This weekend, I heard the sad new of Tony Hart passing away via twitter first.

Image from B3ta

In the last few months news and eye witness accounts (and photos) of major events are often coming first from Twitter – the viral nature of the RT (retweet) phenomenon meaning that a story goes viral in seconds, after an initial tweet from an eye witness…

The BBC talks about the coming of age of twitter, through recent event in Mumbai and of course the incredibly skilful ditching of an aeroplane into the Hudson river…

Outside of news, how does this speed affect YOU as a business?

Anything can go viral very quickly, regardless of accuracy, are you prepared?

At talks I give, I often start with a quick survey…

1) How many of you use some form of the social web/networking personally? (Facebook, myspace, linkedin, bebo, twitter…)

2) How many of you have a strategy for the social web in your business?

At a recent talk of around 40 business leaders, about 35 raised their hand for question 1 and about 3 for question 2.

It always seems to work in waking people up to what I have to say about the power and opportunity of the network.

Being engaged with the changing way people use the internet, having channels open to spot threats and opportunities makes for a more agile and successful business.

We’re giving away 3 TOP TIPS exclusive to the site, just for you… follow these 3 grrrrrreat ways to fail in social media and we GUARANTEE your business will suffer… so what you waiting for? Read on…

1) Create sock puppets – Copy the example of Cllr ben Grower , caught out today for creating an anonymous username to post comments on the Daily Echo website and then using this account to praise himself and fellow councillors.

Special deals on reduced honesty – whip up your very own social media storm by getting caught out, what are you waiting for?

(Ed: Not only was he caught because he used an email address with his name in it (duuuh), he then denied he was involved – his dishonesty is really quite shocking.)

2) Place you fingers in your ears and sceam “la la la la la” – A sure fire way of failing to market yourself and your business online is not to listen.

Follow the lead of industry giants like Sony, ignore the build up of sentiment by just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming… you’ll feel grrrreat and if you’re really lucky and you continue doing this long enough, you too could have a class action law suit!

3) Boast boast boast! Want to be the envy of everyone? Don’t bother actually being the best, just tell everyone you’re the best… boasting, worked great for Matt Bacak.

(Ed: actually he has got a lot of press…)

But wait… we’ll throw in one more bonus never-fails to fail tidbit for FREE, yes FREE

4) SPAM SPAM SPAM – Don’t bother engaging with your audience, just shout at them enough – never fails to fail.

RT Media is an ethical Social Media Marketer – terms and conditions apply – things in this post may be satirical, if in doubt you should consult your nearest village idiot.

Simply genius.

I was going to write a longer analysis of why i think this is a superb campaign, but most of it has been done very eloquently on the SEO Optimise blog.

Compare the meerkat works as a campaign for one key reason, it sets them apart from what has become a very competitive sector where the offering and price (ie free) is essentially the same for everyone.

How else would you compete in this market? Superior offering, better customer usability/feedback or huge market awareness?

A simple clever play on words, with a good social media marketing strategy (facebook fan page, twitter etc) and a simple mock website equals brand recognition though the roof.

The only thing I would of done differently would be to make it possible to link to specific meerkats on the site, if you find one that amuses you, all you can share with friends is the options that you chose to find that meerkat – people like to share the specifics too.

Its always good to hear of examples of how businesses use LinkedIn for real (and tangible) benefit.

Take this example:

One of the other members asked a question about what people thought was the best product in a certain field. 4 out of the 5 responses recomended my clients product. From a PR point of view that is great, but it also enabled me to identify the person asking the question, the company they work for and their office location.

How valuable can that be?

excerpt from weetpr

Now that’s good to hear. I bang on about using Q+A on LinkedIn to generate interest, promote yourself as a centre of authority and to get leads in my seminars.

…I can’t take direct credit for this particular lead, but the blogger had attended my seminar in November…

Which leads me nicely to mention my next seminar on Social Media Marketing (exploiting social networking to the benefit of your business) as one of three speakers at the Original Business Thinking Event on 29th Jan.

So if you’d like to learn more about how you can use social networking in your business, follow the link above or drop me an email.