Despite increasing numbers of customers using Twitter to publicly complain about brands, the vast majority of companies respond in the exact same way….with the quiet of contempt.

New research from Maritz and Evolve24 of 1,298 Twitter complainants found that only 29% of those tweet gripes were replied to by the companies in question. 

This is a direction of duty, in my estimation. As we discussed in The NOW Revolution, brands must look at these new channels as the “social telephone” and ignoring these 140 character cries for help is a flawed decision for two reasons.

First, responding to Twitter complaints can turn lemons into lemonade. The Maritz study found that 83% of the complainants that received a reply liked or loved the fact that the company responded.

More at: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-monitoring/70-of-companies-ignore-customer-complaints-on-twitter/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ConvinceandConvert+%28Convince+%26+Convert%3A+Hype-Free+Social+Media+Strategy%29

Burberry isn’t wasting any time, getting knee-deep in all the social media it can find. Its Spring/Summer 2012 collection will be live-tweeted from the official Twitter account, and using the hashtag #Tweetwalk right before it hits the runway, in what has been dubbed the first ever Tweetwalk Show. Burberry will be taking full advantage of Twitter’s new gallery feature, where 500,000+ followers will be catching the very first glimpse of the collection, before anyone else – and that includes the people who are at the show in London’s Hyde Park.

Twitter isn’t the only social network that’s getting in on Burberry’s fashion firsts. Burberry has over 8 million fans on Facebook, and the entire show will be streamed in HD through the social network, as well as on the company’s own site, viewable on the iPhone and iPad.

More at: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/09/19/see-burberrys-2012-collection-before-anyone-else-on-twitter-right-now/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Looking across the sharing and clicking habits of the more than 300 million people a month who pass links with a ShareThis button on over a million websites (producing 7 billion pageviews a month), a few things stood out.

Overall, sharing now produces an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic and 31 percent of referral traffic to sites from search and social. Search is still about twice as big.

When it comes to sharing on the Web, Facebook rules. Facebook accounts for 38 percent of all sharing referral traffic. Email and Twitter tied for second with 17 percent each

Journalists are increasingly turning to social media to verify stories, research has found.

According to the fourth International Study of Journalists study by the Oriella PR Network the use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter are becoming more common in being used to source and verify news stories with 47% of respondents saying they used Twitter and 35% using Facebook when searching for news.

478 journalists from 15 countries responded to the survey, with 42% admitting that they had drawn information from blogs that had not previously visited before for news.

62% also said that PR representatives were used when sourcing stories, while another 59% cited corporate spokespeople as sources. 

When it came to validating stories already in progress, one third of respondents said that they used Twitter, a quarter cited Facebook and another quarter said they used Blogs.

socialflowteam:

A full hour before the formal announcement of Bin-Laden’s death, Keith Urbahn posted his speculation on the emergency presidential address. Little did he know that this Tweet would trigger an avalanche of reactions, Retweets and conversations that would beat mainstream media as well as the White…

It doesn’t take much to send a story viral on Twitter, but a recent quirk in the URL system at The Independent saw a flurry of humorous web links scattered across the Twittersphere. 

I was first alerted to the incident when one of our leading techies at dotCommerce, Stuart Gill, sent me a link that was doing the rounds on Twitter, seemingly exposing an entertaining URL on a story about Kate Middleton’s head in The Independent.

Namely:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/utter-PR-fiction-but-people-love-this-shit-so-lets-just-print-it-2269573.html 

While it initially looks as though a sub-editor at the paper has been neglectful, this is actually an example of a little URL rewriting feature that is common to lots of content management systems.

As long as you have the numbers at the end, you can put anything into the URL and it will still work normally.

For example:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/why-we-are-cancelling-our-Guardian-subscription-2269573.html

More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7445-using-rewriteable-urls-to-help-user-experience-and-seo

Ticketfly founder Andrew Dreskin says the music industry now turns around Facebook and Twitter when it comes to social networks. How does he see MySpace? “MySpace is pretty much an also-ran for what we do”.

The news about waning interest from the music industry (granted this is one example and there is still plenty of music on MySpace) follows recent reports that advertisers were abandoning Myspace as rumours of sale to Vevo swirled.

But music and advertising are not its only problems. There are also reports that the booming social games market is taking its leave too. Zynga is reported to be shutting down games on MySpace. Zynga is said to have axed several games on MySpace including ‘Mafia Wars’, ‘Fashion Wars’ and ‘YoVill

Read more: http://wallblog.co.uk/2011/04/21/music-and-games-firms-take-their-leave-of-myspace/#ixzz1K9ke1B6u

Branded pages, through which advertisers could deliver tailored messages, are under consideration, along with other plans to increase the long-term revenue potential of the social network, according to sources familiar with the subject…

The pages would work in a similar way to Facebook Pages, providing brands with their own space to deliver content and encourage Twitter users to follow them, claim sources…

Any launch of branded pages would roll out first in the US. Twitter launched its first ads on the platform in the US in April 2010, where its partners include Starbucks, but has yet to offer such opportunities in the UK.

A spokesman for Twitter confirmed that ‘strong interest’ from brands meant it is now looking to set up a UK office. He declined to comment on specific advertising plans.