OK, this is interesting… I know many of us moan about the over-softness of the world today, that the PC-liberal types but calling a new toy Spastic is a bit of a stretch to fair in the other direction – and it’s terrible marketing…
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Glad this wasn’t touted as a PR/Social Media Friday Fun Challenge: it’s a robot that mimics births. Complete with Japanese robot voice.

Many thanks, if thanks is the word to the never-dull Warren Ellis for that one.

So, as part of a plan to lighten things up around here, I asked for submissions for fictional PR problems (inspired by my Star Trek social media and PR post) and got some really good replies (at least if no-one gives me a new one next week, there’s plenty here to play with). Thanks everyone for the entries, the winner for this week was from the wonderful Barry Dewar:

A giant Japanese monster descends on the UK. The police are quickly overwhelmed while people and property is being destroyed. The press discover that it’s all being stage-managed by an evil criminal mastermind with a self-image problem. The world teeters on the edge of distaster….Save us Social Media!

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With every passing week, more and more people proclaim Facebook to be the future of everything for social media and digital engagement (even in Scotland!) and it continues to expand to try and do more things (and here’s 10 tips for using Facebook well). But there’s one thing that it can’t do at all. In fact, given how much this one made MySpace the player it was for a while, it’s very surprising.

Upload MP3s.

Yes, you can upload video easily enough via one click, but try putting the humble audio file up there as easily. No chance.

(Yes, Google has a couple of workarounds but you would have thought – even with piracy concerns – that MP3 upload would have been in there.)

A lot of my American friends see the story as undemocratic, but I think the Wikileaks publishing of 90,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan (background here, TL;DR version of documents here) shows a few things: 1) the power of digital communications to help inform people, 2) the death of traditional media yet also 3) the usefulness traditional media still has?

Thoughts? I suppose I better explain myself first…

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Interesting article on Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg over on Scobleizer (is that even grammatically correct?) and it posts a decent question: is the problem with Facebook not the privacy and so on but the fact that the boss of the company is rubbish at being put in front of people?

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Here we are in 2010 and, as the #StuartMacLennan stuff has shown, some people still don’t get the basics of social media or being online, so for those in Scotland and the rest of the UK, here’s a very quick guide to using social media for digital engagement…
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That was quick. AOL has put Bebo up for sale just two years after buying it for $850million (£417 or so million). Does this mean social media and social networking are on a downward? Are all those Learn how to use Bebo for your business classes doomed and a waste of time?

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And this, gentle reader shows the problem with the UK press and digital engagement: an online radio station is the best online innovation the British press could come up with. FFS!

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Turns out the stooshie over Nestle and Facebook manners isn’t the first time Nestle has found itself  in social media hot water. Crunchy Domestic Goddess points out that there were issues last year as well when Nestle organised a Family Blogger event.

Quite a lengthy read, but interesting all the same.