‘Bad taste’, ‘goulish’ and ‘wrong, wrong, wrong’ – just a few of the phrases used to describe The Guardian’s reporting of 9/11 in its @911tenyearsago Twitter account.

The idea was to live-tweet the 9/11 attacks as if they were happening in real time.

On face value, @911tenyearsago provided an interesting exploration of how social media would have played its part on 9/11, had it been around at the time.

However, after just one hour and 16 tweets, the account had been suspended – public outrage was so deafening that The Guardian had no choice but to pull it.

So why was this particular Twitter reportage so badly received? For many, @911tenyearsago smacked of sensationalism and a way for The Guardian to show its affinity and connection with the medium of Twitter rather than provide any new insight into the event itself.

It’s clear that misjudgment of this kind shows we’re still learning the boundaries of Twitter. The tweets by @911tenyearsago were perceived as shocking because they were written as if the events of 10 years ago were really happening. On a day of quiet reflection for so many people, it was the account’s precise lack of warmth, context or emotion that made it so out of place.

While Twitter reporting was also carried out by other media organisations, including Associated Press and The Daily, The Guardian was the clear casualty of the day. Its quickness to react and remove the account was its only saving grace.

Like a cucumber sandwich, an Aston Martin or a Corgi, Burberry is quintessentially British. Founded in 1856 by Thomas Burberry, the luxe fashion label is celebrated for its sought-after rain macs and tartan print.

Of late, British beauties – including Agyness Deyn, Rosie Huntington-Whitetely and Emma Watson – have become ‘faces’ of the brand, donning iconic trench coats and sultry poses for huge advertising campaigns. Many a fashionista has also waited with bated breath to get their first peep at the label’s latest designs.

Yet, despite being steeped in tradition, Burberry has decided to buck the trend when it comes to marketing. The FT has reported that Burberry now spends over 60 per cent of its marketing budget on digital media, having ditched glossy print ads in favour of a global Facebook campaign.

Expertly timed for the launch of its latest fragrance, Burberry Body, the fashion house is now spending triple the market average on social networking activity.

The bold move is already paying off. Today, Burberry has over 8 million Facebook ‘likes’ – an increase of 500,000 fans in just a week – and more than 250,000 people have now signed up online to receive a free sample of the new scent.

The label’s certainly come a long way since 2005, when Burberry nail art and Daniella Westbrook’s head-to-toe Burberry attire turned the brand from chic to chav!

In PR terms, Burberry is now flying the flag not only for ‘Britishness’, but also for how a brand can genuinely engage with consumers on social networking platforms. Of course there’s kudos attached to appearing in the pages of Vogue, but who can argue with a digital shift that appeals directly to people in their hundreds of thousands?

News that an LA-based PR agency was unceremoniously dumped this week after it sent a thoughtless tweet comes as no surprise. The company in question – Redner Group – got sacked by its biggest client, a video game publisher, after its MD tweeted it would punish bad reviews of its latest release by withholding future copies from reviewers.

The story comes just days after the MOD launched its ‘Careless Tweets Cost Lives’ campaign, which begs the question: why are so many PR professionals, the ‘reputation experts’, continuing to tweet before they think?

In recent months, Twitter has brought the English justice system to its knees thanks to Giggs-gate; we’ve had hash-tag spam from Habitat, while Kenneth Cole felt the wrath of the web following his now-infamous Egypt Twitter gaffe.

When users, and particularly PR practitioners, cock up via social media, it never fails to cause a storm. That social media is embedded in traditional PR is a given, but it’s still a relatively new tool with no steadfast rules of engagement.

That said, threatening to blacklist reviewers, à la Redner Group, is not big or clever. It showed not just a lack of foresight, but a complete lack of respect and understanding of the medium at hand. Although an apology was offered, it was too late. The tweet was out there, the agency sacked. End of!

Twitter breaks boundaries like never before. It gives PR consultants the opportunity to engage with journalists, react to breaking news and spot trends before they go viral. However, while it extends the conversation, careless tweets really do cost.

The message is simple: every tweet puts the reputation of you and your business on the line. If you wouldn’t want it on the front page of the Daily Mail, keep it under-wraps. Simple advice? Yes. Adhered to? Worryingly not!

You may be forgiven for thinking that social media is a relatively new invention, spawned by college geeks and digital entrepreneurs. However, a certain maker of plastic containers is now arguing that the true origin of social networking can be found in the quaint image of 1950s domesticity.

Let’s hear it for the Tupperware party – considered to be an early form of a very modern phenomenon. According to Tupperware inc: “The word-of-mouth model of direct sales and marketing relied upon trusted relationships between women.” Now, with a global campaign to ‘coolify’ the company’s image, the 65-year-old brand has embraced the modern day equivalent of ‘home selling’ with an ambitious social media strategy.

The campaign, which goes live this week, will see the brand go back to its roots (in a digital sense) and talk directly to would-be shoppers. With a new face for the campaign in Kelly Clarkson and a message of empowerment, the company is looking to recreate the Tupperware party for 2011.

Now we’re not sure that Ms Clarkson ever dreamed of being the face of a ‘re-sealable plastic container’ (poor love), but we adore Tupperware’s vision to bring the ‘party’ to social media. Let’s hope their 50s mantra of ‘know your audience’ rings true in the digital age.

The papers have been covering a number of stories damning social media and suggesting that our use of social networking sites – such as Facebook and Twitter – is making us more anti-social. It’s certainly not something to be made light of, but it’s worth keeping an ounce of perspective on the matter.

Everyone’s been in a situation when a person they’re with is constantly checking their Facebook profile, tweeting a celeb, or checking up on someone. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that another story in Saturday’s Express cited Facebook as a reason for marital break-ups and divorce.

However, I don’t think we should blame Mark Zuckerberg entirely for all this. There’s no doubt that social media has been a huge game changer in the way people interact, but surely the positives outweigh the negatives? It’s also important to bear in mind that it’s people who are choosing to use social media tools so frequently – no one is putting a gun to our head, forcing us to tweet.

Used positively, social media is the key to developing and maintaining contact whether personal or professional, over a long distance or right around the corner. The truth is, there will never be a substitute for face to face interaction. Social networking sites were created to provide users with additional channels of communication, not replacement ones. It’s a clever way for us to stay connected with people who we perhaps otherwise wouldn’t communicate with, whilst remembering that a little bit of face time goes a long way.

Will 2011 be the year of Quora? The Telegraph has already claimed that it’s set to become bigger than Twitter, so what’s all the fuss about?

From what I can make out so far, Quora is a cocktail made up from part Twitter, part Yahoo Answers with a dash of LinkedIn groups and maybe a twist of Wikipedia. In real terms, it’s a question and answer website that allows you to follow topics and people that are of interest to you. The result is a vast, user-generated, interactive, (hopefully) credible knowledge bank.

Originally the playground of techies, I first came across Quora when it was mentioned by tech journalists on Twitter, and where journalists play − you can be sure that PRs are never too far away. Since then the hype has really kicked in and it seems that everyone’s rushed to sign up to the site.

Well, what can I say? So far, so good, the site is lovely to look at and user-friendly. It’s a little bit overwhelming when you first log-in, but helpfully there are plenty of responses about how to get started on Quora.

There are some really nice features, like the fact that you can vote top answers which will mean that responses have been weeded by other people ‘in the know.’ Quora gives you a platform to demonstrate a more in-depth expertise than Twitter and comes with a warning that it must be used responsibly. After all, the site will only ever be as good as its members. If respondents are credible then Quora will become an extremely useful platform for B2B marketing.

As a social site, Quora will work for some and not for others. It’s all about finding the right fit for you and maybe it is trying to fill a space that’s already filled? For now, I’m enjoying my new toy, but concerned whether I have enough time to upkeep another social media profile.

And finally… they say that imitation is the best form of flattery. Well, it’s already got its own parody site – what a week it’s been!

There was a time, circa 2006, when alongside New Rave, it was oh-so-very-cool to boast about how many friends you had on Facebook. Flash forward four years and many of us are now wondering if it’s appropriate to have ‘that person you once spoke to at school’ as an online friend – particularly if you’re hiding from them in the supermarket.

These days, it’s more fashionable to have a friend cull than to appear too keen and, where I once secretly tittered at those who had less than 100 friends (I’m not proud of it), I now admire their exclusivity. 

Step forward Path, a new social network launched today, which limits users to just 50 friends.

With backing from some serious digital heavyweights, including former Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin, Macster co-creator Dustin Mierau and Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning (aka Justin Timberlake in the Social Network), it’s clear that Path is not just a flight of fancy from some young bedroom coder.

The key for Path is the 50 friend limit; supposedly this is the maximum number of personal contacts our brain is programmed to deal with effectively.

Whether Path will ever compete with Facebook and Twitter remains to be seen, but it does strike me that this new approach meets a growing need. Having 50 friends ultimately means you can trust who you post information to. In light of recent reports into cyber bullying and the net’s ongoing threat to our personal privacy, trust is something that larger networks are starting to erode.

However, whether Path can meet our inherent need to show off and become a sustainable network, is up for debate. Watch this space.

As a self-confessed social media junkie, I was one of the first in the queue for the opening weekend of The Social Network.

The film’s had a lot of buzz surrounding it but I had no idea what to expect. If I was to play movie buff (which I’m not), then I’d give it 4 stars. The story is very entertaining and captures every emotion − I was genuinely captivated. We’re talking love, betrayal, greed, irony, ambition and humour to boot.  

The film took me back to a time before social media (in my life anyway). I’d never been a MySpace-er so Facebook was my first foray into the world of web 2.0. At its most basic, it’s such a simple idea but has changed the way that we communicate forever.

It was November 2006 when I logged-on for the first time. Little did I know but, it was the beginning of the end of life as I knew it.

Over the next few months, it seemed to explode and became apparent just how massive this was. You only had to walk around the university library to see every computer screen displaying a Facebook page. We spent hours on there because people are fascinated by one another.

If you’d have told me about the film then, I would have ruled it out as an unwelcome reflection of our times. After all, what’s sociable about the glare of a computer screen and evenings spent tapping away at a keyboard? It’s easy to see how you could live vicariously through our profile page but that’s not for me.

I’m more of a tweeter these days but the principle is the same – I have more conversations with more people. Now, what’s unsociable about that?!

Despite the Facebook brand being stronger than ever, and the company valued at over $33 billion dollars, could Facebook be in danger of outstaying its welcome?

A combination of several interface designs, high profile and embarrassing withdrawals and concerns over privacy settings has seen public perception of Facebook drop dramatically. With the imminent release of the film The Social Network, which paints Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a less than positive light, is Facebook already past its best?

Facebook rose to prominence following a MySpace backlash, as it offered the one thing that made MySpace so hated – a simple, uncluttered interface and an easy way to contact people you actually knew. However, with every new sign-up comes a new problem. More and more adverts are needed to sustain the current business model, and more applications ask to access your private information, purely so they can tell you which comic book character you most resemble.

Is the time right for a challenger to the social networking throne? Enter Diaspora.

Diaspora is a brand new, open source social network due to launch next year. Promising to be everything Facebook isn’t – namely open and transparent in its privacy settings and putting the user in control. Could this be the death knell for Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg has donated £100,000 to Diaspora in an attempt to win back some good PR, and to prove that competition is a good thing. Similarly, Microsoft invested heavily in Apple in the mid 90s to avoid it going bust…and we’ve all seen how that turned out!

Regardless of how it turns out, competition, whichever form it takes, can only be a good thing. Just make sure you sign up to Diaspora early before all the good names go!

In the last couple of days I’ve seen The Paddlesworth Press pop up on my Twitter newsfeed a few times. I thought it sounded like something from Postman Pat and I wasn’t far from the truth.

It’s a spoof newspaper that’s nearly real and wants everybody to join in. Confused? So was I.

The paper, its Armageddon-style headlines and the journalists are fictitious but a lot of what the paper reports is entwined with reality – well sort of. The editors are on Twitter, local bands have a MySpace profile and the restaurants have reviews on Qype. As readers, we can interact and influence the story as it develops over the next ten weeks.

The founders have hinted at the fact that this may be more than just good fun. They point out that the internet is perceived to be tied to reality and that we place a great deal of trust in the online space and what’s written on the web. This project is set to highlight how that trust may be misguided, or not. I’m already gripped…