Leave it to the military to come up with a clear, tactical approach to how and when to respond to a blogger across a wide range of posting types. Anyone in social media should read this, and hopefully add to it. This is pretty tightly focused on bloggers, and with social networks, the range of situations would be far broader. However, this is foundational to all social situations.

John Battelle replies to the AdAge article about major brands not buying into social media. He brings up three great points about how to approach social media: "So what do I mean when I say a conversational approach?

This really drills to the core of the social media industry. What's the agency's role?

A worthwhile read, although the overall complaint is weak. They're saying Facebook fan pages don't work unless the brands put some effort behind them. Duh. But here they are, trying to compare a social media campaign to a multi-million dollar TV campaign, and they're saying for the social media campaign to work, you have to put something more into it than no time and no money. Really??

This was bound to happen. Throw in mobile tech for flash mobs, and a highly identifiable camera truck, and you have Google StreetView stunts. I could see this being used for marketing purposes in a rather humorous way, although the big question is how many people would ever see it. I'm guessing there isn't a lot of StreetView traffic. However, could be good for PR stunts.