If there are a lot of negative opinions about your brand, social media may become your worst enemy. We often hear that brands should engage in meaningful conversations with fans through social media. But when there is a lot of controversy or negative opinion around a brand, asking people on social networks to speak up might not turn out the way you expect. McDonald’s experienced this when they initiated the hashtag #McDStories, in an attempt to get people to share nice stories about the fast food giant. Instead, people who disliked the brand, hijacked the hashtag on Twitter and started tweeting complaints and snarky comments.

A similar thing is currently happening for the Liverpool FC striker Luis Suarez. He has been involved in a number of contorversial incidents during the football season in the UK, being suspended for racist comments against Manchester United defender Patrice Evra for example. And then later refusing to shake Evra’s hand before a game, later in the season (disclosure: I am a United fan).

Today, Suarez is taking questions from Twitter users under the hashtag #InterviewLuisSuarez. More than six hours ago, he tweeted that he would now be answering questions.

I’m going to answers your tweets right now at @MarcainEnglish#InterviewLuisSuarez

— Luis Suarez (@luis16suarez) maj 16, 2012

But no answers have yet been posted by the forward. That might be due to the fact that the hashtag is more or less filled with accusations about racism and nasty comments about Suarez’ looks.

Once again we see that brands (or celebrities) underestimate the power of social media and that they really have no control over it. If you invite people to participate, they won’t automatically show up and play nice. If your house is not in order, you will learn the hard way what people really think of you.

In social media, it is just as important to know what your fans think as it is to know what your enemies think.

Cinemagr.am is a fun app for creating animated images (GIFs) where only a portion of the frame is animated and the rest is in form of a still shot. The app still doesn’t have a very good web presence, so how do you find your images if you want to embedd them to your blog?

Of course you can search for them on Google, but there’s a better way. Go to the app on your smart phone and select the image you want to locate. Press on the share icon on one the image (the icon with three dots in a row). Choose “tweet” to share it on Twitter. You don’t actually have to tweet it, but now you can see the url of the image/video in this format:

http://cinemagr.am/show/3905295

When you click on this link, it redirects to a web address that has added the letters “OG” to the url you get a new version (don’t asky me why, it just works). If the link doesn’t redirect you to the longer address, you can add “OG” manually, but please note that the url is case sensitive: http://cinemagr.am/showOG/3905295

There you see your username, in my case “kullin”. Click on that link to find your profile page which includes your uploads and the images you have liked. http://cinemagr.am/web/user/827705

I blogged last week about how spammers on Pinterest used a URL on BBC’s site intended for external redirects. By adding the web address of the spam site to the BBC redirect link, it looked like an image on Pinterest had been pinned from BBC.co.uk, when in reality the link took you to the spammer’s site.

After I blogged about it, the BBC have now closed that opportunity for spammers. The link can no longer be misused.

The issue with spammers that use URL shorteners on Pinterest still remain though.

There is a growing amount of spam on Pinterest and I blogged today on my Swedish blog about how it is easy to replace a link on a pinned image to send unsuspecting users to a spam site. Just replace the image link with a link using a URL shortener and no-one can tell before they clicked the image that they aren’t going to end up on the site where the image was originally published. In my blog post you can see the screen shots from an image of Strandvägen in Stockholm, which if you click on it, sends you to a site selling weight loss pills.

Here’s how it works. Pin an image to Pinterest, then edit the link and add a link to the site you want users to visit. Use a URL shortener to hide the real address. Alternatively you use the BBC redirect scam which works like this. Instead of using a URL shortener, you type the address of the landing page after this BBC redirect URL, example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/redirect.shtml?http://auoff.info/pinterest

This way, Pinterest displays “bbc.co.uk” as the source of the image. Credible, right?

You can type any URL after that BBC link, for example http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/redirect.shtml?http://www.cnn.com This link will send you to a BBC page which automatically redirects you to the site at the end of the URL.

Here is a live (at least for now) example of the BBC scam, on an image I found by searching for Copenhagen on Pinterest:

http://pinterest.com/pin/237283474087224957/

The trial against the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik started today and the media coverage, especially in Norway, is massive. The online news sites are filled with interviews, articles, photos and video coverage. The events that took place on July 22 this year in Oslo and Utøya were nothing short of horrific. For many people in Norway, there may of course be a number of reasons why you would not want to read the detailed reports from the trial, including photos and videos of the murderer. Dagbladet.no solved that issue by offering a “trial free” button, i. e. a version of the site that is stripped from any articles of the murder trial. By clicking the button “front page without the July 22 event” you get a completely different front page.

Here are the screen shots of the regular site and the special version.

Popular photo app Instagram does many things really well, but one thing it does not handle is the ability to upload and share videos. Enter Cinemagram, a social networking app for sharing short videos that are actually made into animated GIFs. It includes Instagram-like features such as the ability to add filters to your videos, but the twist with Cinemagram is that each video can be edited so that only a portion of the frame is animated and the rest is in form of a still shot. The effects can be hilarious.

The app is fairly new and was initially $1.99 in Appstore, but it is currently free. It is too soon to tell if this app will become successful, but one thing I noticed immediately is that creative uploads have the possibility to get a lot of attention. I had only just downloaded the app and had almost no followers, still my third video has got almost 500 likes during the first 24 hours since upload. You can see it below. The quality is quite poor but it looks a lot better on the iPhone.

One of the reasons that content may “go viral” within the app is that each time you “like” a video, it is re-posted by you in the app, sort of like a retweet on Twitter, so the content gets a lot of exposure. On top of that the videos with the most likes are displayed in one of the tabs in the app.

Cinemagram doesn’t have a very good web presence, but if you manage to find your profile page and/or the page of one of your animated images, you can find the embed code so that you can paste it easily to your blog for example. The page for the image above is: http://cinemagr.am/showSingle/3502979 and my “profile page” is here: http://cinemagr.am/web/user/827705

Check out and download Cinemagram here.

The popular online pinboard Pinterest has been hit by a series of spam ads. Pinterest user Craig Fifield found that a strange image had been posted on of of his wife’s boards. It was something she would never pin on the site, an ad for Wal-Mart. The same thing was noticed by Om Malik on Gigaom:

“Earlier this evening, some kind of spam-exploit injected  javascript code that started replacing many Pinterest photos with ads for Best Buy. (see photo.) The actions resulted in disgruntled users blaming Pinterest.”

Fake gift cards for well known brands such as Wal-Mart, IKEA, iPad and others are suddenly all over Pinterest.

They all seem to be pointing to the site facebook-goodies.com and some spammer has probably posted several photos and then after they were repinned, the image changed to an ad through some kind of script. The original images seem to have been posted to boards themed “party ideas”, “beauty” and “quotes” to name a few.

Some of the spam ads have been repinned more than 6,000 times.

This is of course quite serious for Pinterest, since it is a blow to the very heart of the site. If we can no longer trust that images we repin aren’t going to turn into spam ads, dare we use the site at all?

Another form of spam that has been emerging is that the same image is posted multiple times on multiple accounts, but with the exact same text.

Update: one of the accounts that seemed to be the origin of some spam ads have now been deleted: http://pinterest.com/ElisabethCarla/

H&M is the Swedish brand with most followers on Twitter. But Spotify, which is the second largest brand, creates more engagement around each tweet.

Here is an infographic that illustrates the battle for the top spot among Swedish brands on Twitter. Created with visual.ly.

Pin It

In January I published a blog post about the growth of Instagram. I hade noticed that the unique ID numbers for photos on Instagram were handed out in a serial sequence. In other words, it wasn’t very hard to calculate the growth of the service since the data was publicly available. All you had to do was a bit of digging. For example, here is photo number 400 million: http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/400000000_3849764

A few weeks later, on Feb 7 to be precise, Instagram changed the ID numbers from serial sequence to what looks like a random set of numbers. As of this date, the ID numbers are determined with what I believe is called a hash function (please correct me if I got this wrong). It is no longer possible to determine the volume of uploads to Instagram by simply looking at the ID numbers.

So how do I know this changed on Feb 7? Take a look at the Instagram user “boobievsjagger“. On that day, he posted this photo:

http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/686008000_10844406

According to the first part of the unique ID, this is photo number 686,008,000. The second part of that string is the ID for that user.

Later that day he published another photo:

http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/120983929741434582_10844406

The first part of the ID is now replaced with 18 digits that gives us no clue to what number among the uploads this photo has. The same goes for all other images posted after Feb 7.

I predicted in my January post that Instagram would reach 1 billion uploaded photos by April this year. If you ask me, I think Instagram changed the way each photo is identified after my blog post, which was also picked up by The Next Web, among others. So now we can’t tell how fast Instagram is growing, until the company decides to tell us themselves. Let’s wait and see.

A related question is if the ID numbers for members on Instagram also will change. As it looks now, you can tell that Instagram has at least 27 million users. Here is a friend of mine that just joined: http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/user/27135093/

After a bit of confusion this week, I finally understood what had happened to Barack Obama’s profile page on Pinterest. It seemed as if the account had pinned several “non-presidential” images to a board, but in reality a user had taken advantage of a security flaw in Pinterest. When you invite another user to collaborate on a board, that board becomes visible on that user’s profile too. So an inactive account like Obama’s could be “hijacked” to include any board without the account owner even noticing it.

After that first incident, the person who managed the board that appeared on Obama’s page, removed it. But now it has happened again. Another board is visible on pinterest.com/barackobama and once again it does not belong to that account.

Having the President look like a fool on your site, can’t be good for business. Pinterest should change the procedure so that a user that has been invited to collaborate on a board actively has to agree that the board becomes visible on its profile.