Tomorrow evening I will be speaking at a PR Newswire event about social media. Specifically, the meeting aims to look at a SWOT of this communications platform from a B2B and B2C perspective - looking in depth at:

what is social media?
where did it come from?
why should it be used and what the best tools [...]

Edit: 12 May: updated with 10 additional analysts
After I published the top analyst twitters last week, I am pleased to say there has been a surge of activity amongst the analyst community regarding who twitters and how they use it. I have now updated the table below to take the new players into consideration. Carter has [...]

 
I have noticed a trend over the past year in that there has been a steady rise in micro-blogging (using Twitter) from the analyst community. James Governor explained the difference between a blog and a twitter as:
twitter is better as a hearing aid than a megaphone. better for putting feelers out than shouting into the [...]

Mary Beth-Kemp from Forrester has recently completed a new report that Edelman contributed towards that has tried to look at the value of influencers in a connected world.
Mary has previously explained that marketers need to integrate an individuals social value (knowledge, involvement, participation, contacts) into their plans.  My take from this is that [...]

Earlier this year I was asked to give advice to one of our clients who wanted to make a ‘viral video’. At first I was a little bit overwhelmed by this request, as my initial view was that something only goes viral if the content is top notch. As Media Guerilla states, “If there’s any real [...]

Kudos to my colleague Mark Pinsent who pointed this great report from the EIU
Download the marketing paper Engaging Global Executives: 10 Megatrends in B2B Marketing 2008
The 10 megatrends it predicts include:
1. Thought leadership becomes a top priority
2. B2B marketers go higher, deeper and wider
3. Integrated marketing becomes the norm
4. Emerging markets move to centre [...]

The need for blogging transparency is something that many people (Edelman included) have learnt through mistakes. Which is why I am shocked to find that the Guardian of all places should make such a mess-up.
In what promised to be a ‘nice’ travel-blog by a 19 year old about his forthcoming travels in South East [...]

 
Forrester’s Peter Kim has produced a very thought provoking read on the future of the advertising agency. The report argues that consumers now rely less and less on marketing messages when in buying mode. Instead they seek guidance from family, friends and others in their respective communities to guide them toward purchase decisions.
Obviously working [...]

Sometimes I feel I live in a bubble where social media has a disproportionate impact on decision making. The part of me that has not immersed myself in the kool-aid understands that the technology industry in which I work is more likely to be receptive to this media but I should be careful about [...]

As requested, I have republished the white paper into separate blog posts so that each section can be commented on. This post focuses on the final section - the conclusion. You can still download the full paper by clicking the link: Distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media (PDF).
Links to all sections:

introduction
why is it [...]