Social media have helped corporations, retailers and small brands make a name for themselves and maintain sales during one of the toughest economic times ever. But it’s also had a significant impact on the entertainment industry, making unlikely stars and also highlighting flaws in some seemingly perfect icons.
YouTube is probably the best case study of how social media can create and deflate celebrity. Lonely Girl 15 was a realistic but fictional video docu-series that had everyone believing Lonely Girl’s life [...]

When I think back to the early days of the digital media era, I find that we spent far less time debating the meaning-of-the-medium-as-a-medium and more time actually doing stuff. Does anyone else think it strange that we have social media sites with 300 million members and yet there’s never a shortage of participants debating the role of the medium? Did everybody get burned so badly building their store on Second Life that they’re afraid to venture into the social [...]

There is more being written about social media than any other marketing topic today. And with good reason: Social media has turned out to be a powerful determinant of a brand’s success.
Before a company ventures into the social media arena, however, it pays to take a look at what others before them have done in the space. Recently, I did a study on the social media strategies of organisations and found that they were using them at four key levels:
1. [...]

This is the first in a series of three.
We just finished conducting one-on-one interviews with some of the brightest minds in the social Web. Here are some of their insights, which we shared with our general managers yesterday in Paris. Check in tomorrow for more of what these leaders have to say.
B.L. Ochman, president, Whatsnextonline.com:
“For big corporations, this stuff is still very scary…. Anyone who is a consultant must tackle fear.”
“A lot of companies should take their websites down, because [...]

In the PR business, we’re all constantly thinking about social marketing, social networks, the social Web and social media. But we don’t think as often as we should about what those terms actually mean. Where does one end and another begin?
As Trebor Scholz, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study at the New School, lays out in an info-packed online slide show, the roots of our collective digital society are long and tangled: from an e-mail progenitor in 1965, [...]