How and when we use our mobile phones http://bit.ly/oTrMiU

How does mobile phone use vary between services, through the day and across countries? Find out with this nifty little graphical tool from TNS.

What do you love? http://bit.ly/pqfi8L

Google wants to tell you more about the love of your life. Purely in the interests of research, you understand, I set this to work on myself and discovered a namesake of mine has written a thesis on “Solutions to unanswerable questions”.

Clever hotel campaign lets people use Facebook in the real world http://bit.ly/rqiITC

A rather nifty way to get your customers spreading the word on Facebook.

Givmo http://bit.ly/p6xQkQ

Over-consumption, social media and behavioural economics (at a stretch…) combine to try to put surplus goods to good use.

Gold versus cats http://bit.ly/ohxh9c

Infographics are popular on the internet. Cute kittens are popular on the internet. You can guess the conclusion.

Google’s hit rate with its new projects is fairly low. It knows that if it tries out enough new ideas, the occasional one will be the sort of success that more than makes up for the efforts which went into the flops. Even in social networks, there have been plenty of flops already – remember Google Sidewiki, Google Buzz or Google Wave to name but three?

However, Google+ has three things going for it that make it look, at this early stage, more like a Chrome or an Android – something that is set to become a major success.

First, Google has invested very significantly in the project, as Wired’s excellent feature on Google+’s development explains.

Second, it introduces a significant new focus for organising your social networking, albeit one that others will be able to imitate if it’s a success. Google+ uses the idea of “circles” to organise your friends or contacts, so you can have different groups of (possibly overlapping) people have access to different content. Work colleagues can see some content, for example, whilst personal friends (who may or not include some work colleagues) other content and family possibly some of each. Compare that with Facebook, whose privacy settings simply let you allow wider groups of people to see less, and you can see how Google+’s approach more naturally fits with the way people actually live their lives.

Third, if circles is one of Google+’s hearts the other is Google’s search algorithm expertise, used to find and present content the algorithm think you will find useful from all that being shared online (called “Sparks”) – using your network of contacts to refine what you’re shown but pulling content from across the internet. By contrast, Facebook with its newfeed relies on what your friends have already decided to share on Facebook – a far smaller pool of information, and one necessitated by Facebook not having a global search engine technology at its heart.

If all this turns out to be accurate (and checking back, my initial reaction to Buzz was appropriately sceptical, phew!), what dose it mean for people working in PR?

By bringing together search and social media in the Sparks results, Google+ will heighten the need to run integrated communications operations. Getting media coverage from mainstream news outlets these days often results in very search-friendly content going online – such as if a daily newspaper puts a story up on its website – but that will be only half the job to get it appearing prominently in people’s Sparks. The other half will be having it shared by networks of interested readers, which means both choosing shareable topics and encouraging the formation of those networks.

Google will be even more closely entwining the results of customer service, marketing and public relations – making the costs of having siloed approaches to all three that much higher.

Cross-posted from the MHP Communications blog.

One of my reasons is that I’ve a reasonable amount of experience of reporting fake profiles or pages to Facebook in the past, across a range of different fields, and have seen them often delete ones which break the rules. So there didn’t look to be anything suspicious about Facebook deleting some political ones when I’ve seen them remove all sorts of others in the past.

However, I thought I’d too a little test to see if that’s still the case and, because Malcolm Coles just keeps on mentioning her (all in the interests of research, you understand), I went for 10 fake Pippa Middletons. It took around two-three weeks for them to act, but Facebook did remove them all.

Yet take a look at Facebook now, and you still  see a plethora of fake Pippa Middletons.

This mirrors my previous experience: even when it should be fairly obvious to Facebook that there’s a widespread issue of fake profiles or pages for a person, Facebook only removes the specific ones you’ve reported. It takes (in my experience at least) quite a lot of work to get someone at Facebook to up the ante and both do a proactive search for fakes and to curb the creation of new fakes. That was done in at least one case I was involved with, but as Pippa Middleton shows it isn’t done nearly as widely as it could be.

So whilst the one reasonable part of the complaint in the case of the political accounts was the lack of communication from Facebook about what they were removing and why, there’s also a fair ground for complaint that although Facebook says it doesn’t like fakes, it can be rather slow to act when there’s an obvious problem.

I’ve mixed views about the growing dominance of Facebook, yet – for both this site and others I have been involved with - I’ve long been keen on trying to pull together the discussions that happen in comment threads, on Twitter and on Facebook so that you get a critical mass of interesting conversation going rather than having fragmentation impede that.

The combination of Facebook commenting and Topsy for pulling in tweets should produce that sort of integration here (at least, once I’ve tweaked the Facebook end to meld in comments posted there). Will it work? I think so, but do let me know what you think…

And so the Lib Dem Voice Facebook app (kindly part-funded by Liberal Democrats Online), which makes it easy to post a Facebook status update and/or send a tweet about the campaigning you’ve been doing.

You can find the Lib Dem Voice application here.

Do take a look, give it a whirl and help spread the campaigning buzz.

On past form, many will gloss over the big differences between US and UK politics and the differences between a campaign headed up by the first non-white President and one aiming to make people buy your brand of shirts.

But as the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, one of the more perceptive commentators on Obama online first time round, has pointed out, the early signs from Obama’s re-election campaign do give hints as to how the internet landscape is looking. In particular, he points out the relative prominence given to Facebook – the social network now where so many people spend so much time both in the US and in the UK.

Far less prominence is given to Twitter, though that may say more about Obama’s track-record of not making particularly good use of Twitter than it does about Twitter’s current potential. It certainly does not have the mass audience of Facebook, but for reaching journalists, opinion formers and potential activists it can do a great job.

Surprisingly, the Obama 2012 Facebook page makes little effort to promote the grand-daddy of online campaign tools – the one that is and forever will be only one year younger than myself and which Obama’s campaign concentrated on last time – namely email. No email sign up form is pushed at the reader.

Less surprisingly, that official Facebook page currently has fewer fans than the unofficial one – continuing a common trend of the unofficial being more popular than the official in online campaigning (something that was particularly notable with the Liberal Democrat online presences in the 2010 general election).

As Rory Cellan-Jones has also pointed out, the early launch of the Obama campaign illustrates how online audiences and teams of active volunteers usually take time to build up – it’s an environment for tortoises, not hares.

In that respect, at least, the Obama campaign is already giving a lesson that has wide applicability.

Whether it’s building up an email list, getting a decent readership for your blog or accumulating a good network of residents on Facebook, as you steadily build up towards large audiences you need a regular supply of content, and all the more so once you have got your large audience. Being seen to be regularly providing interesting, useful and occasionally fun news in itself helps build the audience.

The supply of potential information is not normally the issue – just try asking a councillor whether they think they get too few emails from the council with lengthy documents. But what often stops the information becoming online content is a feeling that this has to be a big job that takes time, and with pressures from too much else to do and the sense of having a blank sheet of paper to start with, often nothing happens.

The solution? Go for little and often, adding details and summaries as you move from the brief to the more substantive communications.

So your Tweets or Facebook status updates are the most frequent form of communication, and the shortest. They may be up to several times a day but are always short – and relying on links to content elsewhere if a story is more complicated or details than 140 characters allows. Letting people know about a planning application, for example, becomes a simple tweet with a link to the online documents.

Then for the blog post every few days, you pick the tweet that was on the most important topic, expand further on the topic in a few sentences and put the story on the blog. Perhaps one of the planning applications has turned out to be controversial – so that becomes a fuller story, following up the response you got on Twitter to mentioning it.

Then for the email newsletter once a fortnight or once a month, you look through the blog posts, pick out the most important stories and expand on them a little further. Now perhaps you add in an account of a discussion you have had with the Planning Officer about that controversial application.

And then for the Focus leaflet? You go through the email newsletters, pick out the most important stories once again and expand on them yet again. Time to head off to a local meeting to gather petition signatures about that planning application and get a campaigning action photograph, perhaps.

In other words, rather than being put off by having to write a long story from scratch and never starting, kick off the process with a brief tweet, whose very brevity makes it much easier to do. Each time as you move up through blog and email to leaflets through doors, and you need longer content, expand on what you’ve done before. That way there’s never a blank sheet of paper staring at you and expanding what has already been written is often much easier to do.

If you are consistently selecting and expanding on the best stories as you reuse ideas, you avoid any risk of annoying people by duplicating messages because even if someone gets all your messages via all the different routes, each time there is something more for them.

Not all stories fit this formula – sometimes you may want a longer, more detailed story on your blog than can fit in a leaflet, for example – but as a basic template to follow that turns your good intentions into effective online campaign, it is a very good one to use.

Thanks to Jake Holland for helping to crystallise the thoughts in this post earlier in the year

The pup modestly says “I am extremely cute”. Well, pah I say to that, bet he can’t cook like a certain other dog.