links for 2009-12-10

In 2007, Facebook introduced a new feature called “Facebook Pages”, which are user profiles for brands (companies, organizations, and celebrities). Facebook Pages have the look and feel of personal pages but offer additional features such as the ability to quickly send messages to thousands of fans.

Sysomos analyzed nearly 600,000 Facebook Pages to investigate usage patterns. This is the first large-scale study of Facebook Pages, reporting on different aspects of pages including popularity, amount of content posted, number of fans, and categories.

In an age of bloggers and social networks, you no longer control the conversation about your company. So you must recalibrate the way you see your marketing, branding and corporate communications.

For John Cleese, sleep time is creative time.

The signs are pointing to next year being a banner one when it comes to mainstream adoption of the latest digital business models. With half a decade under the belt of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and almost as long for Enterprise 2.0, we're just now seeing the ideas spread to more traditional corners of large enterprises, medium-sized firms, and especially the public sector with Government 2.0.

Social Media is rooted in relationships, the dynamic interaction and collaboration between real people. We learned and continue to learn how to communicate in public forums, evolving our personal views on privacy and uncertainty as we transform from digital introverts to social extroverts.

This is our industrial revolution and its reward for participation is relevance. The socialization of online societies democratized the publishing industry and equalized influence.

Contrary to popular belief, social media is not naturally more resistant to marketing tricks. It can be gamed. On Twitter, services exist to boost your follower count and give the impression that you've got a vast high-quality network. Bloggers can write articles rich with links that draw the attention of others who would hopefully link back the the article. You can run behind-the-scenes campaigns to get people to provide positive reviews for your products or services as if they were just some happy customer rather than a hired hand. Or you can hire a small army of part time college students to Digg your content. Social media is just another social system and any such system, real world or online, can be gamed.

There is a question that has crossed the mind recently of anyone who has sent a cellphone text message while cheating on a spouse: What was I thinking?

Text messages are the new lipstick on the collar, the mislaid credit card bill. Instantaneous and seemingly casual, they can be confirmation of a clandestine affair, a record of the not-so-discreet who sometimes forget that everything digital leaves a footprint.