The issue of blogging ethics came to the fore recently when prominent Canadian wine blogger, Natalie MacLean was accused of copyright infringement by the US wine magazine, Palate Press.

Sherrilynne’s Ottawa Twitter top 20 lists used to feature on this blog monthly. But they were very time consumer to compile and the grading tools used kept changing algorithms and or other aspects of their service making the lists difficult to standardize.

The Pope has seen the light. Last week he sent his first ever tweet: “Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.”

Global news media is full of stories drawing parallels of last week’s royal hoax to Diana, and perhaps these are not unfounded. But for this new generation of royal watchers, there is one very big difference from Prince William’s mother’s day…social media.

Social media consultants beware! Facebook and other social networks can affect your brain!

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Treasury Board of Canada President Tony Clement, sometimes known as the tweeting minister, spoke at last week’s IABC 2012 Canada Business Communicators’ Summit in Ottawa. His told the audience of public relations professionals about his own social media journey and shared some insight into how he sees politics in the age of social media.
Clement started out on Twitter only after he realised that people were mentioning him there. “I thought I’d better figure it out,” he said.  “As a defensive mechanism, I thought that I should try to understand Twitter …

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Yesterday, Michael Geist presented a keynote address to the IABC 2012 Canada Business Communicators’ Summit which was held in Ottawa.  His topic, the year the Internet fought back, focused on how a genuine grassroots movement, fuelled by social media, impacted the Canadian Federal government’s digital copyright law.
Mr. Geist, the Canada research chair of Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa is widely known as a newspaper columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star. He’s recognized as one the world’s most influential people on the subject.  He …

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Checking online reviews has become a normal part of consumer purchasing decisions, and so, companies are paying for or faking these reviews to gain favour and influence preference. By 2014, we could see up to 15 per cent of all online reviews being ‘faked’, according to Gartner, the research company.
“With over half of the Internet’s population on social networks, organizations are scrambling for new ways to build bigger follower bases, generate more hits on videos, garner more positive reviews than their competitors and solicit ‘likes’ on their Facebook pages,” said …

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Research released today by LoyaltyOne and two leading North American academic institutions provides the long-awaited proof that social media interaction between a customer and a brand drives immediate and long-term sales increases.
The findings are based on a two-year analysis of brand-customer social media engagement and transaction data with the more than 10-million member AIR MILES Reward Program. AIR MILES collectors were encouraged to engage with the AIR MILES-hosted social community website by sharing thoughts about the brand or participating in promotions; they were rewarded either with a small number of …

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LinkedIn, the professional social network, has recently introduced ‘endorsements’, a feature that makes it easier for people to recognize their connections’ skills and expertise.
With just one click, a person can endorse a connections for a skill they’ve listed on their profile or recommend one they haven’t added yet. So if a connection lists ‘crisis management’ under the Skills & Expertise section of their LinkedIn profile, it is almost effortless to confirm this,  just a click.
Here’s how to endorse LinkedIn connections.  On the top of a connection’s profile, see a …