Online commenting: the age of rage

For a while after his first TV series was broadcast in 2009, comedian Stewart Lee was in the habit of collecting and filing some of the comments that people made about him on web pages and social media sites. He did a 10-minute Google trawl most days for about six months and the resultant collected observations soon ran to dozens of pages. If you read those comments now as a cumulative narrative, you begin to fear for Stewart Lee. A good third of the posts fantasised about violence being done to the comic, most of the rest could barely contain the extent of their loathing. This is a small, representative selection: "I hate Stewart Lee with a passion. Lee, a standup comedian who does not shy away from the more grotesque aspects of human behaviour, or always resist dishing out some bile of his own, does not think of himself as naive. The "40,000 words of hate" have now become "anthropologically amusing" to him, he insists. The psychologists call it "deindividuation". Have they ever met?

How to Find Your Most Important Fans Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but how do you work out which customers are most important in spreading your message? Services like PeerIndex or Klout help you find experts and influencers in particular communities, but can't measure what people have actually done for your business. The new Vipli.st service from Awe.sm aims to fill this gap by uncovering the fans who drive the most sharing. Launched at the Strata Startup Showcase last week, the site visualizes how Plancast events are shared across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It draws a tree showing the first person to create a plan, with links below to everyone who added themselves as attendees after clicking on that link, downwards through the entire history of the conversation around the event. The number next to each name shows how many attendees each person helped to sign up. If all you want to do is reach people, direct marketing through email is a great channel.

31 New Social Media Resources You May Have Missed The cold snap may not have "snapped," but all that winter chill hasn't prevented Mashable from churning out another set of social media tools and resources. Have a read through resources below for a perspective on Wikipedia's short life and it's prospective future, or how videos games are helping social good. Tech & Mobile has some tips for Ruby and some odd Apple patents. Business offers up some case studies and how marketers can optimize crowdsourcing. Looking for even more social media resources? Social Media Why the Future of Online Video Is in Serious Trouble [OP-ED]Google is preparing for war with Apple and Microsoft over the future of web video, and the rest of us are getting caught in the crossfire.Wikipedia Celebrates 10 Years, But Will It Survive Another Decade?

30 Ways to Use Social Media for Business People * While we Web professionals may assume that virtually everybody is using social media these days it’s far from the truth. People use social media but businesses don’t. A recent study shows that 94% of businesses actually do not use social media even for the most obvious task it’s good for: Getting feedback. That’s akin to not using cars, phones or electricity in the first half of the 20th century. So of course another study shows that those businesses not using social media fail to compete. Also getting feedback from your customers is a crucial benefit but it’s just the most obvious and must have use case for social media. Get feedback: There is even software for that like Uservoice, GetSatisfaction or OpenMind. Do you want more? * Image by Leo Seta.

Reflecting On What I Have Learned As An InHouse SEM, Time To Move On Back in 2001 when I started my professional career in online marketing, SEO was still pretty new. Paid search had literally just materialized in the form of goto.com (anyone remember penny bids?!). Everything was still soft and new. Negotiating ad buys was as simple as cutting the seller’s price in half. Yet, for all of that newness, if you were a web-based business back then, each of these areas was top of mind and mission-critical to your success. Even today, this same formula holds true for a lot of SEOs. When viewed from 50,000 feet as an SEO, not a lot seems to have changed around the “what we do”. What has changed is the business and political landscapes. Out of the increase investment around training, or maybe because of it, came higher expectations from business owners and executives. Time and again, I hear from folks still struggling to hit unrealistic goals because a VP wants it to be so. If that means scaling back work, so be it. Don’t get caught in this trap – stay focused.