According to net security firm Sophos, social networking spam and malware attacks rose 70 per cent last year, with Facebook and Twitter in particular becoming prime targets for Web 2.0 spammers.

More recently, bogus direct messages have invited users to log into counterfeit Twitter sites, and hand over login credentials in the process. Hacked accounts have subsequently sent spam messages, much to the embarrassment of the victims of the attack, including cabinet minister Ed Miliband, online bank First Direct and BBC correspondent Nick Higham.

In news that will be welcomed by the thousands of Twitter users who have fallen prey to such an attack, the popular micro blogging site has decided to fight back.

How does it work? Quite simply, even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, Twitter will be able to keep that user safe. The system is similar to current Gmail security, which automatically checks link destinations, and works by all submitted links being routed to this new service.

Aside from the obvious benefits these new measures bring for the celebrity user and average Twitter fan, businesses will undoubtedly benefit from this extra level of protection. A vast majority of companies are signed-up to the service because on the plus side, Twitter is an effective tool in which to market their brand, giving them the ability to continually and repeatedly promote their products and services to a large audience. On the negative side, if a business falls prey to an embarrassing, or in some cases, damaging phishing attack, a company has left itself open and vulnerable for the masses to see. But is this really the last we will see of Twitter spam attacks?

Backed by a Twitter co-founder, the site is called Blippy. Much of the design, functionality and user experience mirrors Twitter. It requires you to share your debit/credit card numbers with it, as well as your bank account details and other online accounts such as eBay or iTunes. Every purchase made on these accounts is displayed, in real time, to other Blippy users online.

What did you buy today?

To many, this may seem like the most outrageous sacrifice of privacy and security. Yet the Blippy founders think it holds the key to learn more about deals, new products and consumer spending habits. Surprisingly, quite a few have signed up. 5,000 volunteered to try it during private testing, sharing information equating to $5million worth of purchases. Since launching publicly in January, Blippy has persuaded more than 13,000 consumers to sign up and has even piqued the interest of a number of US investors.

Another key element is the data that Blippy offers, which details where you shopped and the money spent per purchase. It even prints a description on occasion and in the same window your friends are invited to comment on each transaction. So if I saw a DVD a friend of mine purchased, I could ask them if they liked it.

Living this publicly online could be a step too far for many. Especially given the concerns raised recently over location-based and social network sites making it easier for criminals to ascertain when you’re not at home. Despite this, I’ll draw on what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg said recently, which is that ‘living publicly is now the social norm.’ Blippy, therefore, could be the one to watch this year.

The archive’s ‘special collections’ collate websites on a particular theme, housing everything from the credit crunch to the forthcoming 2010 election. For brands looking to create relevant campaigns that communicate the right messages at the right time, this could be an excellent future resource to help shape online activity that is based on proven behaviour patterns in certain categories and situations.

Aside from its benefits for those of us in the marketing & PR industry, what’s also fascinating about the web archive is that it highlights how integral everything digital has now become to our culture. In the classrooms of the future, children won’t need a textbook to explain the effects of the credit crunch. Instead they’ll be able to read about it firsthand through blogs, Facebook posts and mobile video footage.

For Generation Z, history lessons are set to become much more exciting.

I was recently reading a book called Pixarpedia, a behind-the-scenes look at Disney Pixar’s film studio. Almost as soon as I’d opened the first page, the foreword from their CEO, Andrew Stanton, struck a chord:

“When it comes to making our own movies we’re obsessed with figuring out the details that will make our stories real. The first step of that process is ‘city planning’ – figuring out how the world works and what the rules are. From there we work out the particulars of personality and setting.”

‘City planning’, as Stanton puts it, should be fundamental to any PR campaign- and never more so than with social media. Brands that ignore the rules and skip straight to the execution will inevitably end up getting burnt. I won’t go into the well documented social media failures of the past few months, but it is clear that they didn’t take enough time to understand the online landscape before jumping in feet first.

But brands shouldn’t be afraid of social media rules. It’s not a secret doctrine you can’t read about online; just one that requires attention, adaptation and intelligence. Taking time to city plan may seem like a daunting task, but once you’ve figured out the rules, campaigns can go to infinity and beyond…

Having encouraged his followers to bombard a selected target with ridiculous questions, it would then be a waiting game to see how the target would react. Would there be direct replies, would a company provide a holding statement or would there be silence. Targets varied from Kerry McCarthy (Labour MP Bristol East) and Doritos, to BNP and Nick Griffin.

Ms McCarthy took the campaign in her stride: in the space of six hours, she answered more than 100 questions. The BNP responded with silence, posting general tweets but ignoring the commotion on their pages. This was like throwing fuel into the fire as the tweets got more and more provoking, looking for a reaction from the BNP.

Are campaigns like twitterbombarding likely to become a norm? I don’t think so. Random twitterbombarding is meant to be a form of amusement, keeping us occupied online. A coordinated PR campaign would very quickly become spam which would undermine the campaign completely. If the audience is seeing a campaign as spam, it is very easy to block users on social media sites, such as Twitter. Quirky brands that look to flirt with danger with their PR activity might pull a campaign like this off; fans of more traditional approaches should steer clear.

If a client is targeted by a guerilla campaign similar to the twitterbombarding, the response has to be reviewed on a client-by-client basis. Brands such as Doritos are perfect for some online banter; would more traditional/conformed brands benefit from taking part? The good thing about campaigns of this nature is the possibility of answering selected questions. No one is expecting all questions to be answered. I see the campaign as a great opportunity to communicate directly with the end users. By showing the brand is listening to them, this can only be a good thing, surely?

Rumours, insinuations and accusations have been bubbling around for a while now, but today’s announcement that the European Commission has launched a preliminary anti-monopoly probe into Google’s affairs is the first concrete action to challenge the firm’s tactics.

Brief summary without getting too technical – Google allegedly artificially demotes articles in its search results to discourage users from visiting particular companies.

Google’s response to today’s allegations has been simply to swat them aside, claiming “this kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you are a large company.” They will also be encouraged that much of the disquiet can be traced back to Microsoft, making the claims seem like a case of sour grapes.

Google would also argue that its search engine algorithms are as much a part of its unique appeal and success as, say, Coca Cola’s or KFC’s recipes are part of theirs. SEO experts feel they have a general idea of how Google works, but many of the intricate vagaries and updates remain closely guarded secrets only revealed to an inner cabal. Google believe this is its intellectual property, and that making too much of the information available would weaken its position and open the company up to its competitors. All companies have their own ideas, and in a free society, they should have the right to hold onto them shouldn’t they?

The position is weakened somewhat by the fact that Google’s formulas are constantly being tweaked and updated. Coca Cola and KFC introduce new products, but their core offering remains basically the same as it has always been. Google can change its algorithms at a whim, constantly updating and reacting to patterns as it likes.

Many in the industry have a love/hate relationship with Google. For some, Google is a team of evil scientists, seconded in Silicon Valley bunkers coming up with ever more diabolical schemes to rule search engines and, one day, maybe even achieve total world domination. Google Government anyone? For others a paragon of what can be achieved through always being one step ahead of the competition.

My suggestion to Google would be: a little transparency can go a long way. Give us a crumb of insight, enough to dampen the criticism, but you can always leave your audience wanting more.

But, is this a good thing? Are journalism standards slipping?

There is certainly a strong advantage to using social media as part of journalistic research. Its global reach and speed means that stories can be documented and sourced as they are taking place – the New York Hudson River plane crash is a great example. Ferry passengers were able to tweet about the accident before TV crews even got to the scene.

However, social media shouldn’t be used as the sole source for stories, but rather it should sit alongside public relations – providing interviews and access to sources and experts to help paint a fuller picture. It still begs the question as to why the media is so obsessed with social networking?

Phenomenon! Everyone loves to be in the middle of a newly discovered craze and social media is currently it! Flick through the national papers and there will undoubtedly be a story relating to social media. As a PR professional, I have been told by numerous news desks and news agencies that stories relating to Facebook or Twitter stand a much higher chance of being selected than those that don’t.

Why? Because social networking provides that much needed human interest angle that the media loves, especially tabloid papers. The fashion designer, Alexander McQueen died tragically last week but rather than lament on the fashion world’s loss guess what the papers chose to write about…the string of ‘weird’ Twitter posts that he had left during the run up to his death.

So, celebrities and politicians be afraid. It’s no longer what’s lurking behind your closet that matters but what’s lurking on your Facebook and Twitter page!

We’re not claiming that this will predict the outcome or anything like that, but it certainly gives you an interesting snapshot of online buzz. We use a chart from Google Insights for Search to show the volume of online searches for the names of each of the three main party leaders, as this is a good indicator of the level of public interest in those people and their parties.

On the surface of it, there are no surprises in this chart – Gordon Brown comes out on top, as you’d expect since he’s the current prime minister, followed by David Cameron and then Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats.

If you look at the chart right now you’ll see that Gordon Brown has enjoyed quite a large spike in public interest from February 6^th onwards. One of the great features of Insights for Search is that it allows us to see what caused this spike.

If you click through to the full report on Insights for Search, and scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see a section which shows the most popular current searches that are related to Gordon Brown, as well as those which are rising fastest. Right now it looks like this:

What this tells us is that the phrases “Piers Morgan” and “Gordon Brown Interview” are currently popular and, by extension, Morgan’s TV interview with the Prime Minister is generating interest amongst the public.

This is a great tool because it lets you pick a topic (in this case the PM) and find out what the trending issues associated with that topic are, and this allows us to really get a feel for what the public is interested in. During the run up to the election, we’ll continue to monitor these trending topics and report back on the most interesting issues.

Additionally, if you look at the top search terms related to David Cameron, most of them revolve around the recent ‘roll your own David Cameron poster’ meme – some food for thought, for the Conservative leader’s PR team. Perhaps worse for Nick Clegg, there are no related searches at all – not surprising given the low volume of interest compared to his rivals.

Image via Wikipedia

Last week Google announced its new social networking feature, ‘Buzz’, which gives its Gmail service similar features to those found by social networking giants, Facebook and Twitter.  Google executives describe it as the “poster child” for Google’s future: ‘a social networking structure that automatically finds people to connect with you.’

The new Buzz module will allow all 176 million users of Google’s Gmail service to see their friends’ live status updates, and share photos and videos.

Sound familiar? Been there, done that, got the Facebook/Twitter account already?

With social media success stories like Facebook claiming 400 million active users and Twitter recently reaching 75 million users, do we really need another social networking tool? Buzz is unlikely to usurp either of these services ; it doesn’t seem to add anything significant to what they already do and it certainly doesn’t attempt to do them any better.

To add to this, Google also faces competition from Yahoo and Microsoft, which have already added social networking features to their web mail products: Microsoft’s Hotmail and IM products between them claim close to 500 million users.

Also, what are the benefits for businesses? As we know, Facebook and Twitter have both been useful tools for building and maintaining brands, but what does Buzz offer? The answer is nothing at the moment as the service has not yet been rolled out to those using Gmail within organisations – this is due to arrive in March 2010. However, if it is a success, brands would be foolish to ignore the service, as experts predict that, if it was adopted by all of Gmail’s existing users, it would slingshot past News Corporation’s MySpace to become the world’s second-largest social network – behind Facebook.

Despite the cynicism and doubt surrounding this new service (and the growing privacy concerns), we must not cast aside the fact that Buzz has access to a large talent pool of engineers and it stands on top of existing Gmail, mobile devices, and a dominant search portal. Indeed, if Buzz grew, users could integrate with all Google apps and aggregate the entire internet. So, at this stage, I’m going to sit on the fence and say let’s watch this space.

There’ll be new blood on the hustings. According to Home Office sources, 134 serving MPs will be “spending more time with their families” instead of contesting in May (87 Labour, 35 Conservatives, 7 Liberals and 5 others.) While natural churn of MPs is only to be expected for personal, health and career reasons, that is an almost 50% rise on the 85 who stood down in 2005.

Various news sources have indicated that this might have something to do with expenses, surely not! Nevertheless, the stage is set for new firebrand candidates to fill the vacuum and the re-standing candidates to face fresh competition. These candidates have been immersed in social media explosion of the last 5 years in their private lives and now are looking to galvanise support with it through their political careers.

The vast majority will be utilising social media and search mentions to push their agenda and their shiny politician faces, at present a mere 81 serving MPs are without their own website.

New web savvy and Twitter prolific Prospective Parliamentary candidates (PPCs) or ‘iMPs’ include Chuka Umunna (Lab, Streatham, Twitter following 1,397) Iain Lindley (Con, Worsley and Eccles South, Twitter following 481) and Bridget Fox (Lib Dem, Islington South and Finsbury, Twitter following 698.)

We’re not expecting the right honourable member for Bexhill and Battle to boast a Twitter following in the millions, but parliamentary process is becoming more and more integrated with social media, one need only look to the fervent activity on Tweetminster to see that.

Over the next few weeks we’ll look at how specific iMPs’ social media campaigns are progressing and our ever changing Election Dashboard will also analyse how Brown, Cameron, Clegg and co are competing in the social media stakes.

Finally, there’s always that elephant in the corner to confront after the election dust has settled: ‘Does a big online following translate into a seat in the Commons?’