Scott Monty's perspectives on implications of social media – the convergence of marketing, advertising and PR on the Web – for marketers, agencies, the enterprise and the individual.

"Where do I start?" More often than not, that is the first question many business professionals have when it comes to dipping their toes into the digital channels. They simply have no idea how to begin… and then what to do after that.

Jonathan MacDonald blogs about giving up SMS for lent

Last year 2008 saw the total global user base for SMS text messaging pass 3 billion. Today 76% of all mobile phone subscribers worldwide use SMS text messaging. Even the last hold-outs, the North Americans got into SMS partly through experimenting with votes on American Idol, but even more so with the Obama presidential campaign of 2008. Today more than half of Americans are active users of SMS text messaging and being fast learners, the US average has reached 4 SMS text messages sent per day across the total mobile phone subscriber base. This means the USA has caught up with average European SMS text messaging usage levels.

What if you didn’t know who to follow on Twitter? Would you randomly start following people? Would you follow people you see mentioned by those you already follow? Most likely you would ask your friends for recommendations since you can trust that your friends will suggest people who are worth following. Which is exactly how FollowFriday began.

Local Government Engagement Online Research

RIP: A Remix Manifesto is an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this website, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary.

There has been a lot of online speculation that Twitter is looking to cut into the massive online social networking population that Facebook continues to grow. If you spend enough time on Twitter, you might start realizing that their goals could be much grander. Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog and Podcast – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image

A judge in the USA has approved the use of social networking site Twitter in court in a landmark ruling for the US legal system.

Brands must not lose their internal focus amidst the din of new information.

One of the most interesting trends on the Internet right now is a move towards a more real-time experience. We have seen a lot of discussion lately about how Twitter is leading the charge by creating a search engine for the real-time web, for example. However, there are also a good number of other services that already expose some of the promises of the real-time web. In this post, we will have a look at some of the most interesting ones.

Welcome to the Hive Mind

Giving its ageing site design a handy refresh this week Twitter has finally rolled out integrated Search and Trends functionality. Until now Twitter Search had ludicrously been located on a separate domain (http://search.twitter.com/) and was heavily reliant on third party apps for the latter. Search will not index profiles users have decided to keep private. Another small tweak sees the 'Profile' and 'Settings' links moved under the username on the home page to make space for the new functionality.

A police Facebook 'fan' page featuring photographs of wanted criminals, videos, forthcoming events and a police blog is now online. The official Hertfordshire Constabulary Facebook site has been set up as an organisation page so it can be viewed by anybody, allowing users to add themselves as a fan.

For anyone who ever balked at ploughing through thousands of pages from the diaries of one of Britain’s greatest recorders of historic times, Pepys’s observations are now appearing on the internet as they were written almost 350 years ago — in easily digestible daily updates.