A visual look at global brands and celebrities with the most social media presence and followers. Which companies have utilised social media with success and who has the biggest Twitter following, Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber?

Enjoy this great Infographic from our friends at Infographiclabs

I’ve been immersed in some form of Social Media for the past 5 years. My latest experience; working with Social Media Marketing both interested and disappointed me. The potential of networking is amazing but it’s all moot if you have nothing worth sharing and you come off as a pitch man.

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Social Media is such a fickle beast. One day people are Tweeting a revolution and the next a stalker takes a liking to Facebook’s CEO. However, Social Media, or at least Sony’s use of it, hasn’t been consistent leading to a massive blunder on the company’s part.

If you’ve been following any technology or gaming blog, you may know about Sony’s borderline lawsuit against George Hotz (Geohot). Sony is relentless pursuing every legal avenue available to fight Geohot’s publicly released PS3 Jailbreak. While the suit let alone the thought of suing Geohot for developing and releasing a Jailbreak of the PS3 seems ridiculous, Sony’s Social Media presence has ironically reflected the company’s publicly perceived image of insanity.

One of the biggest blunders is Sony’s marketing character Kevin Butler (Jerry Lambert) retweeting the code needed to Jailbreak a PS3. The response posted by Kevin is posed as a Battleship joke and contains the original reply, Jailbreak code and all. While Kevin/Jerry or whoever is managing the account went for a quick laugh, it only highlights how disorganized Sony’s Social Media presence is.

To make matters worse and further insinuate a PR blunder, Sony asked YouTube to not only hand over Geohot’s personal information but to disclose the personal information of anyone who has commented or viewed his video on Jailbreaking the PS3.

Casting its evidence-gathering net far and wide, SCEA has demanded that YouTube surrender not only information for Hotz’s account where his jailbreak video was posted, but also how many users accessed the video, the usernames of those with access to the video, and all usernames and IP addresses of everyone who posted or published comments to the vid.

Consistency is one of the most crucial aspects of a good Social Media strategy. Sony’s inconsistency coupled with its attempt to sue for something Apple hasn’t even considering bringing legal action against has only been amplified through Social Media.

It was the best opportunity to capture the attention of millions of viewers. In fact, all eyes were glued as people settled down on the Cowboys Stadium and on their couches to watch Super Bowl XLV. Everything was about Greenbay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers but the National Anthem belonged to Christina Aguillera.

Unfortunately, she delivered the Superbowl’s first fumble by messing up the lyrics of the “Star -Spangled Banner.”

Instead of “O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?,” she said, “What so proudly we watched at the twilight’s last gleaming?” a line that she already delivered earlier.

Just like any fumble in this day and age, it gets captured in video via YouTube and people show their annoyance through Twitter. The video is here while here’s a sample of some Twitter posts:

“Sad Really: Shoutout to Cristina Aguillera for the first fumble of the Super Bowl,” @MickeyFactz said.

“Christina Aguillera butchered the melody and messed up the lyrics,” says @judy4arizona.

“I think Christina Aguillera spent too much time Just showing off her vocal range and lost the plot a bit!” according to @piersmorgan. read more

Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, you’re already well aware of the growing civil unrest in Egypt. You most likely know about it thanks to Social Media, particularly Facebook and Twitter. However, many people are claiming Social Media is what sparked the revolution in Tunisia, Egypt and will do so again in any other country ready for revolution in the Middle East. If anything Social Media has only helped revolutions, not started them.

I’m not downplaying the effects of Social Media but I’m not exactly attributing the next overthrow of any Orwellian government to Twitter. Instead, it’s what the people are saying – that’s what responsible for revolutions. Twitter, Facebook nor any Social Media channel is not directly responsible for organizing millions of people in to overthrowing a government or staging protests – these are all thoughts that have been years in the making, – it has only been recently that acting on these thoughts en masse was viable. read more

Wow, what a couple of weeks it has been for Social Media. Heralded as helping spark the revolution in Tunisia by giving people the voice to call the populace together against corruption, Social Media is now being fought by the Egyptian government.

Yesterday the Internet was effectively turned off in Egypt but little could be done to contain the fallout.

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Fox 4 DFW decided to roast Social Media and what we have are some pretty funny results.

Among the social media company’s roasted are Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and even popular message and phone service Skype.

The scene opens up like a skit from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. The stations anchor opens with a breaking story about a shooting, but when they cut to their on the scene correspondents they are so busy using social media that they have no idea what’s happening on the scene. read more

Transparency in reporting of major social network performance recently received a shot in the arm courtesy of WatchMouse. Using their Public Status Pages, WatchMouse now tracks 20 giant social networks’ uptime and other performance metrics at Social.DownorNot.com.

Specifically, users can view the performance speed and uptime of home pages, login pages, and APIs from Classmates, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Friendster, Gowalla, Hi5, Hyves, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Orkut, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Xanga, Xing, Yelp, and YouTube. If upon automatic checking any site returns errors or takes longer than 8 seconds to respond, it’s marked as error and unavailable. The uptime percentage has its basis in the number of errors reported by such checks. read more

Ahead of the upcoming anniversary of the September 11th attacks, McCann Worldgroup has partnered with a motorcycle club called “Ride with the 40″ to raise money for a national memorial at the Flight 93 crash site. According to AgencySpy, 3 producers from McCann have joined Ride with the 40 on a cross-country road trip to generate funds by utilizing social media throughout the journey.

The concept is to encourage people to donate to the cause via their web site and via text message, but also to create a community effort by inviting people to participate in social networking with Ride with the 40 and fellow followers. Ride with the 40 are utilizing Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare to document their journey, which began in Newark, NJ last week and will end in San Francisco. read more

The much-discussed new version of the BBC’s iPlayer, which allows users to watch television shows and listen to radio programs up to a week after they’ve been broadcast, has finally been released. It’s been expected after a number of development blogs that this new version, iPlayer 3, would place greater emphasis on social interaction, and expectations have been met.

Primarily, the new iPlayer offers fairly seamless integration of Facebook and Twitter to allow users to share what they’re enjoying. This follows a growing trend towards user recommendations as tastemakers. (Apple’s Ping recently joined this fray, but Netflix dropped out of the competition.) read more