Check out this fun but discussion-provoking presentation on social media and measuring its impact on bottom line.

A powerful video by the people at Socialnomics which throws a lot of compelling numbers at you. It’s great if you’re looking for an introduction to social media, or data to convince someone that it is indeed more than just a fad.

In this interview with Eric Schmidt, Charlie Rose asks the Google CEO a range of questions, from the origins of Google’s advertising model, to the monetization of YouTube, to whether the search giant would consider buying Twitter.

The interviewer turned to the concept of the digital divide, and the role technology companies have played to bridge the gap. Schmidt pointed out that, “In our lifetimes, we’re going from almost no one being able to communicate, to almost everyone being able to communicate. We’re also going from almost no one having information and any kind of access to libraries, to virtually everyone having access to every piece of information in the world. That is an enormous accomplishment for humanity. ”

Schmidt describes the future of mobile search, giving an example of how someone interested in history, walking down a street in New York could be delivered a “narrative stream that’s highly personal and highly entertaining.” He added, “Why can’t my phone generate the searches I should have been asking [based on my interests]?”

TechCrunch has posted a complete transcript of the 56-minute interview here.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams spoke at a recent TED conference about the founding of what has become today’s most exciting social networking tool. Williams, who was also involved in the founding of Blogger, describes how Twitter arose as a side project at start-up company Odeo.

What struck me is how much of Twitter’s current functionality has come about through user involvement. For example, the @username syntax for responding to a tweet started and spread from within the Twitter user base and was only later incorporated as a standard.

The TED video notes other examples of user-generated applications with Twitter such as the Summize, a real-time search engine which has since been purchased by Twitter,

Skittles, a candy produced by Mars Incorporated, created a bit of an online uproar on March 1 when they made a dead simple, yet effective change to their web home page, www.skittles.com. Instead of a rainbow-colored product site as one would expect, users saw a Twitter feed for the search term Skittles.  The page was superimposed by an intercept survey asking users for their age, and acceptance of a simple terms and conditions statement:

“Just a heads up: Any stuff beyond the Skittles.com page is actually another site and not in our control. This panel may be hovering over the page, but SKITTLES® isn’t responsible for what other people post and say on these sites. Click the box below to acknowledge that you know SKITTLES® isn’t responsible for that stuff.”

Tweets containing the word ‘skittles’ automatically appeared on the new Skittles homepage, along with any tweets making reference to the change as they contained the same keyword.  The buzz on Twitter grew to a point where Skittles became the number one trending keyword in buzz monitoring tools such as Twitscoop.

Several Twitterers used the opportunity for creative expression:

Incidentally, this user claimed that Skittles look like a Rick Astley YouTube video.

Users quickly caught on to what Skittles was trying to achieve with the campaign, but were also having fun in being part of the action.

Others gave in to the urge of turning a new found brand awareness into actual consumption.

With this social media marketing campaign, Skittles effectively held up a mirror to the Twittersphere, a mirror which reflected and amplified whatever ‘skittle’ was thrown into it.

It will be interesting to see if and how others brands follow suit.

I wanted to share this recent Guy Kawasaki interview conducted by Robert Scoble (@scobleizer, FastCompany.tv). In it, Guy tells us the story behind his latest book, Reality Check.

I recently had a chance to catch up with Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs. Ann has developed a successful online presence for MarketingProfs on popular social networking site, Twitter (see twitter.com/marketingprofs). In the interview, she shares her thoughts and personal experiences on Twitter as it relates to her role as a B2B marketer and promoter of the MarketingProfs brand.

Here’s a tool which will certainly allow for much amusement. And it could also be a great way to communicate feedback on web page usability or content.

Tynt is a program which allows users to add text, drawings, highlights and other fun things to web pages. These can be shared with others by email or through a social network like Twitter.

News of Tynt.com propagated through the social media universe and landed in my field of awareness this evening. I believe it was a tweet from Guy Kawasaki which linked to his Holy Kaw! Posterous blog. On it, a user by the name of Derek indicated he had mercilessly “tynted” the post. Here it is, the very first tynt I ever did see: http://holykaw.com.tynted.com/my-favorite-place-in-the-world

Tynt, just over a year old, has kept a relatively low profile until last week when they announced a new website, new version and integration with Twitter. Technically, the program is still in beta as it works out the kinks. There has been concern over Tynt and search engines, and the fact that this new content may get indexed. Tynt has also strongly been accused of stealing or scraping content for its own benefit. According to them, the program only ever visits the original site and all Tynt content is simply layered on top of the existing site (when the Tynt browser plug-in is used). In the case where the viewer is accessing a Tynt through a gateway (no plug-in installed in the browser) the gateway does not access a stored version of the underlying site, but rather loads the original site (including all images, media, advertising, and so on) and displays it to the user. The original site gets the ‘hit’, the ad view and so on.

Tynt CEO Derek Ball states, “We hope that Tynt can prove valuable to the underlying site by creating more page views and more ad views by encouraging people to share the sites that they feel a desire to comment on.”

It will be interesting to watch how the use of Tynt spreads now that it has embed codes for sharing Tynts as links.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out the tynted version of this blog post:
http://tynted.com/0LVV0rBN30s