A lot of companies refrain from using twitter and other social media because they feel their customers are not on there.  But what if someone were bashing your company on twitter?  Let’s face the facts — the twitter community has a large reach (and mighty influence), whether it is in social media or outside of it.

Check out this dialog below between @chrisbrogan and @technorati.  Chris had a bad user experience with the Technorati site, vented about it on twitter (without addressing them directly, mind you!) and they immediately responded to it.  How cool is that!

Are you missing opportunities to respond to some bashing or constructive criticism by not getting involved? Are you missing a chance to influence experts or analysts in your field even if your customer audience is not using social media? It’s easy to get involved, get started today and start influencing today!

A happy ending to an extreme case of misconduct by a NYPD police officer who shoved a harmless bicyclist off his moving bicycle during Critical Mass. Unluckily for the officer the entire incident was caught on camera and uploaded to YouTube which spread virally over the internet.

The YouTube footage below was used to indict the officer for falsifying records that the cyclist attacked him first.  It seems the cop may also be charged with misdemeanour assult.  You can view the entire 12 minute video on blip.tv.  Hooray for another victory for social media!

I love the viral nature of social media and here is another classic example.  The 6th photo meme, the new version of the age-old chain letter (remember those snail mail days?).  Choose the 6th photo of the 6th page of your flickr stream and post it along with links to six other people or bloggers you know.

By “tagging” your peeps with links to their sites ensures they find out automatically as most bloggers check their ping backs regularly.  The viral nature of this meme drives more inbound traffic to each person tagged which I think is very clever! Hooray for social networking!

My 6th photo meme is in response to being tagged by Mike Volpe and while I do not have a flickr photo stream, I picked the sixth photo from my sixth online photo album on SnapFish.

The photo below is of the legendary five-story step well, Adalaj near my home town Amdavad in western India.  The architecture is a marvelous blend of Hindu and Islamic styles that adds to the history and tragedy behind the legend.

Now for my tags to keep this meme in montion…

Around a month back BusinessWeek ran this article on how Google was jumping into the fray of grading how influential people are — very similar to their page rank system for grading web sites.  Seth Godin’s new book Triiibes has a very similar message. Tribes are powerful and you should strive to be the leader of a tribe to help the spread of ideas and build a community.

This is taking the “Karma” system used by crowdsourced news aggregators sites like Digg and Reddit to the next level.  Below is an interesting presentation by Digg founder Kevin Rose that I found on SlideShare that shows they are planning to put more emphasis on the “Followers” phenomenan.  The future of sharing and discovery is weighing heavily on how influential an individual is.

If you ask me I think Twitter has a leg up on all of them as the follower system is native to their system and a lot of the most influential people have already congregated around Twitter and started building their following. Plus Twitter is just too cool.  If you would like to discuss this further feel free to follow me on Twitter @prashantkaw.