The Internet is a treasure trove of the bizarre and comical content and this is no more evident than in the form of memes. Memes, while certainly funny and generally cute, have a power that many of us had not yet thought about until ROFLCon earlier this month: free speech.

After taking a week to reflect on the show at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – attendees included many of the  faces from popular web videos, such as “bed intruder” Antoine Dodson, or My Drunk Kitchen’s Hannah Hart – one of the biggest takeaways I had was from a panel called “Global Lulzes,” which considered the international use of memes and social media, particularly in countries of political and socioeconomic unrest.

In the U.S., memes have been used for years to criticize society and politics in a way that is humorous and powerful, making statements against or for a particular stigma or leader. (Note, if you do not know what a meme is I suggest reading this). In lieu of the 2012 election, memes have been generated showing distaste for both the Republican presidential runner Mitt Romney and President Obama.

Consider:

In this country, such obvious jests on behalf of government officials are legal and welcomed as part of our First Amendment rights. In other countries, however, this isn’t the case, and as a result, political activism is taking refuge in the unassuming world of memes.

In Syria, for example, it is illegal to make fun of the president. As a result, many Syrians have had to self-censor the comments they post online, but Internet memes have been popping up since the beginning of the revolution in that country to showcase the public’s dissatisfaction with the regime.

Satire has been used for centuries to express displeasure with a political system. In today’s world, it is easier to reach the masses not with the printed word, but with an easy to alter and share image. The “it belongs to everyone” nature of memes enables anyone to take a picture and make it their own with just a few words.

I can’t help but wonder, however, how long it is before such statements are silenced. We are already noticing such actions with Facebook and Twitter posts, for instance, the Marine who was recently discharged after he criticized Obama on Facebook. And a judge in Virginia deemed that a Facebook “Like” does not constitute free speech, adding that employers can fire employees based on these interests. By clicking the “Like” button, though, are you not saying that you are in favor of what that page represents, whether brand or politician?

The main saving grace of memes, it seems, is the anonymity with which they are created and the simple objects that can be turned into a meme, such as, say, a duck. This keeps them off censorship’s radar, and keeps the individuals who make them fairly unattached to the content. For now, though, memes are and will continue to be a wonderfully funny and powerful tool in the protection of free speech.

- Brittney (@bntrim)

Even as recently as this weekend Techcrunch reported that Pinterest has over 10.4 million registered users, 9 million monthly Facebook-connected users, and 2 million daily Facebook users. (It is important to keep in mind that some of these stats are still speculation or determined through number of Likes on Facebook so are not true active user stats, yet.)

Okay, so we know that Pinterest is popular. But the question is, just how groundbreaking will it be? Dean Browell, PhD and EVP at Feedback, tackles that question in the UK’s MyCustomer.com:

Brandweiner writes, “With Pinterest’s more personalised approach for brands – particularly retailers – and growing popularity, how does the network fare against Facebook and could we have finally found a social platform to knock it off its perch?

Dean Browell from Feedback doesn’t think so. “There’s no way Pinterest will kill Facebook – it just isn’t the same network so can’t replace it,” he concludes. “But it can influence it. I think Pinterest will become and stay popular, in the vein of Tumblr with the possibilities of Twitter.”

So there you have it. It doesn’t look like the interest with Pinterest is going to wane anytime soon. My interest, however, is now more focused on how its success is going to influence the leading social networks.

-Anna (@alucas9)

In other words, marketers can expect to pay $3.60 for one set of eyes on the foremost social network. Reports U.K.-based Marketing Magazine:

Criticism of the announcement was widespread and immediate, noting that impressions give no account of engagement. Vitrue chief executive Reggie Bradford countered that he was coming to that, and “shares”, “comments” and “likes” would feature in a subsequent study.

While it is sometimes difficult to measure ROI in social media, pointing to “Like” as an indicator of success is seen as a problem by many, including Feedback’s own Dean Browell, who was interviewed for the article. A “Like” may simply be someone entering a competition or seeing something intriguing on a company’s Facebook page – but it doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is instantly wedded to a brand.

The article continues:

The truly curious thing, according to Dean Browell, executive vice-president of US social media strategist Feedback, is that so many brands seem happy to unquestioningly reach for the large numbers – and the less nuanced, the better.

“There’s an unusual shift happening now,” says Browell. “At first, marketers were clamouring for very specific data they could hang their hat on as a reason to go into social. Now, you have brands doing social and being OK with not measuring it.

“They are in love with the ‘like’ and, unfortunately, many of them aren’t asking who these people are who ‘like’ them, and what is the quality of the ‘likes’ they are getting.”

While many top brands view an individual Like on Facebook as a huge value, a good social media and digital practice comes down to more than just numbers. With careful methodologies in place, a great deal of meaningful data should emerge from a brand’s presence online and its fanbase, giving a company insightful feedback on its customers and stakeholders. This is data that impacts marketing departments, sure, but also gives key information to sales teams and C-suites.

For more, check out the article, Social Media: The value of a Like here.

Active Tweeters
At the Web2.0 Summit Twitter CEO Dick Costolo shared statistics on active users. Twitter now has 100 million month active users, and of those 50% log in everyday. Twitter isn’t catching up to Facebook just yet. Facebook has more than 800 million active users, and of those 50% log in everyday.

iPhone 4$:
With a dual-core AA5 chip, new camera and optics, iCloud and Siri (Apple’s voice recognition app), the iPhone 4S is pretty impressive. Sales for the newest iPhone are pretty impressive as well. Let’s look back a bit: it took 74 days to sell the first million iPhone’s and it took three weeks to sell three million iPhone 4′s.

Drumroll, please.

It only took one weekend to sell 4 million iPhone 4S’, making a new iPhone sales record.

Now, for those of you who don’t have it yet, the question is “To upgrade or not to upgrade?”

Social & Mobile
Highlights from a recent ComScore Study:

Those using social networks from their mobile device grew 37% in the past year and more than half accessed social networks almost every day.

Facebook’s mobile audience is approaching 60 million users. In the past year, mobile posts grew by 50% on Facebook,  75% on Twitter and 69% on LinkedIn.

70% of mobile social networkers posted a status update from their phone and the majority of them read posts from brands from their device.

“Social Jobs”
Facebook and the Department of Labor are working together to connect job-seekers and employers through Facebook. Called Social Jobs,  “The partnership’s goal will be to facilitate employment for America’s jobless through the use of social networks.” Social Jobs aims to provide job postings and resources for job-seekers and recruiters. Like “Social Jobs Partnership” on Facebook to learn more: https://www.facebook.com/socialjobs. (With never-ending privacy issues, I wonder if people will be weary of “Social Jobs” as many don’t want potential employers seeing any part of their Facebook life.)

Are You LinkedIn with your Classmates?
While Facebook was adding features to help users find jobs, LinkedIn was busy adding a feature to help users expand their network. “LinkedIn Classmates” is a new feature that makes it easier to connect with alumni from your college/university. As LinkedIn described,  “In the years since college, your classmates have become experienced professionals, industry experts, potential clients and trusted colleagues – in short, people who can help you expand your horizons.” This new tool allows you to see where alumni work, what they do, and where they live. You can also see what you have in common now, making it easier to network and connect with them.

-Anna (@alucas9)

For me, the annual September release of Inc. magazine’s top 500 private companies (stretched to 5000 online) has been an autumn rite for as long as I can remember.

For the uninitiated, Inc.’s list is ranked by the percentage of revenue growth over a three-and-a-half year period by privately held, for-profit independent companies that meet some qualifying financial requirements. Some companies appear on the list briefly before going public. Other companies are stalwarts, like North Carolina software maker SAS, which has appeared on the list each year since 1981.

At Feedback, we’re frequently charged with surveying the social media landscape of entire industries, clients and competitors alike, to evaluate the overall usage and uncover best practices. For the purpose of this post, I thought I might do a quick audit of this year’s Inc. 500 No. 1 fastest growing company, ideeli.

If by chance you haven’t heard of ideeli, you’re certainly familiar with the concept: a members-only online retailer, a “Flash-shopping” site, with regular-if-not-daily emails offering merchandise for greatly discounted prices. While ideeli counts sites like Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and HauteLook among its main competitors, it’s a short leap to their much-ballyhooed geo-specific daily deal siblings, Groupon and LivingSocial. Most of ideeli’s thousand brand partners are in the fashion world, though offers for such things as travel present growth opportunities they are just beginning to explore.

So how is a company of this size and potential using social? At first glance, the answer is quite well.

On Facebook, multiple daily posts reflect their assets via pictures, as well as their sponsors and items of general interest to their more than 170,000 fans. Likes by the hundred and comments by the dozen are common within hours of posting.

The effort on Twitter is strong as well. Having cultivated a base of almost 26,000 followers with over 20,000 tweets since September 2008, the content and interactions really flow here. Chances are if you direct your message to @ideeli, you’ll get a personal response. At the time of this writing, there were twenty direct responses to individuals tweeting their questions or affections for this shopaholic’s dream.

In addition to their regular offerings, they also do what they call “Flash Friday” giveaways for an unspecified and far briefer time period that you can only participate in by following on Twitter and using the appropriate hashtag in your messages. Clearly, there is some serious social media savvy within the company’s Manhattan headquarters.

As a business that contacts its consumers regularly via email, you could give ideeli a pass if they failed to make use of a blog along side their other efforts. However, the clean design and presentation of information, as well as the availability of multiple RSS feeds at blog.ideeli.com provide a strong complement to the other promotional efforts, though it would seem with less traffic and far fewer interactions. I am somewhat surprised – given the adoption of Tumblr within the fashion community – that ideeli has not embraced that site and its potential to further engage with its clientele. A presumptive search for ideeli.tumblr.com gets forwarded back to the main site, where an unformatted page lies begging for completion and content (I know some who would be willing to help them out with that).

I’m somewhat obsessed with deal websites, so I was surprised to see a site that I had never heard of (though competitors Gilt & Rue were on my radar) top the Inc. 500. Who knows where they will place on next year’s list: Maybe they’ll go public or be bought out and no longer qualify. Or maybe they’ll find a goldmine in other retail sectors and continue to grow at this torrid pace.

Either way, I’m sure they’ll be keeping up with their strong efforts in social. If you’re looking for an example of a private company doing it right, look no further: ideeli’s the real deal.

-Thomas (@thomasmcdonald)

Facebook has unveiled – in an attempt to curb the growth and keep up with features of Twitter, Google+ and others like it – a feature called “Subscribe,” which will allow Facebook users to, well, subscribe to the news of others. You’ll be able to begin hand-picking the content you want to view on your wall, thus fine-tuning the Facebook experience to your liking instead of having to see the somewhat random mess of updates from an array of people.

Subscribe is completely optional; if you don’t use it, Facebook will continue to run as it always does.

But for those who choose to use Subscribe, the benefits could be many. Like Twitter, instead of “friending” a celebrity or someone you’re really not friends with but are otherwise interested in, Subscribing will let you simply follow their updates (provided the person allows subscribers) without getting all their personal details. Subscribe means that popular or up-and-coming performers, writers, singers or comedians will see their stars shine a bit brighter. Self-proclaimed social media gurus will begin to measure their self-worth on the number of Subscribers they have. And you may find yourself with people you truly don’t know who are interested in what you have to share.

Subscribing may be the answer to keeping people on Facebook while tightening the experience to meet the demands of what people are looking for in today’s social networks: greater control, a more personalized experience, and a reason to stay at Facebook instead of another service: the people.

Facebook, unlike the rash of other services available, already has the critical mass. Yet if you take the pulse of savvy web users and even everyday Facebook users, you’ll hear stories of Facebook fatigue, the desire for more control over content, the need for privacy, or simply that they’ve done everything they can do on the site and are moving on. And while it is still growing, that growth is perhaps slowing (even dropping by 6 million users in May, Inside Facebook reports). It’s no death knell, but it could be telling.

For these reasons, we’re seeing more niche, focused communities pop up on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Path and other platforms. They are more private, and the people on them more difficult to find.

This “privitization” of social networks is a trend we’ve been watching closely. And Facebook is about to board this train in a big way.

Not all of this is new, revolutionary or mind-blowing. But Facebook Subscribe is a bit of a mind-blower when you apply what this is and does to the masses of the social network, the paradigms in play in digital media, and the ever-increasing complexity of the modern identity.

Does it mean everyone will use and understand Subscribing right out of the gate? No, but its very existence is a product of some other trends and thoughts. For months (which is how we count technology time) people have been organizing their lives into separate places: Twitter for public thoughts, Tumblr as an extension of that community or to share personal interests with others, photo-sharing apps like Path or Instagram to share slice-of-life pictures and video.

Up until now, Facebook wasn’t really adequate in separating content as well as simple privacy. But with Subscribing, now even the non-savvy can start stratifying in new ways. People will share more, and less. Lives will take new shapes to certain people. And therefore, so will identities.

The layers of social soil just got more interesting for your garden.

Google Acquires Zagat

Google has purchased Zagat, popular restaurant review site, for an undisclosed sum that is estimated at less than $66 million.  Google made the purchase to improve its local products. As stated in the Google blog, “Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.”

Facebook Testing Page Recommendations
Facebook is testing a Page recommendation widget, which prompts users to write a recommendation for a Page. Facebook is hoping this widget will make it easier for friends of reviewers to find and connect with Pages.  When questioned about the widget, Facebook responded by saying “We’re always testing new features with small percentages of users to provide us feedback to help improve the service. The tests inform many of the improvements we make to the site and help shape new products.”  Facebook is also testing friend’s filters in the news feed: http://mashable.com/2011/09/08/facebook-news-feed-changes.

Twitter’s Active Users

We finally have a pulse on how many active Twitter users there are. Typically, Twitter likes to share number of users, which is currently around 200 million, rather than active users. This week, Twitter finally broke the news that there are over 100 million active twitter users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users logging in everyday. Adding to these stats, Mashable explained that “Twitter now hosts roughly a billion tweets every five days, 230 million tweets every day, and has hit a new record for tweets per second: 8,900.”

Smartphone Satisfaction
Apple should be grinning over the recent study completed by J.D. Power and Associates on Smartphone satisfaction. The study, which surveyed 6,898 Smartphone owners, found that Apple Smartphone’s had the highest customer satisfaction. Criteria included overall satisfaction, performance (35%), ease of operation (24%), Smartphone features (21%), and physical design (20%). Apple scored 830 points based on a 1,000-point scale. The industry average, for comparison, was 788 points. HTC was the closest to Apple with 801 points. See the full study here.

Smartphone Usage

Speaking of Smartphone’s, how is the average consumer using them? According to a recent study by Pew Research, Checking in on apps like Foursquare are at the bottom of the list. The survey, which was conducted on 2,277 adults, found that 92% of Smartphone users send and receive texts whereas only 12% checkin on geolocation services. View the charts below to see how Smartphone activities rank:

-Anna (@alucas9)

There’s been quite a bit of chatter surrounding Twitter demographics and ethicity, however uncomfortable broaching the topic may be. One of the most interesting statistics to come out of it all are the levels of African American users on Twitter, because the figures are so disproportional to the overall U.S. representation.

A study done by Pew indicated that as of May 2011, 25 percent of African-Americans use Twitter as compared to 19 percent of Hispanics and only 9 percent of whites (note: these figures reflect the percentages of Americans as a whole who use Twitter, and not the actual makeup of the service, which is about half white and a quarter black).

A humorous but factual presentation by The Onion’s digital director, Baratunde Thurston – bluntly titled “How to be Black Online” – noted that while less than half of African-Americans have high-speed Internet at home, they dominate mobile broadband usage – nearly double that of their white counterparts. And the ease of Twitter (140 characters or less to update) and access to other people within the service makes it popular for use on mobile devices.

And lastly, a study suggested that Twitter adoption among African-Americans was based on the finding that they are more likely to have a greater interest than other ethnic groups in celebrity and gossip news. And thanks to the fall of MySpace, Twitter has become the online outlet of choice for celebrity drama. Plus, you can shout at them.

In my opinion, it’s the age of user as opposed to race that might be most indicative of how people are using Twitter.

The younger generations (teens and young twentysomethings) of Caucasians, African-Americans, Latinos, and others generally use Twitter as a public instant messenger. It’s more conversational than Facebook, and they can not only message their friends, but also tweet celebrities and read their tweets in real-time. Like Myspace, users can also personalize their pages with colors, designs, and different backgrounds.

Thurston also makes mention of the Twitter trending topics that dominate many evening chats (such as, #thingshoodratslove, #ghettohurricanenames, or #waystogetoffthephone) in the U.S., referring to them as, “blacktags.” It’s even a subject that has entered the halls of academia. From Slate:

Brendan Meeder thinks he’s got a good hypothesis about what’s going on. Meeder, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, has downloaded the tweets of more than 100 million users. (Twitter gave him special permission to do so for research purposes.) He’s been probing this collection to see how Twitter users interact with one another; he’s particularly interested in how trends begin and spread through a social network.

While analyzing his database a few months ago, Meeder noticed something strange—he found a cluster of hundreds of users whose profiles were connected to one another. When he looked up the users, he noticed that a lot of them were black. It’s in exactly these kinds of tight-knit groups that Twitter memes flourish, Meeder says.

“It’s my impression that these hashtags start in dense communities—people who are highly connected to each other,” Meeder says. “If you have 50 of these people talking about it, think about the number of outsiders who follow at least one of those 50—it’s pretty high at that point. So you can actually get a pretty big network effect by having high density.”

These kinds of bonds are obviously not unique to social media – rather, these are cultural distinctions we are merely seeing reflected inside. The nation’s African American community is finding its voice and community on the web, and that platform of choice is increasingly looking like Twitter.

In coming months, we’ll explore ethnicity, age and other personal traits and how different cultures interact online.

-Brittany (@britgary)

Photo credit:

“Dean Browell, executive vice president at social media strategy company Feedback, part of Worldwide Partners Inc, agrees that they are few businesses that would not benefit from being social.

However, he points that businesses themselves should not get too hung up on definitions of social media and social business – as their customers give it a second’s thought.

“Consumers just simply operate online and nearly everything they do contains some social element, peer validation or interactive possibility,” he explains. “The only part of social media that is a fad is actually calling it, ‘social media’.”

This isn’t the first time Dean has been featured across the pond. See what Dean inked in June 2011.

Socializing during business is a lot different today than it was years ago. Like, bigtime.

New #4sq Features
Foursquare has made two notable updates to their app this week:

Tips List
They have added a tips list feature, which allows people to categorize a group of places. So now, for example, you can create a tip list for your favorite local bars or coffee shops.

Event Check-Ins
Foursquare has also announced official event check-ins. Foursquare has partnered with ESPN, movietickets.com, and Songkick to populate it’s database with sporting, movie and concert events for you to check-into.

Higher Ed and Foursquare
In an article this week, InsideHigherEd discussed “A recent survey by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth found that 98 percent of higher ed institutions are on Facebook, and 84 percent are on Twitter.” This is a contrast to the 20% of campuses that have adopted an institutional presence on Foursquare. Foursquare use among colleges is expected to rise as officials realize the opportunity to interact with students while they’re on campus. Just think of the engagement opportunities – such as turning a college tour into a virtual check-in game or making students aware of campus events as they’re happening.

Skype Wi-Fi
Skype has a new app for iPhone and iPad users called Skype Wi-Fi. Skype Wi-Fi allows users to connect to more than 1 million Wi-Fi Hotspots around the world. Normally you will be charged by the minute (starting at $.06 per minute), but this weekend only you can try the app for free for 60 minutes. Find out more.

Social Media Marketing Infographic

Mashable Infographic

-Anna (@alucas9)