Social Media Done Right

Mashable points us to 35 solid examples of corporations employing social media. 

A few of our favorites:

-Adobe’s social bookmarking page on del.icio.us

-Cisco’s hosted blogs

-Southwest’s direct communication between employees and customers

-Wells Fargo’s student finance blogs

The entire list is here.

Any other particularly strong examples? Leave a comment.

Tweet-Spam and Evolving Community Norms

Beyond the (semi)lovable “Fail Whale,” Alley Insider today reports on another issue for Twitter: a growing spam problem:

The service has gotten popular enough to attract spammers, and Twitter is trying to combat them — namely by blocking accounts that “follow” many people but don’t have any followers themselves. Presumably spammers will try to combat this by rigging accounts so that they have lots of artificial followers.

We also can’t help but notice the level of blatant self-promotion on Twitter. It’s not surprising when you consider the audience of tech-savvy early adopters — many with their own projects to plug. But as Twitter grows in popularity, this activity — if gone unchecked — could strangle the usefulness of the service.

Perhaps the social norms and community guidelines in micro blogging need to evolve.

Should Twitter users be asking themselves: “Is my tweet worth an opt-in text message?”*

On the Facebook front, perhaps a ratio of 5 posted items in the general interest of your friend network for every 1 blatant post of self-promotion?

Twitter and Facebook are incredibly useful utilities. But it is how the community norms and self-policing evolve that can keep them vibrant. If there is a social stigma to being a self-promotional spammer, perhaps the noise will die down to a mere rumble.

-Colin Nagy

*assuming there’s a monetary or attention-based value to an SMS.

Social Networking Stats: Facebook and LinkedIn Surging in US

Some useful social media statistics:

According to Nielsen Online:

“Facebook swelled to 29.2M unique visitors in the US, up more than 10 percent from May. Meanwhile, professional social networking site LinkedIn grew more than 20 percent month-over-month to 9.5M uniques. Year-over-year, that represents 77% growth for Facebook, and 187% for LinkedIn, respectively.

Meanwhile, it would appear that MySpace has officially hit a plateau in the US, though it still more than doubles up on the competition. Its 59.4M visitors in June represented zero growth over last year, and was a marginal decline from the 60.6M reported by Nielsen in May.

Elsewhere, Ning debuts on the charts with 2.2MM unique visitors, up 326% from last year when the create-your-own-social-network site was just getting off the ground.”

Attention at PSFK Conference San Francisco

Just a quick note to our friends on the west coast – Attention’s Colin Nagy will be  moderating the “San Francisco Snapshot” panel at PSFK San Francisco on Thursday, July 17th.

The panel includes Amit Gupta (Photojojo), Jeremy Townsend (Ghetto Gourmet), Kevin Allison (Financial Times) and Liz Dunn (funnyordie.com) discussing what aspects of local culture inspire them the most.

The complete conference agenda can be found at www.psfkconferencesanfrancisco.com