Image by Anorak News In December of last year, Anonymous hackers teamed to hack U.S. sites and post angry messages of dissent against U.S. companies that withdrew support of Wikileaks. Last October, when ace photography blogger Scott Bourne posted on Twitter’s digital copyrights, angry photographers flash mobbed his site, causing Bourne to close comments. In 2007 Greenpeace targeted Apple for poor environmental standards with its Webby award winning GreenMyApple campaign, which in part featured calls to action to comment negatively on Apple blogs. While usually used to organize rallies or market consumer products, online flash mobs are a favorite tactic to silence or overpower opposing viewpoints. Sometimes they involve a negative commenting campaign on a Facebook fan page or a …

A better social web exists. It exists within each of us. Today, this social web isn’t popular, instead it has fascinating small pools and eddies of action and meaningful dialogue. But this can be The Social Web, a place better than a popularity driven attention sphere focused on the best looking unicorn (Bieber or Kardashian, take your pick). Our virtual worlds can become a place of vigorous discourse. Rather than dismissing social media‘s incredibly empowering capability in the hands of the Fifth Estate, the better social web seeks to increase online literacy for Everyone using these tools. The Middle East is just an example of what driven people can do with intelligent networking tools. So much more can be accomplished …

In life on Twitter, it’s virtually impossible to move far into one’s career without being asked to retweet (RT) something. Almost every single one of us have asked for and have been asked to RT for a fellow marketer, friend, or simply a follower. But as time passes, more and more influence formulas are tied to RTs as a metric. This impacts the value of receiving RTs, both positively and negatively. There seems to be people who will ask for a RT on just about anything they do. Given the lack of capital that is involved in kicking out a RT these days, does it mean anything? If many fans blindly RT as sign of support for their favorite voices, …

On the social web, it is important to look at the details, including content publishing rights, communication “best practices,” influence theory, or a “Perks” package. For the past two weeks, many online personalities updated their Facebook and Twitter statuses declaring they had received their Klout Perks package. It has brought up the question of ethics. Will these influencers always reference the Perks program when touting their Klout? In addition to becoming the preeminent influencer package of choice for businesses, it’s clear that Klout has a second agenda: Disseminate products into the marketplace via volunteer online influencers for their marketing clients. The sponsorship program is called Klout Perks. Certainly, at face value this seems like a reasonable way to monetize a …

Much has been made about BP’s questionable advertising campaign, from President Obama’s call out of the $50 million expenditure to ethical questions and search engine placements. Experiencing this inappropriate overspend on Facebook has been quite troublesome. The above ad was served to me over Memorial Day weekend on Facebook. It clearly demonstrated that while Facebook is using my posts and links as a means to serve me ads, it doesn’t work. The ad features BP, a company I have been blogging negatively about for several weeks, and one of my local friendly competitors John Bell, head of Ogilvy 360 DC. John’s a good guy, but that isn’t going to sway me to support BP. Thus, Facebook privacy violations or not, …

Episode 33 of the El Showfeatured guest host Rich Becker who filled in for a sick Richard Laermer. We discussed the Deep Horizon oil spill crisis, the collective communications mess that has ensued, and the ethical issues presented. Here’s a breakdown of Episode 33: Introducing Rich Becker and his Fresh Content Initiative Breaking down the oil spill problem into a series of sub-crisis, from the culpability aspect, to fixing the oil spill, the different clean up issues, and the PR behind BP’s role? Rich says that they simply need to fix the oil leak and stop dismissing environmental damage. Is it a question of leadership: BP is running the entire show, and it’s not realistic. We analyze the BP (Haliburton …