launches an iPhone app
China’s leading e-commerce website Tmall has launched an iPhone app, which allows users to browse and purchase items from all of its B2C brand partners and independent stores, with the addition of social functionalities such as ‘likes’ and comments. The mobile app also supports full order management, such that purchases can be tracked whilst they’re on the road. This signals the growing trend of m-commerce whereby consumers are making purchases from their phones while on-the-go, and Tmall seems to be capitalising on this with their dedicated mobile app. It’s interesting also that Tmall has decided to launch an iPhone app first while the iPad and Android versions are currently in the works, which signals the increasing popularity of the iPhone in China.

Boris Johnson joins Sina Weibo
Boris Johnson’s campaign for re-election as Mayor of London has even seen him join Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo in a bid to win over London’s Chinese community. However, Mayor Johnson certainly hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it yet.

Mobile an increasingly important media channel in Thailand
Statistics from mobile ad network InMobi reveal that mobile is an increasingly important media channel in Thailand, with 44% of mobile web users claiming that their preferred method of going online is through a mobile device. Most importantly, 75% of mobile web users are as comfortable with mobile advertising as they are with TV or online advertising. Mobile is fast becoming an important driver of consumer purchasing decisions with 38% of Thai respondents saying they have been introduced to something new via mobile advertising, while 13% have reconsidered a product because of mobile advertising. M-commerce will also be a driver of this mobile movement, with 68% of mobile web users planning to purchase a product through their mobile device over the next 12 months. Marketers clearly have an area of opportunity to better target Thai consumers through mobile advertising given their receptiveness to it.

Trust in social grows
According to Nielsen’s latest Global Trust in Advertising report, social networks and consumer-generated media continue to have a significant impact on advertising as consumers’ reliance on word-of-mouth in the decision-making process has increased significantly. The report showed that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends above all other forms of advertising – up 18% since 2007, with trust in consumer opinions posted online up to 70%, a 15% increase in four years.

Sponsored ads on social networks, a new format included in the 2011 Nielsen survey, were found to be trusted by just 36% of consumers, underlining that a paid strategy for social networks alone is not enough.

Consumers respond to social media symbols on TV
A new survey has reinforced the idea that social media and television are a perfect match. The survey, carried out by Accenture, found that one-third of US television viewers interacted with a social network ‘after seeing a social media symbol on the TV screen’, with the Facebook ‘Like’ being the most recognised symbol. Interestingly, US television viewers are more likely to recognise QR codes than Twitter hashtags.

Facebook tests and launches a range of new features
It’s not exactly news that Facebook is focusing on mobile – witness the purchase of Instagram – but it is interesting that they’re focusing on all mobile users. Recently, they’ve launched a new ‘Facebook for every phone’ app which creates a much better mobile experience for non-smartphone users, and in good news for brands, includes the ability to vist Facebook Pages within the app. It’s a move which shows Facebook is keen on mobile domination across the market.

Facebook has implemented a ‘listen’ button on artists’ fan Pages that lets users instantly stream songs from an artist’s catalogue. The feature could help make Facebook a go-to option for people looking for new music, similar to the Myspace in its glory days, but more likely will just integrate music more strongly into the existing Facebook product.

Facebook is also testing a new “trending articles” feature to highlight social reader articles within users’ News Feeds in an attempt to drive more users to Open Graph news apps. Particularly for smaller news sites, this could have a big impact on the number of people reading their site.

In addition, Facebook has delivered “real-time” analytics to Page admins for the first time. This overdue improvement provides new abilities to help marketers measure how well a post is performing on their Pages now, rather than 48 hours later, and modify their content (and advertising spend) accordingly.

It’s an interesting move now, as over the next few weeks, Facebook will introduce more granular metrics, measuring actions other than ‘Likes’, within its ads management platform. Facebook’s product manager for Pages Insights David Baser said the measurable actions “could be anything [such as] commenting or sharing a page post, claiming an offer, or, instead of just installing an app, actually using an app or doing things within an app.” The new feature titled “Action Measurement” will appear as a column and pie chart in Facebook’s Ads Manager and will help marketers tailor ads for relevant consumers.

It seems clear that Facebook are trying as hard as they can to get existing advertisers to spend more money with them – both through letting marketers optimise the performance of their posts, and by making advertising more measurable.

Google products get the social treatment
YouTube aims to become more social and increase revenue by possibly introducing Google+ comments to the site. It could be a mutually beneficial move for Google – encouraging better quality comments on YouTube and also increased use of Google+.

In a smaller piece of news, Gmail users can expect to see recent photo and video thumbnails from Google+ when they hover over the “people” widget within their inbox.

Foursquare announces advertising platform launch
Plans for a mid-June launch for a paid-media platform have surfaced which will give Foursquare merchants the ability to promote a deal to check-in at a given place. According to the reports, Foursquare is pitching brands to become launch partners, and it’s a move which we can definitely see being of particular interest to restaurant chains.

Tumblr to overtake blogs, will introduce advertising
Tumblr looks set to overtake ‘blog’ by the end of the year in Google searches. Between the two terms, ‘blog’ is currently ahead but XKCD blogger Randall Munroe believes that ‘Tumblr’ will see more Google searches by October 12 this year.

Pinterest losing its interest
After its explosive growth in recent months, it seems Pinterest’s bubble may have burst and might now actually be losing users. Monthly active users of their Facebook app are down from 11.3 million on March 1 to just 8.3 million currently. It’s likely that the hype around the photo-sharing and curating site motivated many people to join, but have now decided that Pinterest is not their thing.

Quora and Path both raise funds and plan expansion
According to TechCrunch, Quora is set to raise between $30 – $50 million in its Series B fundraising, giving it a $400 million valuation. Co-founder Adam D’Angelo will also be investing up to $20 million of his own money along with other investors according to one source.

Location-based app Path closed its Series B funding of ”more than $30 million” with investors including Sir Richard Branson, which values it at $250 million. In his email statement, Path CEO Dave Mortin noted the investors’ commitment to building Path “for the long term” with the funding being used for “international growth and expansion as well as user adoption”. It’s unclear whether he meant they would be spending money on advertising, or just on improving the product to boost user adoption.

Klout launches Brand Pages – ‘a new twist on influence’
Klout, the influence measurement company, is now topping 12 billion API calls a month– and has launched Brand Pages to try and work more with brands. According to Klout, the newly launched Brand Pages give ‘influencers a place to be recognised and have a direct impact on the brands they care about most’.

Red Bull have teamed up with Klout for the Beta launch and are offering their top advocates the chance to win a trip to the X Games or, more likely, some merchandise. It’s good to see Klout trying something new, but what they really need to work on is their influence measurement which could do with some work.

Brands tweeting and the Olympics
If you’re working for a brand which isn’t an official Olympic sponsor, even mentioning the Olympics on social media channels could get you in hot water. While Rax Lakhani makes a fair point that it will be impossible for the IOC to keep an eye on every tweet and the rules are clearly overbearing, it’s still an unnecessary risk to break them.

It was notable in the pre-Christmas period how little variety there was on brand social media accounts, with everyone talking about Christmas and little else, so it will be interesting to see how skilled community managers perform in posting content which deflects attention away from their competitors’ Olympic sponsorship, without breaking the rules.

In other Olympic news, the IOC has launched the nicely designed ‘Athlete’s Hub’ which will bring together social media updates from different athletes. While you could just follow them all on Twitter, this is an easier way to follow the Olympic stars, with less effort for the ordinary fan. Nice.

Honda ask people to give up Pinterest – sort of
The new Honda campaign for the CR-V strikes of one where somebody has come up with a decent pun – Pintermission – and built a campaign around it. The campaign revolves around offering active pinners $500 to give up Pinterest for a day, and instead go outside and do the things they’ve been pinning about. It even features personalised invitations and persuaded a few super-users to give Pinterest up for a day.

But as Adweek neatly put it:

The campaign is nicely designed and executed, but somewhat frustrating. If the only way your brand can relate to Pinterest is by dissing it, isn’t it disingenuous to build a whole campaign around it?

Quite.

Dr Pepper’s new Facebook Connect campaign
Dr Pepper have launched a new campaign called ‘The Best Day Of High School’ which creates a bespoke video for each user by connecting it up with their Facebook profile. Considering how long Facebook Connect has been around, it’s a little underwhelming.

Air New Zealand give consumers cashback for recommendations
UK-based Air New Zealand customers can earn £50 for every Twitter, Facebook, email or blog recommendation that turns into a premium economy booking. Consumers that register for the trial can earn cashback on bookings for the premium economy seats. Although the campaign will probably show impressive numbers, it will be hard to prove it has convinced people to book who wouldn’t have otherwise.

Fulham FC attempt Foursquare Super Swarm
Before their home game against Wigan on Saturday, Fulham attempted to unlock the Super Swarm badge for all those checking-in on Foursquare. While this isn’t particularly innovative or interesting on its own when you consider there was a crowd of 20,000+ at the Cottage, Fulham also plan to introduce special offers on tickets and retail items throughout the season that you can only redeem with Foursquare.

Italian ‘blog killer’ law returns
In a quite incredible story, the Italian government is trying to pass a law so brilliantly ridiculous one could be mistaken for thinking Silvio Berlusconi was still Prime Minister.

The proposed law – which is designed to protect those libelled online – works like this:

In order to protect people from online defamation, this law states that each webmaster of whatever website must rectify within 48 hours (even if you’re a private blogger who just left for the weekend!) any page on the website itself, if somebody just tells him or her (how?) that they consider themselves wronged by that page. No discussion or reply allowed, no judge needed, and the fine for not “rectifying” within 2 days is 12,000 Euros [about S$19,693].

Nuts. In other words, if one writes a fact and anyone disputes it, the person will have to change what they’ve written. Looks like the trolls have finally won.

How Sina Weibo is faring against Twitter worldwide
There’s no doubt that Sina Weibo is big in China – it receives 1 in every 100 Internet visits in China. How then does it fare against Twitter, which is used internationally? Resonance China charted the percentage of visits both microblogging services received in the respective countries they’re used in for December 2011, and Sina Weibo sees a higher penetration in China than Twitter in the many countries it is available in, such as US, UK, India and Brazil. Interestingly enough, Twitter sees a higher percentage of visits in Singapore, where it is receiving 0.85% of Internet visits, compared to US, which sees only 0.23%, and UK, which accounts for 0.44%. This could be due to users accessing Twitter via third-party applications such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, or perhaps through Twitter’s mobile apps.

Sina Weibo promotes social good through its charity platform
Sina Weibo has included a charity platform ‘Gong Yi‘ to its microblogging site that will allow users to ‘follow’ and donate to good causes on the site itself. The concept seems slightly similar to Facebook Causes, a social fundraising tool available to non-profits that wish to integrate donation capabilities with their online efforts. The Gong Yi homepage categorises charities into education, child assistance, medical care, animal protection, and environmental protection, and on each charity’s page is displayed a progress meter that shows how far along it is to hitting its target amount of donations, as well as a donation button. Once Gong Yi is out of its beta phase, it’ll be interesting to see whether non-profits utilise the platform given the 250 million users on Sina Weibo.

Navigating the weibo waters in China
There are plenty of figures on the number of users Sina Weibo has, but the great takeaway from this infographic by Digital Jungle is the demographic data of Sina Weibo users. Apparently, females dominate Sina Weibo – 70.2% of Sina Weibo users are female, and the other 29.8% male. The majority of users, 68% of users to be precise, are aged 18 to 25, while 32% of users spend more than 3 hours on Sina Weibo per day.

‘Occupy Obama’
For months, Google+ had been banned in China. When the firewall was mysteriously removed last week, thousands of Chinese web users flocked to President Obama’s Google+ Page, in a move dubbed Occupy Obama. Yes they can.

LiveJournal Singapore launches LJ checkouts
LiveJournal Singapore will be launching e-commerce features through its brand new LJ Checkout platform, catering specifically to the unique local ecosystem of ‘blogshops’, which are online shopping websites hosted on the LiveJournal platform itself. The suite of new features include product catalogue creation, a shopping cart system, and an online payment gateway which will see it partnering with MOLPay. Given that the 50,000 or so blogshops in Singapore generated US$72 million or S$90.25 million  in 2011, it’s no wonder LiveJournal Singapore is responding to this particular niche.

What happens on social media in 60 seconds
If you’ve ever thought that you can’t accomplish much in a single minute, think again. This infographic by Social Jumpstart shows you what happens on social media in a mere 60 seconds, and some of the figures are breathtaking indeed. 2 million videos are viewed on YouTube, 700,000 messages sent on Facebook, 25,000 stumbles on StumbleUpon (updated figures provided by a StumbleUpon representative), 7,610 searches on LinkedIn – all in the space of a minute.

Facebook announces partnership with mobile carriers to offer carrier billing
Today at Mobile World Congress, Facebook announced what could be a potentially game-changing move: it’s created an ecosystem where people can pay for things on their mobile phone bill directly through Facebook, in just three steps.

Facebook set to launch new premium ads and speed up Insights
According to a document leaked to Gigaom, Facebook plans to update its premium ads product by requiring their premium homepage ads to be in page post format.

According to Facebook, page posts significantly outperform other types of ads with 80% more chance of being remembered, a 40% increase in engagement, and a 16% increase in fan rate. These changes are expected to go into effect on Wednesday.

Facebook is also giving Insights, its analytics tool, a revamp. It is expected that they will soon show Page performance data in real-time or near real-time rather than on a 48 hour delay. This is an opportunity to give businesses the understanding necessary to drive higher ROI, which will in turn attract more brands and advertisers to the platform. According to Chad Wittman, EdgeRank Checker’s founder, making real-time Insights data available through the API “will give Page owners an opportunity to see how their Page actually lives and breathes”.

Twitter’s global takeover

Twitter now has over 500 million users just ahead of its sixth birthday. This phenomenal global growth appears to have no plans to cease, with Twopcharts predicting it will hit 600 millions users in around 108 days. On top of this, Twitter has taken yet another step in its international growth by announcing that Google’s Russian rival, Yandex, is their new real-time search partner. Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets” covering all languages. This is an extremely clever move for Twitter in both extending its coverage and utility beyond its home market and English.

LinkedIn launch ‘Follow Company’ button
As of today, LinkedIn have launched an embeddable ‘Follow Company’ button, which companies can add to their sites, to allow anyone to follow their company on LinkedIn. Big news for those who like to stay connected.

Google+ integrates with Google Voice, adds ‘More By’ to search results
Google have announced that Google+ will now be linked to Google Voice by bringing information from your Google+ circles into your Google Voice phone account to make it even easier for you to organise your contacts. This means it will be easier than ever to manage your callers – i.e. ‘Creepers’ go straight to voicemail. It’s another step towards Google bringing Google+ to every Google web app, indicating that Google+ is now the “new mode of usage of Google” that its leaders envisioned – at least from Google’s perspective.

Google have also recently added a new ‘More By’ link to the authorship tag in search results which when clicked, brings up a personalised search results page containing all content by the author. At the top this features information about the author from Google+ and then below lists all the blog content. This is expected to soon be populated by more social content.

Pinterest hype not backed up by the numbers
Looking at the latest research from comScore, Pinterest actually lost users in the UK in January, despite only having 300,000 users to start off with. This might burst some people’s bubbles, but Pinterest is the ultimate embodiment of the Emperor’s New Clothes – just look at the graph! As for the rest of Europe, it’s barely even registering.

PeerIndex launch reward scheme
PeerIndex – a competitor to Klout – has launched a reward scheme, called PeerPerks, which offers free products and discounts, to those they consider influential. Visitors to PeerPerks.com can choose the offer they’re interested in and then find out if they have the Klout clout to be eligible for it.

NBA All-Star game adds social media offering
Yesterday’s NBA All-Star game saw two separate social activations. First, the annual Slam Dunk contest was opened up to Twitter, with users able to vote for their favourite player – by using their surname and the hashtag #SpriteSlam.

Second, and perhaps more interestingly, they teamed up with Shaker, a virtual nightclub which lives within Facebook. This allowed them to create a site which gave fans a chance to interact, chat, watch exclusive interviews and highlights, and test each other’s NBA knowledge. The by-product of all this is that is has been dubbed the most social NBA All-Star game, ever.

Could ‘Fringe’ be saved by a hashtag?
US TV-show Fringe was threatened with cancelation – because its audience was too, um, fringe. But a clever social media campaign has reached a lot of people, suggesting that it might be saved. It’s worth reading the full story to learn about the viewers’ strategy to save the programe, and how they’ve managed to reach such a huge online audience with their campaign.

Ford crowd-source ideas for mobile innovation
Around this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ford are looking to crowd-source answers to this question: What will communications technology in vehicles help us do in the future? The most interesting responses will be collated into a “customer vision” for mobile-vehicle interactions, and published via social media storytelling tool Storify. Users will need to focus in order to give Ford the fiesta of ideas they’re looking for.

Eurostar launch new social platform, Eurostar Live
Last week saw Eurostar launch their new social platform, Eurostar Live, with a little help from the We Are Social team in London. It brings social media commentary by the general public about Eurostar’s destinations to 363 public display screens across London and the South East.

Kellogg’s develop Totes Amazeballs cereal after Twitter suggestion
Kellogg’s developed a cereal for The Charlatans front man Tim Burgess after he announced his interest in developing a cereal to his followers on Twitter. They created Totes Amazeballs, after Burgess tweeted that he wanted to create a new super cereal which would be Rocky Road flavoured, using the hashtag #totesamazeballs.

Having seen the tweets, Kellogg’s decided to commission the idea in the singer’s honour, with the cereal ultimately containing Kellogg’s Coco Pops Rocks, marshmallows, shortbread pieces and raisins. It remains to be seen whether this was a one-off, or whether Kellogg’s will make this a serial feat.

Absolut London Instagram competition
As part of the launch of their newly-designed bottles, Absolut London are running an Instagram competition to win one of the limited edition bottles.

People like big chocolate bars
Last week Mars announced it was cutting back the size of a whole range of its products, in order to ensure none were more than 250 calories. Judging by the comments on the Snickers Facebook Page, people like big chocolate bars. Picnic.