How Facebook Supported the Egyptian Revolution

Officially, Facebook has remained mum on its role in the protests in Egypt and Tunisia, which grew into full-on revolutions. But this week, reports have surfaced that reveal a somewhat active involvement in the events and outline Facebook’s support of democracy and civic engagement.

Facebook reportedly worked to protect the identity of Egyptian activists, according to The Daily Beast. The news site claims to have obtained e-mail correspondence from Facebook executives and the administrators of the Facebook Page that was the revolution’s digital epicenter — the We Are All Khaled Said Page, which was created in memory of an Egyptian man murdered last summer by police.

The Page mysteriously disappeared as activists prepared to substantiate what would likely be rigged elections in November of last year. It turned out someone had likely notified Facebook that the Page administrator was using a pseudonym, a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

Facebook stuck to its policy, but Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of policy for Europe, offered a loophole.

“There is no discretion here as the creation of fake accounts threatens the integrity of our whole system,” he wrote. “People must use the profile of a real person to admin the page or risk it being taken down at any time. It is not important to us who that real person is as long as their account appears genuine. So if they can offer a real person as admin then the page can be restored.”

An Egyptian immigrant and activist in Washington, D.C., lent her account password to Wael Ghonim in Egypt, who continued to run the page.

The Daily Beast‘s e-mails reveal that the social network put the key Facebook Pages under protection, the night the protests in Egypt began in late January.

“We have put all the key pages into special protection,” Allan wrote. A team, he said, “is monitoring activity from Egypt now on a 24/7 basis.”

Facebook Like Button Takes Over Share Button Functionality

Say goodbye to the Share button because the Like button is taking over.

After months of updates to its Like button, Facebook has released an update that fundamentally changes the button’s functionality to that of a Share button. Now after hitting the Like button, a full story with a headline, blurb and thumbnail will be posted to your profile wall. You’ll also be given an option to comment on the story link. Previously, only a link to the story would appear in the recent activity, often going unnoticed by users.

Though users may now think twice about hitting the button, given how prominently it will appear on their walls and in their networks’ newsfeeds, it should ultimately increase traffic to publishers’ websites.

Facebook has slowly been rolling out updates to its Like button and has stopped developing the Share Button. Facebook Spokeswoman Malorie Lucich told us that while the company will continue to support the Share button, Like is the “recommended solution moving forward.” However, Lucich today called it a test, saying “We’re always testing new products that
incorporate developer feedback as we work to improve the Platform experience, and have no details to share at this time.” It’s unlikely that the change is just a test, however. Typically such tests from Facebook only affect a small number of users, whereas this change affects all Like buttons.

Perhaps the change was necessary. Because it was never made clear to users that the Like button would function differently than the Share button, many never understood what it meant to click Like on a piece of content. Making the result the same as the Share button could build stronger user expectations, ultimately fashioning a better user experience.

Never Lose Your Car or Miss a Friend With ToothTag

What are the places and who are the people around you right now? With a new Android app called ToothTag, you should be able to get a lot more useful answers to that question.

Not only will this app find nearby restaurants, it can also tell you whether your friends are at the same party — without having to check-in. It knows where the heck you left your car. Most importantly, it is able to do all this without battery-sucking technologies like GPS.

ToothTag is a treasure trove of proximity-based information. It goes beyond regular location services and novel-but-worthless check-ins, showing you what’s in your immediate surroundings and giving you multiple options for how to make that information truly useful. Instead of GPS, it relies on Bluetooth, Near-Field-Communication (NFC), and WiFi. Power management — long the bane of innovative mobile apps — has been ToothTag’s plan from the start.

The app lets you tag Bluetooth and WiFi devices — such as headsets, laptops, mobile phones, and access points. Once these are tagged, you can set up automated actions when you’re within a given distance from them. Automated actions, such as mobile alerts or emails, can occur without your ever having to think about the app.

Here are a few examples:

You’ve planned a night out on the town. You drive your car and street park it, using ToothTag to drop a Google Maps pin at your car’s location. When you’re ready to drive home, ToothTag lets you find your car with ease.

You walk into an event at your favorite nightclub. You’ve tagged the joint in the app and told ToothTag to automatically check you into that location on Foursquare any time you’re there for more than 10 minutes. Hello, Mr. Mayor!
Once you’re in the event, you open ToothTag again to find out which of your friends are already there and how you’re connected. The app shows you a Facebook friend you know well, a LinkedIn connection that you wanted to meet in person, and a Match.com prospect with a high percentage of compatibility with you — all in a single, scrollable list on your mobile.

You’ve been trying to connect with a special someone for a while, and you’ve tagged her mobile in ToothTag. Unbeknownst to you — but knownst to ToothTag — she’s at the same event as you. ToothTag automatically rings your phone to alert you that Ms. Right has entered the building. The app also tells your phone to fire up Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” when your ex walks into the party, a clever alert you set up to avoid drama.

The Mark Zuckerberg Comic Book Has Arrived

The biographical comic portraying the life of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg hits shelves today.

Canadian comic production company Bluewater Productions released the “giant-sized” 48-page issue, which freelance journalist Jerome Maida wrote Sal Field illustrated.

“Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire on the planet and created something that has already had a profound impact on the world. Yet hardly anyone knows much about him. It’s amazing,” said Maida, adding that he’s trying to give context to a complex public figure in his portrayal of Zuckerberg.

“Rightly or wrongly, Mark dealt harshly with some people on his way to where he is today. As we see, he left many people feeling betrayed. I try my best to be fair here,” Maida said.

Thanks to his billionaire status and the many lawsuits surrounding Facebook, Zuckerberg was already an (unwilling) star of David Fincher’s movie The Social Network, which is up for several Academy Awards. And thanks to the comic, Zuckerberg also may become an animated character, as the production company Hayden 5 Media optioned the script to create an animated film based on it.

Map Your Facebook Friends In a Few Clicks

You know who your Facebook friends are, but can you visualize where they are? You might be surprised when you see “Where My Friends Be?,” a Google Maps mashup with all of their locations pinpointed, showing you just how far-flung your friends really are.

We’ve seen other Facebook/Google Maps mashups before, but this one’s different from other friend-mappers. It’s fast, it takes just a few seconds to click into, and suddenly it’s dropping little pins all over the globe, showing you precisely where your pals reside. Says one of its developers, Ajay Mehta:

“Surprisingly, there aren’t a lot of apps like this. There were a few that were very poorly developed and eventually canceled years ago. They weren’t this visual either, most had a lame loading bar or something similar and the mapping was laggy/slow. We have friends pop onto the map in a cool, interactive way (which was the hardest part to hack together).”

Written by college freshmen Ajay Mehta, Wesley Zhao and Dan Shipper, the mashup gives you a quick way to remind yourself that you’re not in Kansas anymore, and neither are your friends. Unless, of course, you all live in Kansas.

The enthusiasm of these frosh is infectious. Future Zuckerbergs?

Coca-Cola Releases “Happiness Truck”

Coca-Cola, whose Happiness Machine video became a feel-good hit for the brand last year with 3 million views, is back with a sequel that offers more of an international flavor.

“Happiness Truck” takes place in Rio de Janeiro and is a twist on the original idea, which showed a Coke machine that spit out free Cokes, flowers, balloon animals, pizza and submarine sandwich at a college cafeteria. This time around, a special truck dispenses free Cokes as well as a beach toy, a surfboard, sunglasses, beach chairs, t-shirts and soccer balls. Coke is launching the video on its Facebook Page today.

In between the two videos, though, there have been some 40 others that took inspiration from the original “Happiness Machine,” says Shane Grant, global brand director for Coca-Cola. Grant says the brand chose Rio for this major project because “we wanted to show how happiness translates in markets around the world, not just the U.S. or Western Europe.” Grant says there are no plans to cut this video into a 30-second version and show it on TV in the U.S., as the company had with the “Happiness Machine” video.

Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, says “Happiness Machine” was “brilliant” and fits in well with the brand’s image. “It was an unexpected moment of joy and surprise around one of the most mundane touch points there is — a vending machine.” Adamson favorably compared the viral videos with Coke’s Super Bowl spots, which he said were good, but didn’t get the water cooler buzz of, say, VW’s “The Force.”

How Are Cell Phones Affecting The Brain?

A study published in tomorrow’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association confirms what researchers have long suspected: that long conversations on cell phones affect parts of your brain. Trouble is, not even the study’s authors, the National Institute of Health, know how the calls affect you — just that they light up a significant chunk of your gray matter near the phone.

“We don’t know whether this is detrimental or whether it could have some potential beneficial effects. We don’t know one way or the other,” lead author Dr. Nora Volkow told HealthDay.

Potential beneficial effects? Well, yes. All the study found when it tracked 47 mobile-toting participants for one year was this: brain metabolism in a small area nearest the antenna was 7% higher when they were on a 50-minute call. So cell phones boost brain activity. (Specifically, they raise glucose levels.) Doesn’t sound so bad when put like that, does it? For all we know, blasting your brain with focused radio waves could be the mental equivalent of going to the gym. Glucose levels rise with just about any complex brain activity. For comparison, that 7% metabolism boost is less than the amount of energy it takes to process images via your eyes.

Of course, for all we know, the long-term effects could be pretty scary. Tumor cells need a lot of glucose, too. But that may be no more than coincidence. Researchers were careful to tiptoe around the C-word. And with good reason: as Ars Technica points out, in biology, there is absolutely no known mechanism that could lead from low-energy, long-wavelength radiation to cancer. A giant, 13-nation study begun in 2000 still hasn’t found any proof linking the two. Cell phone users, science is on your side — for now.

Bottom line: we know relatively little about brain science and even less about cell phone use. Decades of further study is going to be needed for a definitive answer. We’ve all heard anecdotes from friends about how calls give them headaches, or a buzzing sensation. They could be right, or they could be hypochondriacs. Maybe cell phones affect each brain differently. At the moment, there’s just no way of telling.

If you’re concerned, be like Dr. Volkow — who told TIME that she’s started using a $5 headset so she doesn’t have to hold her phone to her ear any more. “Maybe at the end of the day cell phones aren’t damaging,” she said. “But it’s only $5.”

Motorola Xoom tablet

Motorola has revealed its new Android-based Xoom tablet, which the company hopes will dethrone Apple's iPad in this fast-growing market segment.
The Xoom betters the iPad in some ways--it comes standard with front- and rear-facing cameras, including one that can record in HD, compared with none in the current version of the iPad. It also boasts a larger screen with a higher resolution, supports Adobe Flash, and uses Verizon's network instead of AT&T's.

Motorola Xoom tablet
(Credit: Motorola.com)
It will become the first device to run the latest version of Google's Android operating system, known as Honeycomb. The operating system supports multitasking and has been designed explicitly for tablets.
Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha told reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this afternoon that the device will be available in stores in the first quarter of 2011 in 3G form. All of the 3G Xooms "are capable" of being upgraded to 4G later this year, he said.
Jha didn't announce how much the device will cost and Motorola ended the event without taking questions from reporters.
This will be "the most competitive product in the marketplace," Jha predicted. (Motorola recently split into two publicly traded companies, Motorola Mobility Holdings and Motorola Solutions.)

The Xoom (pronounced "zoom") will operate on Verizon Wireless' network and be upgradeable to 4G LTE in the second quarter of the year, with units sold thereafter including 4G by default. It was not immediately clear if a Wi-Fi-only version would be available, but the companies' statement appeared to indicate it would not be, and the photos of the tablet show a Verizon logo on the top right corner.
Motorola Xoom

Jha showed some videos of the tablet in action but told reporters it was still under development and would not be available for hands-on demonstrations today.
In terms of specifications, the Xoom has a dual-core processor with each core running at 1 GHz, a 1,280x800 resolution (compared with the iPad's 1,024x768), a 10.1-inch 16:10 display (larger than the iPad's 9.7 inches), and supports Google Maps 5.0 with 3D buildings. It can capture 720p video with the rear camera.
Motorola also announced three accessories: a leather case that doubles as a stand, a standard dock for charging and display, and a "speaker HD" dock. The latter includes three USB ports, HDMI output, and built-in speakers. There's also a Bluetooth keyboard, but any should work.

Meanwhile, expect to see other Android-based tablets very soon. Also this afternoon, T-Mobile and LG Mobile Phones announced their G-Slate tablet, which will also run Honeycomb on T-Mobile's HSPDA+ 4G network, and be available in the next few months.

Are you kidding yourself that Social Media is working in your business?

It’s fascinating to see how increasing numbers of Brands are now giving out their Facebook page on advertisements, posters, billboards and in other public places as their main online contact point. More often than not they no longer even include their main website address in their advertisements.

Even BBC Breakfast now gives out their Facebook page as the place to make contact and to ‘interact’ with the programme.

So what’s going on here?

Undoubtedly there are many brands who feel that their products will sit very comfortable amongst the Facebook demographic, or it could be that the functionality provided by the social networking site offers an exciting new way for customers to engage with them. Or perhaps it’s simply because it feels like the ‘trendy’ thing to do to be seen to giving out your Facebook page instead of your main website address. For sure, you don’t see too many Brands giving out any of their LinkedIn pages as their main contact point.

It could also be just plain laziness on behalf of some Brands, in that they can’t think of new ways to attract customers to and to retain them on their websites. And after all, Facebook seems to offer something different, so why not just give it a try.

This brings up challenging questions for organisations:

Do you have a clear and robust enough Internet strategy that stands up in its own right, or are you just going with the flow?
What does the future hold for how a Brand or company (large or small) represents itself online?
Either way, by the way many firms use Social Media, it’s pretty clear to see that there is very little strategy behind their online presence. The trouble with Social Media is that it’s just so incredibly attractive and fun – and with some new tool appearing seemingly every day, it’s just extremely tempting to give it a try. And before you know it, another tool has been retrofitted onto any strategy that you might have had and you have a mishmash of Social Media activities cluttering up your online presence.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of trial and error to see if a particular tool might have some value, and very often unexpected benefits appear over time as if to justify its use in the first place. The fact is that Twitter might not have value for some Brands, and it might be that Facebook pages are not right for your business – particularly if you are just following the crowd.

Ultimately, Social Media can be used in a variety of different ways; it is not all about Marketing, and Brands should take the time to investigate in depth how each Social initiative fits within their overall business and communication strategy.

Yes, have fun with Social Media by all means – but don’t try to kid yourself that it’s the golden key to online riches. I know of many businesses who have been using Social Media for several years who now wouldn’t dream of stopping or changing what they’re doing – but who at the same time really struggle to justify exactly why they use it. What’s more, they’re also too scared to stop ‘just in case’ they miss out on that huge business opportunity that’s just around the corner.

Closely examine your business strategy, your online strategy and then be honest with yourself as to whether you’re getting real value from these tools or just following the crowd.


Philip Calvert
Founder of IFA Life and Social Media Conference Speaker

HOW TO: Deal With Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand

Maria Ogneva is the Head of Community at Yammer, where she is in charge of social media and community programs, and internal education and engagement


Brands try to inspire excitement among their communities so that their fans and supporters will do the selling for them. That’s called advocacy, and it’s much more powerful than self-promotion. There are of course many ways to cultivate that fan base and get your advocates motivated

On the flip side, however, are “badvocates” –- the folks who spread negative comments about you with their networks. For example, Kevin Smith’s experience with Southwest Airlines.

It’s important for any business learn how to handle this badvocacy. To do so, you must first understand its causes.

Causes of Badvocacy

In most cases, badvocacy is a result of negative experiences with your brand. These can come from:

Inconsistency across channels and touchpoints. With social media, you can touch the customer at any point in the purchase cycle: Pre-purchase, during, and post-purchase. Each of those interactions has to add value and be consistent with the rest of the experience.

Let’s take support as an example. When you provide multi-channel support, you need to be careful about creating a consistent experience across all channels. Twitter support tends to lead other channels in its ability to provide individual solutions to customers. Other channels tend to lag behind. How many times have you called a support line only to have them route you to another 800 number because information you are looking for is in a different database? An inconsistent user experience can breed bad experiences.

Inconsistency with expectations. Several times, I’ve gotten excited about a product based on the advertised promise, only to discover that that expectation was wrong. This type of disconnect certainly breeds negative feelings because time, effort and possibly money were wasted.
A negative relationship with people who represent the company. Social media can humanize your brand, if used correctly. It’s important, however, that everyone adheres to the highest codes of conduct and is on the same page about company’s policies, news, product and feature releases, etc. A negative interaction with any person, whether in social or traditional channels, will mar the user’s view of the brand.
Chronic Complainers

In a few cases, though, badvocacy isn’t actually about the experience, but rather about the personality of the complainer. Most people are reasonable, online or offline, and will not trash your brand without just cause. However, there are a few people who just like to pick fights and complain. Some look for attention, some are just chronic complainers, and some enjoy trolling the web under the cloak of anonymity. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn make it harder to troll under a fake identity, but forums and blog comments can more easily bring out this type of behavior.

When dealing with these users, there isn’t a lot that you can do. You need to realize that some battles aren’t worth fighting, and just move on to someone with a legitimate problem. As they say, “Don’t feed the trolls.”

If someone has a legitimate issue, do everything you can to work through it, offer an individualized solution, apologize and give them space to like you again. A reasonable person will work with you, and although they may never be your advocate or use your product again, they will recognize that you tried to help.

Finding Badvocates

Now that you know the causes of badvocacy, it’s important to take action. First, however, you need to understand who your badvocates are, what they are saying and where they are saying it. The process is about listening, much like finding anything using social media.

Listen across relevant channels for the following words in conjunction with your brand name: “hate,” “sucks,” “bad,” “not working,” etc. You should also be tracking who is linking to your site and reading their blog posts and articles. When you find these distressed people, take the following steps:

Figure out the issue. Read the content carefully, whether it’s a tweet or a long blog post, and understand the motivation behind the post. Is it a cry for help? Is it a distressed customer? What did they have a problem with? Why was their user experience subpar? How can you help them?
Reach out. Reach out and acknowledge their pain. Most problems get resolved quickly because the person just wanted someone to talk to.
Respect privacy. Know when to take the conversation private. Upon initial contact, it’s appropriate to acknowledge the problem in a public channel. After the initial public tweet, you should reach out in a private channel to really dig in and see if you can make a difference. Under no circumstances should you ever exchange confidential account information in an unsecured or public channel.
Offer an individualized solution. In customer service, there’s no “one size fits all,” because each case is different. Offer an individualized solution, which may require you to work with the right people within your own company. Don’t tell this poor person to call the 800 number — go to bat for him.
Don’t let it stew. Address sources of conflict quickly. Because most people just want to be heard, cared for and helped, the faster you can reach out, the more likely you will prevent the situation from festering.
Never make it personal. If and when conflict escalates, never make it personal. Never attack the person, even if he or she attacks you personally. Keep the conversation focused on the issues.
Take action, close the loop. Even though it’s self-explanatory, after you take action, you need to close the loop. Communicate back to the customer what has been done, or how soon to expect something to be done.
Never lose your cool. Just like you shouldn’t make things personal, you should never lose your cool. Remember, even if you feel justified in “going berserk” in a certain situation, whatever you say in social media will stay part of your digital record forever. Choose your words wisely.
Watch advocates come to your rescue. If you have done your job cultivating advocacy, in an online conflict, your advocates will come to your rescue.
What’s influence got to do with it? Make sure you don’t just help badvocates with high influence scores. Every distressed customer is a potential badvocate, so make sure you help them before they become a “last resort” distressed customer.
How Do You Prevent Badvocacy?

You can prevent bad experiences by carefully cultivating advocacy among your audience through:

Excellent experience. Just as badvocacy is caused by bad user experience, advocacy is caused by excellent experience. Recall that an excellent experience has to be consistent across all channels, regardless of location in the purchase cycle. The experience also must also be consistent with the promise and solve a big enough pain point to inspire advocacy.
Create dialogue. Advocates are created when there is a two-way dialogue around their need, and users have a direct input into the future of the product. Just check out My Starbucks Idea for a great example.
Humanize the brand. Kira Wampler, who handled the Intuit Small Business community, told me that engaging and displaying human avatars changed sentiment from 65% negative towards QuickBooks to only 35% negative. “My avatar was always a picture of one of my children and me during that time. I regularly told folks that it was easy to say ‘f**k you’ to Intuit the brand, but really hard to swear at the mommy and the baby. Especially when the mommy was helping,” says Kira.
Conclusion

You can’t empower your advocates without an empowered internal culture. Since anyone in the organization is a potential touchpoint for a customer (online or offline), each employee must be properly trained and motivated to provide an individualized solution for the client. When hiring, you must look for service orientation and the ability to solve problems. When training your new hires, make sure they have the resources to do the right thing for each and every customer.

The 10 Best Social Media Campaigns

Since social media has become an integral part of our lives, marketers have used their creative talents to develop social media campaigns with various degrees of success which can be measured in a variety of ways.
One very successful social media marketing campaign that was run in 2009 was the competition for the “Best Job in the World” which was based on the simple concept of posting a one-minute video application on Tourism Queensland’s Web site explaining why you should be chosen as caretaker of Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef and you might get to blog and cam your way through a six-month gig that paid about $100K U.S.

The results included 400,000 new visitors to the website in the first 30 hours and 1 million hits the second day the competition was launched.
Success for social media marketing campaigns can mean many things and can include
More brand awareness
Increased sales
The number of Youtube views
or whatever measurement that is deemed important for the brand in achieving its goals
Forbes recently engaged three experts to rank the world’s best-ever social media campaigns.

The judges were
David Berkowitz of the New York City agency 360i
Brandon Evans of the social marketing agency Mr Youth in New York City
Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship, a digital ad shop in Brooklyn
They were asked to take into account the success of the campaigns as well as the quality of the execution and creativity of each one.
Here are the top 10 social media campaigns

1. The Blair Witch Project
This was a low budget horror movie that used a viral social media campaign that used web sites and message boards to incite anticipation and interest months before the its release in 1999. The anticipation was created by spreading rumors about the fate of the movie’s main characters with fake newspaper clippings and police photos of their missing car being spread on what was then the 1999 version of what we now call social media.
The result for a movie that cost $22,000 to make, at last count it has grossed over $240 million, making it the worlds most profitable movie ever.

2. Blendtec: Will It Blend
This well known series of online videos first burst on the scene in 2006 (not long after YouTube was launched). It shows the Blendtec ‘Total Blender destroying anything from a baseball to an iPhone.
Result: Home sales of blenders has increased by more than 700%

3. Old Spice: “Smell Like a Man, Man”
Isaiah Mustafa was already popular in TV commercial but when a campaign was created that allowed him to respond to questions via online videos(180 in fact) and Twitter the buzz that it generated spread around the world. The results are still being counted.


4. Burger King: “Subservient Chicken”
This social media campaign centers around a person dressed in a chicken suit on a website that responds to commands like “make a sandwich” or “moonwalk”. It was created for Burger King by the advertising agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky for the chain’s TenderCrisp Sandwich.
Result: Website received 15 million hits in 5 days

5. Pepsi Refresh
This was aimed at people’s charitable gene which gave people the chance to get funding for their charity. Its goal was to create a new identity while maintaining its youthful image.

6. VW: Fun Theory
This was a social experiment using humor to drive engagement and influence customer behavior. It involved Volkswagen transforming a Swedish subway staircase into a giant functioning piano. The result, 66% more people choosing the steps rather than the escalator. This won t the 2010 Cyber Grand Prix Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.

7. Office Max: “Elf Yourself”
The office supply retailer encouraged people during the 2006 holday campaign to upload pictures of themselves. Technology was then applied to the images which would transform them into dancing elves. The creative genius behind this campaign was the Francisco based agency Toy and San. The result 122 million elves, more brand awareness and increased sales.


8. Evian: “Roller Babies”
This YouTube blockbuster showing babies break dancing and busting moves ended up being (according to the Guinness Book of Records) the most watched online ad in viewing history with over 60 million views and 54,000 comments.

9. Ikea: “Facebook Showroom”
This Facebook marketing campaign involved the store manager of the Malmo Ikea store posting pictures of the new showrooms where people who tagged the items first, won that product. The result was a viral word of mouth campaign that quickly spread to people’s Facebook friends and created huge product awareness.

10. Hotmail
This was maybe the first integration of social media and email which involved Hotmail running ads in 1996 at the bottom of every email which said “get your free email at hotmail”. Apparently the judges were a bit divided on this with one rating it as the best and the other the worst and also whether it constituted a social media campaign.
What are some of the core elements that were in these campaigns that made them such a success? For me it includes these elements

Humor
Competition
Curiosity

What appeals to you in these top social media campaigns?

Mobile World Congress: Most Buzzed-About Phones, Tablets & Brands [INFOGRAPHIC]

Mobile World Congress: Most Buzzed-About Phones, Tablets & Brands [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social Media Marketing in 3 minutes

Internet Restored in Libya, Google Maps Shows Up-To-Date Info

The Internet has been restored to Libya after the country shut down its network links to the outside world for six hours last night. Now that the Internet is back, protesters are making the most of their connectivity by mapping tweets using Google Maps.

According to those trusty wire watchers at Renesys, “Two-thirds of Libyan routes came back to life at 6:01 UTC [1:01 a.m. Eastern], and the remainder were restored nine minutes later … and Libya is back on the Internet.”

Now that the net is back, we can see brave people tweeting away, letting each other know what’s going on inside the troubled country. Beyond that, those tweets are being mapped in ways that are spectacularly useful.

Take a look at this Google maps mashup, created by Twitter user @arasmus. It compiles Twitter messages and then places them on a map with an unmistakable legend attached each one.

On the map, you can see police locations, protesters on the move, power outages, and the number of deaths that have occurred. A click on each icon shows more data, such as warnings where police are using live ammunition. And, @arasmus is regularly updating this map, saying it’s current to within a few minutes.

This is just one of the powerful social networking tools the protesters can use to keep tabs on the situation. We’re wondering if Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi and his police force are also using this map for their own information.