This week:

• Apple unveils new social network Ping
• Advertising Age's top seven brand stories of the week
• Voice check in for Foursquare

Apple unveils new social network Ping

Applehas launched Ping which is “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes” according to Steve Jobs. Google’s networks haven’t always been that successful, Buzz hasn’t really caught on and we recently said goodbye to Wave. Apple is the latest major player to try their hand. As a music based network Ping threatens the supremacy of MySpace which is now focused heavily on music and artistic content after losing out to Facebook as amore general social network.

The potential for Ping is huge. If people share music and films they like with friends, which leads to the purchase of these items on iTunes, the financial reward for Apple is significant. Adding a social element to recommendations is a great idea for us users too. As Businessweek’s GIGAom points out, recommendations and reviews that appear on Amazon currently are from strangers. I have no means of knowing whether they share my taste or likes at all. Taking recommendations from friends whose tastes I trust means I can really trust their recommendations.

Advertising Age’s top seven brand stories of the week

Advertising Age has started producing a weekly chart detailing the leading seven brand stories in social media. This shows the brands involved, the topic, the perceived sentiment and the most linked to source. This is a really useful way to keep up to date with how corporate news is being discussed and shared and enables you to identify where the news started. Of this week’s seven (Facebook, Apple, BurgerKing, TBS, GM, Samsung and Google) five originated in mainstream online media, with two from blogs. Tracking the share of stories generated between mainstream and social news will be interesting. My hunch is that mainstream will continue to dominate but will bea bly supplemented by a few “power” blogs, in this instance, Gizmodo and ReadWriteWeb.

Britain’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) certainly think social media can be regulated, having today announced that online content from the UK will be subject to the same regulation as that of other media. The extended regulations are aiming to provide protection for consumers from misleading claims made by advertisers. 

This week:

• An Australian "futurist" predict the end of printed newspapers within 12 years
• Germany legislates to stop employers from auditing potential employees on Facebook
• Sports stars are banned from Twitter

Twelve years left for newspapers?

Australian media strategist Ross Dawson has predicted that newspapers will be irrelevant in Australia by 2022. He argues that the socialisation of content means the current media organisations and journalists will need to reinvent to share any future spoils. He doesn’t argue that newspapers will cease to exist, but that the current model will change significantly. He points to an iPad style news reader future where ideas are crowd sourced and the best journalists oversee conversations. This is already happening and it is likely there will be both victors and victims, as some adapt and share the profits of doing so, and others who either refuse to or are unable to adapt. 

German Facebook users get a reprieve  

Politicians in Germany are legislating to prevent employers from checking the Facebook profiles of future employees. The proposed law will allow employers to check the profiles of prospective employees through professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, but not through “social” sites like Facebook. Individuals have always been able to restrict the content on their profile though most do not. For those of us not protected by legislation the advice is to restrict access to your profile, or just don’t let anyone take compromising photos of you in the first place. 

Sports stars banned from Twitter

There have been numerous examples of sports team news being leaked by players on Twitter before any official announcement. Others have sought to hit out at perceived injustices from their employers. Rather late in the day several sporting bodies have reacted by banning their players from tweeting while on official duty. England’s cricketers have been banned, Leicester’s rugby team have suffered the same fate. These sporting bodies are facing the same challenges as many organisations. They are no longer able to control the message or the content. In the past there would only be a very small coterie of official spokespeople. Now anyone with a phone can broadcast to the world with bored sportsmen having more time than most. Closing ranks is no longer possible and a different approach will have to be adopted as a social media generation won’t accept being cut off. 

My colleague Lucy recently announced “Ah ha! I’m the new mayor of Metrica!” It took me a moment to realise she was referring to Foursquare, rather than an actual political contest that I had failed to register my vote in. Mashable’s recent article on the ‘Top 5 Ways Big Brands are Using Foursquare’ caught my interest. I have always associated Foursquare with keeping people updated about where you’ve been, so I struggled to think of ways this could be used for business.

However, the article lists some interesting ways to engage with the social network. Bravo, a television network, uses Foursquare to make recommendations on restaurants, shops and hotels, tied in to its key programmes. MTV allows fans to see where the cast of shows such as Jersey Shore and The Hills have been and what they have done. New York Magazine uses Foursquare to offer tips about where to go and what to do in the city. 

Facebook recently unveiled Places in the US, a new feature that enables users to declare their location and keep up with where friends are going. It seems that location-based social networking is growing in popularity and with Facebook Places there are lots of business opportunities, in the shape of location-specific advertising. The move (if you’ll pardon the pun) has caused some inevitable controversy, particularly the notion of other people being able to check you in to places – Gawker has listed some very amusing situations when this might not be such a good idea.

Metrica watched as Levi Sherwood recharged Battersea Power Station at Red Bull X Fighters 2010  

Saturday August 14^th 2010 saw the return of the UK’s premier free style motocross event to the iconic Battersea Power Station, and the Metrica Red Bull team were there to see the spectacular event first hand.  Red Bull have separated themselves from the rest of the energy drink market over the past 18 years with a revolutionary ‘anti-brand’ strategy which has relied more on ‘buzz marketing’ within social media. The brand has associated the drink with youth culture and extreme adventure-related sports, such as motor sports, mountain biking and snowboarding.

Despite the typically English weather, 28,000 spectators made the trip to Battersea to watch the event which created an electric atmosphere, perfectly suited to the highly charged surroundings. There was an early scare when tour leader André Villa  overshot a jump during the practice round and landed in the crowd, no one was seriously hurt and the competition continued. We were treated to a vast array of spectacular stunts and tricks throughout the evening.

 

Photography by Tom Jagger

First, it was for tech-geeks. Then teenagers got involved. After that, businesses and other organisations started to use it. But you know a social media site has made it when a totalitarian isolationist state, such as North Korea, signs up. As was widely reportedrecently, North Korea is now on Twitter and YouTube, using the handle ‘uriminzok’ (‘our nation’) on both. This may conjure up an image of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il staring blurry-eyed at a screen, frantically trying to cut his latest statement down to 140 characters or less, but unfortunately this is probably not the case.

In June N. Korea registered 1,024 IP addresses, meaning that amongst the 24m occupants of the ‘communist’ state, only the elite 0.005% have access to the internet. Universities and libraries are largely limited to domestic intranet services. This indicates that N. Korea didn’t join Twitter and YouTube so that it could improve the popularity of Kim Jong-il’s regime at home. If this were the case, they would have chosen a medium which is more widely-used by North Koreans. Instead, Twitter and YouTube are being utilised to improve N.Korea’s image abroad, or at least to provide a mouth-piece for the Korean Workers’ Party (the KWP put the ‘party’ in single-party state).