Another week, another Twitter PR disaster. By now, no doubt you’ll have heard about the whole Gillian McKeith debacle: if not, you can find a useful summary on the Guardian website.

There is nothing the usually benign (though swift to become a baying horde) citizens of Twitter like less than duplicity. McKeith’s big mistake was not in trying to defend an unpopular view: Twitter is populated with many millions of users doing just that every day, both for comedic and more sinister purposes.

Her mistake was in subsequently trying to cover up her comments. That she did so ineffectually barely matters: even if all trace had been eradicated from her own website; even if her dissenters hadn’t been carefully taking screenshots and retweeting for future evidence, McKeith is clearly unaware that these days, almost all web presence is aggregated, mirrored, and pushed out in countless places across the Internet.

Forget the Wayback machine: these days Twitter has its own archive. Furthermore, many folks link up their Facebook and Twitter profiles, and perhaps throw LinkedIn to the mix, too, meaning that your words are spread far beyond a single website. Then there are sites which collect all tweets on a certain subject and replicate them – without so much as a by your leave.

In short, your Twitter status updates, and all web content, should be thought of as a permanent record. That’s why, if you are representing your business online, you should exhibit the utmost transparency and honesty – and furthermore, you should think carefully about which members of your business you trust to do the same.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep on saying it: social media is a fantastic tool for business promotion, but for heaven’s sake be careful what you write.

Here’s proof, if it were needed, of Twitter’s ever-increasing omnipotence: babies can now tweet from the womb. Yes, back in February, we reported that dogs can tweet: in our estimation, this is a step further into the realm of… well, the rather ridiculous.

The Kickbee is a fabric band that the pregnant mother can wear while relaxing on the sofa. Dad at work? No problem – with every kick of the foetus, he’ll get a little alert on Twitter to remind him of what is growing back home. Just take a look at the video above for a graphic representation.

So, what’s next? Tweeting from beyond the grave? You know, somehow I wouldn’t be surprised if someone came up with that next.

If you sell internationally, it’s definitely worth reading the technology section of the daily papers. For example, did you know that many websites, including Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, not to mention the all-important Google, are blocked in China?

That’s been the case for quite a while, but recent news stories have also alerted us to similar and less-predictable restrictions in Turkey and Pakistan. On the other hand, the Finnish government have apparently decreed that broadband Internet access is a human right, and are promising every citizen super-fast access by 2015. Currently, almost 100% of the population is already connected at a more normal speed.

Why is it worth knowing these things? Well, obviously, if you sell to Turkey, say, you won’t want to waste your efforts on a viral marketing campaign on YouTube. Similarly, there’s little point in optimising your Chinese web pages for Google. On the other hand, if many of your customers are from Scandinavia, you can have a lot of fun designing fairly weighty websites with as much video or Flash content as you like – it won’t clog up their capacious broadband.

Apart from anything else, it’s fascinating to see how each country restricts or enables access to the 20th century’s greatest invention – and your international strategy will be a whole lot more likely to bear fruit.

Are Facebook, Twitter and Flickr starting to look a bit old hat to you? Wishing you could do something a bit newer and groovier with your online presence? Then it could be time to look at Foursquare.

If this geo-location craze had thus far passed you by, think yourself lucky: for many of us, it’s registered only as an annoying way for our mates – before they work out how to control their accounts, in any case – to clog up our twitterstreams with inane pronouncements like “I just became the mayor of Burger King”.

Yes, at first glance, it’s little more than a game, where users ‘check in’ wherever they may go, and gain points or badges for doing so. However, there is more to it than that – and even some marketing potential. Take a look, for example, at the search results on Foursquare for our local area, Notting Hill, and you’ll see what we mean.

Each of the entries on that list represent a place that a Foursquare user has seen fit to register: straight away, one can see its usefulness for people new to the area, looking for cafes or pubs or any one of the many local businesses in the locale.

Now take a look at an individual listing for a local coffee shop: remember, this is not created by the shop itself, but by its customers. You can see that it has been ‘tagged’ with descriptive words like ‘bakery’: clicking on these will bring up other listings in the same category near the user’s location.

Equally important is the ‘tips’ section: purportedly for users to leave advice for others, this has become, for many businesses, a kind of review space. Again, as the owner of the business, you have no control over this: the age of user-generated content is truly upon us.

There is one area where you can have control, though, and really leverage Foursquare to your own advantage. Click on ‘are you the manager of this business?’, register, and you’ll be able to place special offers right there on the page. You can be as imaginative as you like: free services for anyone who mutters the secret password perhaps, or one big reward for each succeeding ‘mayor’?

It may be a short-lived craze, or it may evolve into something more complex, but for now, Foursquare is definitely a low-cost way to reach the early- and mid-cycle adopters. And since their money is as good as anyone’s, we’d advise you to go for it.

It was over a year ago that we first heard about Facebook, the movie, and now, at last… a trailer. Not that it, nor the accompanying official website is letting much slip, yet.

Those who sit through the trailer will be treated to some corkers of lines, including:

“The site got 22 hundred hits within two hours?”
“Thousand – 22 thousand“.

Which made me laugh, because – and forgive me for saying this – such statements might go down as high drama in our own office, but they do seem a little lame as the selling point for a blockbuster film.

Naturally, the dialogue is accompanied by the usual soundtrack of frantic fingers on a rattling keyboard, possibly from the same sound effects disc once utilised by Tron, War Games and You’ve Got Mail.

We’ll certainly reserve judgment until release, and we’ll happily risk wasting a couple of hours at the cinema – after all, we’ve already frittered away half our lives on the real Facebook – but it’s hard to deny that almost all films centred around computers, let alone websites, have to provide an awful lot of dramatic tension to make up for the lack of stunning visuals. If director Fincher is wise, and we’re sure he is, he will of course focus on the people behind the platform.

Come to think of it, there’s a lesson for us all there. Yes, Facebook is a remarkable phenomenon; yes, it’s ripe for your marketing initiatives. But it is the people on there, forging and strengthening real-life friendships, marriages, events and all the other dramas of real life, that create Facebook – and it is those real people that we need to market to.

Oh, and don’t forget the immortal truth provided by the film’s strapline:

You don’t get to 55 million friends without making a few enemies.

Many thanks to the Wall for pointing us towards Eloqua’s Social Media Playbook [PDF] – “playbook”, we assume, because while a workbook entails effort, everything to do with web 2.0 is, of course, fun fun fun!

Eloqua is a big-bucks customer engagement software company, and apparently this booklet was first produced for circulation amongst its own staff. In a fit of generosity, they’ve decided to share, and it’s certainly worth a read.

Most readers of our blog will be familiar with the basics of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These are all covered, but the guide goes more in-depth, too. Give it a read and we’re sure you’ll learn at least one new thing.

We all know the benefits of having a presence on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and so on, but the fact is that any interaction you have on there may not be seen by visitors to your main website.

We’ve been looking at a neat piece of code that you can add to your own site and encourage interaction on the spot: it’s called Echo.

Whether you’d like to encourage feedback or ratings on your products, or simply aggregate questions and answers, this auto-refresh software gives your users their own space. Neatly, it integrates with a number of social networks, so you don’t lose the viral benefits of those platforms.

To us, it looks like an easy way to key in to all the advantages of having peer reviews and ratings on your site, with the minimum of development. We’d be happy to help you add it to your own site if you require – or talk about other options if this one doesn’t seem quite right.

Fancy fifteen minutes of power? Then you may want to send David Perez a tweet this week. This hapless Advertising Recruiter is promising to do everything – provided it’s legal – that his Twitter followers suggest, for a week. What’s more, he’ll be wearing webcam enabled glasses so you can follow his escapades.

Hmm. We’d be the first to say that our lives were sometimes ruled by social media: we can’t resist dipping in to see what people are up to, perhaps that little bit too frequently. And there’s no doubt it can act as a hive mind, helping influence our decisions on everything from where to eat, to the best holiday destinations – but we think that Perez may be going just a little too far. Will he really do everything he’s told to, by bored office workers looking for a cheap laugh? We suspect he’ll fall at an early hurdle. Naturally, we’ll enjoy watching him do so.

Adidas are. Virgin are. Proctor and Gamble and Toys R Us are… are you? Using Facebook for advertising, that is.

A recent Business Week article reveals that advertising on this social network has quadrupled since 2009. Clearly that oft-repeated mantra, ‘go to where your customers are’ is having some effect in the marketing offices of these major companies. And with Facebook currently beating even Google as the site we spend the most time on, that’s where you can be sure to find them.

All indications are that the Facebook userbase is expanding. Need proof that even the silver surfers are embracing this 21st century phenomenon with the best of them? Well, you might just find it in the fact that a certain 64 year old is now getting to grips with wall posts and silly trivia quizzes. And even the recent Quit Facebook Day seems to have dented the ever-expanding userbase by very little indeed.

We’ve posted before about the ability to reach localised or highly specialised audiences through Facebook’s advertising network. While the big companies we mention above no doubt enjoy a massive budget and blanket coverage, you can do just as much with far less money. Like us to show you how? We’d be delighted.

The whole point of the Internet, some might say, is that you can reach the whole world – so small businesses, serving a small local area, might be excused for thinking they don’t need a website at all. Well, you’ve only got to search this very blog for the word ‘local’ to see that we think otherwise.

We’ve looked at local trends on Twitter, local ads on Facebook, and Google’s ‘in stock nearby’ feature, just to name a few. Read through those posts, and the conclusion can only be that all sorts of websites are leveraging the internet very successfully to speak to customers who may only be a few miles – or even metres – from their premises.

Being a small business ourselves, we are quite passionate about what a local approach can do for one’s own community. We always try to shop local ourselves, mindful that money we put into our own neighbourhood will, most likely, enrich our own customers, and, in turn, increase our trade. That may sound like a selfish kind of altruism, but we prefer to think of it as good karma!

It was the same approach that led us to offer free websites for local companies: we like to see our neighbourhood’s start-ups succeeding, and are happy to do what we can to help. After all, today’s small businesses can easily become tomorrow’s thriving enterprises, bringing higher rates of employment and enrichment to the community. Just don’t forget us when you’re at the top!