Over the weekend, Microsoft used its @BuildWindows8 account to send a message to the account owner, saying "@StevenSinofsky please see guidelines on parody and impersonation. Your account is not following them them and has been reported."

Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows users to post under pseudonyms, which has led to high-profile spoof accounts for tech celebrities, including now fewer than half a dozen for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But rarely has a prankster gone as deep-down the corporate food chain to parody an executive that few outside of diehard Windows geeks would know by name.

And while many of the accounts are harmless, Microsoft had reason for concern: the person or persons behind the hoax were using the fake Sinofsky Twitter account to answer questions from customers and journalists. The bio on the account did have a clear-cut disclaimer (""I'm all about Windows 8 right now. And having a laugh. Oh, I'm not 'the' Steven Sinofsky by the way. He's got a little project to focus on for now") but that wasn;t enough to tip some people off to the satire.

Neither Twitter or Microsoft have responded to a request for comment, but we'll update the post if they do.

But first, brands need to learn how to use Twitter and avoid Sunday night's Toyota disaster, in which the car maker ended up spamming people who used game-related hash tags.

The $10 million figure is about 10% of the total spent on television advertising during this year's game, Kerpen said.

We reached out to Toyota and several people at Twitter on Monday asking what guidance, if any, the company gives to advertisers and brands using the service as part of a marketing campaign. So far, we haven't heard back but will update if we do.

Toyota is just the latest in a long-line of Twitter miscues by brands, many of which were covered by Robyn Tippins last week. Several verified Twitter accounts, including @CamryEffect, used LocalResponse to invite people discussing the game on Super Bowl-related hashtags like #SB46 to enter a contest to win a Camry.

LocalResponse is a program that lets users respond to tweets in real-time, but in this case, the response was overdone and many users who had expressed no interest in Toyota or the campaign. Because the Toyota accounts were verified by Twitter, the implication was that the aggressive marketing was condoned by the microblogging site.

"While such programs are certainly helpful, it's always better to respond to mentions personally," Kerpen said. "A personalized, spam free message makes a big difference in engaging with consumers."

A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.

The study was primarily focused on willpower as opposed to addiction, and the moments when people were forced to resist urges to partake in an activity or deal with conflicting urges, such as the urge to sleep and the urge to stay out socializing. Sleep and sex generally trumped other urges, but checking media and work were generally put ahead of socializing and shopping urges.

"Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success," Hofmann said.

The study found that resistance to all urges declined as the day wore on, and that people seem to do a better job of resisting the urge to smoke or drink than many may have thought, given the addictive nature of both.

"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs - long-term as well as monetary - and the opportunity may not always be the right one," Hofmann said. "So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time."

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

The site is unique in the news-curating space in that it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines: in effect, the news agency is automating editing and story selection and putting it in the hands of "everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne."

News organizations have increasingly warmed toward social media in the past several years. New York Times reporters like Brian Stelter and David Carr routinely tweet about stories they are covering and offer commentary to reactions about their reporting. Small and large outlets have used live-tweeted breaking news events and press conferences.

But the Reuters effort appears to be a major step forward in using social media to shape the news cycle. Presumably, story selection for the main news page will remain in the hands of Reuters editors.

The difference between that page and Social Pulse earlier this morning show that what Reuters editors think is important (Facebook IPO, Jobless Claims Fall and a story about the Federal Reserve, among others) is not necessarily in line with what's getting traffic on Social Pulse, which was topped by a story about a drop in Iranian currency, an increase in planned layoffs last month and a feature on Swiss watch sales.

Of the three articles at the top of Social Pulse, only one, the story about layoffs, was a Reuters story.

Sponsored hashtags can blow up in your face, they can be stolen by a competitor and they can be surrounded by risky UGC. But they can also very quickly achieve some great attention for your brand. Choosing to advertise on Twitter is a risky move, ripe with opportunity and danger. It shouldn't be undertaken lightly or without serious thought.

Walgreens recently purchased some love on Twitter, literally. In choosing the self-serving hashtag, #ILoveWalgreens, the company made a grievous error. They assumed love that wasn't there.

People enjoy going out to eat, so they might love a favorite restaurant. Many enjoy shopping for clothes, so they might admit to loving a favorite designer or even a boutique store. People might even love their doctor or hairdresser, but very few people love fast food restaurants, grocery stores, plumbers or pharmacies. In these cases, you can't buy love, but you can buy attention, and the two are different beasts.

The social media spend, designed to combat a very specific issue, was inappropriately broad and presumptive. A better case would have been to focus on the problem, that Walgreens could no longer accept Express Scripts, and choose a tag that supported their efforts there, like #freedominhealthcare or #yourscriptchoice and gave voice to a public who feels unheard and unloved when it comes to healthcare decisions.

Hulu's Arrested Hashtag

Hulu is sponsoring a hashtag to promote their Superbowl commercial with Will Arnett. The hashtag, #mushymush, is in reference to their ongoing theme of alien world domination through excessive media intake.

While their hashtag is on point, it's not a hashtag that is particularly interesting to their average fan. Hulu could have been more daring, and ended up with real traction had they chosen a hashtag that would really resonate with their viewers.

Because they chose an Arrested Development star, and dropped several references into the ad, they could have created buzz by pointing that out or even asking Arrested Development fans to count the number of references in the video. This, of course, would mean a heavy focus on the show and that may not be in the best interest of a big Superbowl spend. But there are many ways they could have jazzed this up, and stayed show-neutral. Hulu is staffed by a variety of cool and fun folks, as evidenced by the campaign itself. Creativity is important and #mushymush can't have been the most interesting thing that came out of their advertising department.

They also did a poor job of communicating what they wanted. While they did get some high profile retweets, from Roku and Yahoo_Screen, many of the other dozen tweets are either done by Hulu themselves or by Hulu employees. If they asked their employees to share the video, which isn't a bad thing at all, they should have also suggested sample copy. Their star even tweeted about it without using the hashtag, as did most of the folks who watched the video and shared it. There's no call to action on their viral mechanism, the video. Why not end the video with the hashtag? I'm laughing, give me some instructions as to what I should do to share the funny with my friends.

Subway Offers Up a Footlong Hashtag

Photo credit Luca Falda

Unlike Hulu, who couldn't get any attention on Twitter for their hashtag, Subway has gotten attention, but the wrong kind. Their main problem wasn't in their choice of hashtag, it was that they didn't gauge sentiment before they advertised on the social network.

From people angry that a $5 foot long really wasn't $5, to employees who resent having to work at Subway, the hashtag is a busy one, rife with anger. To be fair to Subway, however, there is a solid amount of positive sentiment in their resulting tweets too.

They could decrease some of the negativity if they let Subway employees know that they are about to release a trending hashtag and ask for their support. They should also react in some way to the negatives, using Twitter. I would suggest reaching out to all of the negatives and thanking them for their feedback. Who knows, there could be some positive engagement with the brand to come from it, rather than just pulling the hashtag when the going gets tough.

The Takeaway

What we can learn here is that there is no easy ad spend. Whether you're slapping a vinyl cling on your car to promote your housecleaning business or coordinating a multi-million dollar ad campaign for an international beverage maker, the details matter. Creativity grabs your attention, but it's the practical details that ensure the brand is remembered and the call to action is acted upon.

Advertising on a social network is not different in this regard, but there are parts of this ad spend that are unique to the medium. Prepare your employees with detailed instructions that recommend appropriate behavior. Choose to align with existing sentiment, and don't make it all about you. Do some preliminary insights gathering, and be prepared to shelve the entire thing if the risk outweighs the benefits.

So it was that the local newspaper "exposed" my mother as a fraud, a counterfeiter. It ran a story with the painting next to the Life magazine photograph itself. Thus began a lifelong dialog that became one of the threads of my life: a case study in fair use that fueled endless debates in the Socratic method between Mom and her art students for the next four decades. It began with the delicious irony of the newspaper having reprinted the Life photograph without Time-Life's permission, and embraced the lovely fact Mom eventually sold the painting for many times the original price.

Whose polar bear is this?

Döring is not one of these Luddites afraid of any typewriter that has a TV screen attached; he's relatively active with social media, including regular posts to Twitter (@senadoring). It's there where one of his readers, a lady named Ophelia Pastrana (@mpastrana), whose profile describes her as "anti-print," noticed something familiar about Döring's background wallpaper. It's a beautiful shot of a polar bear stretched out on a rocky, snowy terrain enjoying the sunset, with a face not unlike the Senator's own. It's something my mother would likely have considered painting sometime. But indeed, it would appear to be a screen grab directly from the Mangelsen stock photo agency, whose Web page clearly licenses the photo for royalties.

And so it was that Sen. Döring was called out as a fraud, a counterfeiter. Never mind for a moment the delicious irony that the act of demonstrating Döring's most grievous fault effectively copies the exact same photograph. Supposedly such demonstrations in the act of journalism constitute "fair use."

In other words, it's all right for a journalist to do it, but not for a senator. Evidently fairness may differ depending on whom you're being fair to.

Who needs one big brother when a billion little ones will do?

This is the very type of topic my mother relished. In her ingenious, professorial style, which often resembled Justice John Marshall as rendered by Buffy Sainte-Marie, she'd compel her students to adopt one position ("Every photograph qualifies as art, so copying it without permission is forgery") and then throw a live grenade at them that challenged their newfound position. At such a moment, like Perry Mason closing an argument, she'd extract from behind a cabinet some hidden photo of a painting by Andy Warhol (whom she loathed, by the way), one produced by way of the manipulation of copyrighted photos, and watch her students backtrack ("Oh, that's different, Andy Warhol's famous").

Sen. Döring has suggested that the act of policing each other, of ensuring that we don't step on each other's intellectual property rights, can be crowdsourced. Since the Internet is essentially a cooperative, a kind of digital society, then infringement is something we can all make efforts to help each other avoid. Never mind for a moment the eerie resemblance to Chinese families helping each other to refrain from bearing siblings. The suggestion Döring makes is that we all know infringement when we see it.

Do we? A Spain-based blog post (English-language Google translation here) called Döring out for being two-faced, for having the gall to promote a system of registering intellectual property violations, and for having spoken out against the SOPA bill in the U.S., while at the same time using a copyrighted polar bear as his wallpaper. Evidently the mark of a career politician.

In an adjacent paragraph, the blogger suggests that a polar bear belongs to everyone. Exactly what right did the photographer have to claim the bear's repose as his own? Shouldn't the bear have a say in this? And elsewhere, the same post states (translating from Spanish), "copying is the most common process in the digital environment," something which folks do every day, perhaps inadvertently. Or put another way, it's fair for a blogger to do it, and maybe for a bear, but not a senator.

Theft Is Theft (void where prohibited)

At one level, the SOPA debate brought thousands, and perhaps millions, of people together to collectively agree on something, perhaps "Censorship Bad," perhaps something greater. But the true problem we face as a people and as a society, as we continue to take what truly are the first steps in the age of digital communication, is that we don't know what we're talking about. It's impossible to legislate a principle that we have not yet defined in the public mind. To a member of the MPAA, it may seem clear-cut enough: You steal a movie, that's piracy. But a principle is deeper than a campaign slogan; it's something definitive that applies to the future as much as to the present.

"Fair use" is a concept we believe to be well-defined in U.S. law. There are reasons we need to copy things, for example, in research, in journalism, in exercising our own freedom of expression by borrowing an idea, in art. Fair use would say it's okay to slap a picture of a polar bear on your notebook. It would be wrong to broadcast that picture without proper attribution to the photographer.

But Twitter turns that distinction entirely upside down. Every little thing you do is a broadcast; every polar bear you slap on your cover is a little act of infringement. While it seems altruistic enough that we should help each other to not step on one another's toes, where do we stop? Most of the tweets that will be generated as a result of this article are copies of each other. The Internet is, by its very nature, a giant replication factory. While it may have been easy for each of us to take a side for or against SOPA, Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman was right in telling AllThingsD's Peter Kafka yesterday that the polarization created through the debate may be blinding us to the underlying issue of what kind of copying is fair and what kind wrong.

Here, you can read about what Dauman told Kafka on stage in this blog post. It's been conveniently copied, in its entirety, without permission, from something first published by Mashable.

The BossTracker5000 from Michael Shirley on Vimeo.

But don't start your knee-jerking just yet (as so many did with Twitter's local compliance policy). This is a way around censorship. Would you rather Blogger and Twitter be blocked in some countries outright? As Google Operating System (the original purveyor of this fine story) points out, the content at the "blogspot.com" domain will continue to exist. "Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD," Google explains in its support document.

There are still some questions here, as there were in Twitter's case. As Google says, a takedown request will only affect the content at the TLD of the country whose government requests the takedown. Does that mean users in that country will still be able to access content at other domains? Obviously, Google can't be straightforward about that if the answer is "yes," so the fact that it doesn't explicitly say "no" sounds good.

In fact, it makes clear that users can specifically request a particular country's version of a Blogger site by using a "No Country Redirect" URL. If you request http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr," it will go to the .com (U.S.) version of the site no matter what. It sets a short-term cookie to prevent the browser from redirecting that blog to a local domain. Whether that version will be accessible within a blacked-out country is unclear, so let's test it!

Better Than Nothing (And Then Some)

The idea of Web companies complying with censorship requests sounds icky. But too many people gave knee-jerk objections to Twitter's policy last week without considering what it actually does. Both Twitter and Google (at least with Blogger) have found ways around censoring this content altogether while still complying with local laws. The content isn't lost. It's still accessible outside of that area. Blogger sites may still be accessible within some blackout areas if users request a different domain.

The alternative, in some countries, would be to block the entire service. There's no way that's good for free speech. One could argue that doing business at all in a country that supports censorship is wrong for a communication company. But then put yourself in the local users' shoes and consider which alternative is preferable. The shame here is on the governments who censor their people, not on the companies sneaking free speech past them however they can.

What do you think of Blogger and Twitter's new censorship policies? Sound off in the comments.

Emil Protalinski has a much more thorough analysis of what is happening, which includes the Pew Research report AP used, as well as a July 2011 Pew report that focused solely on teens and social media use. His conclusion? Teens are definitely using Twitter more, but they are not giving up their Facebook accounts to do so.

The AP report seemed aimed at the myth that younger users found Twitter "uncool" and less protective of their privacy. AP draws some solid conclusions on why teens may be using Twitter more than they once did: unlike Facebook, Twitter allows them to set up multiple accounts and they can do so anonymously. There's also rising evidence that teens like to use Twitter with a smaller, select group of friends while keeping Facebook as a more public profile for a wider group of friends and family members.

But score a big swing-and-a-miss for the assertion that teens are "shifting to Twitter" included in the AP report. Like a lot of us, teens, including at least one of the two teens AP quoted in its story, maintain multiple social media accounts on multiple social media platforms.

Anecdotally, I can't speak for teens, but as a part-time college writing and journalism instructor, I can say Twitter has been the best crossover platform for me when it comes to connecting with students in their late teens and early twenties. There's a growing body of evidence suggesting that social media in the classroom can increase student engagement, so I've been experimenting with different ways to do just that over the course of the past year.

For many students and faculty, there remains a creep factor for friending on Facebook. I also know of a handful of students who have been in abusive relationships and have either been advised to shut down their Facebook accounts or limit the number of friends they have while amping up their privacy settings.

I tried using Google+ in one of my classes last fall but ran into problems when a couple of 17-year-old freshmen couldn't register for the site (Google has since changed the policy and opened Google+ up to teens). Google+ was still relatively new at the time, so there was a lot of class time wasted in getting students up to speed with its many features.

While not all students love using Twitter, it is workable in most situations. Roughly half of my students have Twitter accounts before they enroll in my class, and for those that don't, its a simple enough platform that I don't have to spend loads of time demonstrating the basics in class. Students who are truly worried about their professor creeping on their Twitter feed can easily and quickly set up a new one (which is something I recommend they do).

Prior to O'Neal's unsolicited endorsement, Tout, which just launched in April, was largely unknown. After Shaq's quick message thanking fans, however, interest in the service exploded. "We got lucky with him being so involved with it," said Melissa Breen of Tout.

But since then, interest in Shaq may have risen thanks for Tout.

Breen claims other Tout users are seeing a boost in followers as a result of the service. A sizzle reel she played on Saturday at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York big increases from average users to Ryan Seacrest. Traffic on the site is growing at about 25% per month.

It's hard to attribute how much of the growth is organic and how much can be attributed to Tout. But the company likes to point to CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who gained 10,000 new Twitter followers within 10 days after she started using the service.

"We don't want to take credit...[but] the only answer is that it's more immersive. People want to connect," Tout's Gardner Loulan told CNET.

Two and a half years later, Twitter remains blocked in China, though many people find ways to make use of it none the less. China isn't the only country that's related to Twitter's announcement last week that the social network will now selectively censor messages country-by-country when it receives "a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity." Debate went on throughout the last week about the policy, but I think there are at least three big questions that remain unanswered.

"I understand why people are angry, but this does not, in my view, represent a sea change in Twitter's policies," blogs Jillian C. York, Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Twitter has previously taken down content-for DMCA requests, at least-and will no doubt continue to face requests in the future. I believe that the company is doing its best in a tough situation...and I'll be the first to raise hell if they screw up."

It's interesting to see York say she'll raise hell if the policy is misapplied and Ai Weiwei to say he'll go silent on the network if the policy is applied at all.

Three questions in particular remain in my mind.

How Will This Censorship Be Used?

What kinds of content will be censored with this new capability? What will governments around the world demand be removed from the site? Will it be things like the identities of people involved in court cases, as the UK's controversial Super Injunctions looked to ban on Twitter this Spring? That's information that has long been banned from newspapers. Would Twitter have co-operated with that kind of legal move if it was instructed to today?

Or will Tweet-zapping be called for in places like Syria, where users rallied under the hashtag #RamadanMassacre in August, to bring global awareness to the brutality of the Syrian government they protested? If told to do so by a government massacring its citizens in the streets, will Twitter render all people in that country unable to see messages of protest on its network? Will shouting into such an eerie silence change the way such Tweeting campaigns also engage with the outside world? I would think so.

At what point would such demands no longer be interpreted by Twitter as being "a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity?" When the US State Department ruled a foreign government invalid, perhaps?

How Will Twitter Censorship Impact People Arrested for Their Tweets?

It is not unheard of for people around the world to be arrested for their Tweets. As Curt Hopkins reported on ReadWriteWeb in November, 2010:

Cheng Jianping has wound up in a Chinese 're-education camp' with a record-breaking five words on Twitter. Mocking nationalistic vandalism that flared up around a Chinese-Japanese dispute over the ownership of uninhabited islands, she retweeted another's message and added the ironic admonition, 'Charge, angry youth!'

Middle Eastern Tweeters have been arrested for quips mocking their ruling royal families.

Will the governments in question issue a take-down order to Twitter on their way to knock down the doors of the Tweeters in question? Or will they not bother?

Will people be arrested for messages that no one else in their country can even see anymore? How Orwellian.

Will This Reduce Conspiracy Theories About Twitter Censorship? Should It?

What's unique about Twitter's position, some people say, is not the censorship but the transparency about it. One might hope that if every instance of censorship is openly and loudly announced by Twitter, that critics who have long suspected Twitter was censoring conversation about topics of great importance to them might be less inclined to be suspicious.

In recent months some have worried that Twitter was systematically de-emphasizing discussion about the Occupy protests. In 2010, some of the first wide-spread concerns about Twitter censorship arose when the Israeli army clashed with a flotilla seeking to deliver aid to Palestinians despite an embargo.

Charles Arthur of the Guardian told the story as follows:

The attack by Israel on a flotilla of ships approaching Gaza has, as you'd expect, generated a huge response on social media - and of course Twitter, with its real-time content, was quick to react.

Many users began the morning by tagging their comments about it with "#flotilla" - a "hashtag" which gives a structure to a discussion or emerging event, as you can filter searches in applications such as Tweetdeck so that you only see those with that tag.

But at around 11am, as #flotilla began "trending" - rising to the topmost-used hashtags on the service - it seemed to vanish.

Was this censorship by Twitter?

Twitter Headquarters investigated why that happened and found that there was another event, elsewhere in the world, that was using the hashtag #flotilla as well, at the same time. Twitter's automated spam fighting software saw unrelated uses of the hashtag and zapped it from the Trending Topics list. Conspiracy resolved.

In all likelihood, critics will still suspect in many cases that Twitter is engaged in censorship even if the company doesn't take the steps for transparency that they have pledged to take. No one but perhaps some of the very deep pockets who have invested in Twitter is really evil, though, (not the employees) and so now under the new policy, the simplest explanation of why some communication is less visible on the network than expected will likely never be covert censorship.

It's a complicated situation, though. Much remains to be seen with regard to how the new "feature" will be used and what it will mean for people facing repression around the world. Twitter will no doubt face ongoing scrutiny for its practices, as all communication network infrastructure companies deserve.

The move was so popular, Republicans are trying it for their election-year digital strategy. Ahead of last night's State of the Union address, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and other Republicans started tweeting using the hashtag #1000days to accent the amount of time since Senate Democrats passed a federal budget.

"#40dollars means my grocery budget for the week" just does a much better job of tugging at the heart strings than "Lewis and Clark traveled to the West Coast in 862 days. The U.S. Senate hasn't passed a budget in #1000Days."

"We kind of proved it in a very clear and public way that this money was significant to a lot of people," Kori Schulman, White House deputy director for digital strategy,said at the What's Next? D.C. conference on Monday. "This was sort of a make or break moment for us, and we kept reinforcing that this was important and kept at it."

At this writing, Topsy is saying #1000days has generated close to 2,500 tweets in the past day. By comparison, when @WhiteHouse first used the #40dollars hash tag at 4:15 pm on Dec. 19, it was trending worldwide by 5 p.m. and generating about 6,000 tweets per hour.

It's clear that the digitial media campaigns had different goals, and #1000days was primarily aimed at emphasizing a point that was notably absent in President Obama's State of the Union address last night. But if social media as it pertains to politics is truly about connecting with voters and constituents, score one for the Democrats.

It's arguable whether investors really needed a sophisticated sentiment measuring analyses to predict Netflix's shares would drop after what has been called the worst business decision since the introduction of "new" Coke in 1985. But social media sentiment analysis is growing more sophisticated and may soon become a key component investors look at before making a decision to buy or sell stock.

How Twitter Beat The Mainstream Business Media On iPhone 4S

"People don't really tweet about stock ticker symbols, at least not in any predictable or useful way," said Rishab Aiyer Ghosh of Topsy. "But they do talk about companies and products."

Ghosh pointed to the launch of iPhone 4S, which was initially greeted with lots of negative reviews from the mainstream media. Those negative articles fueled a steep decline in Apple's share price on the first day iPhone 4S was available. But on social media, early reviews were mostly positive with normal people tweeting about how they liked and wanted the latest version of the iPhone.

"Ten days after the launch Apple announced they had the biggest backlog for a product in its history," Ghosh said. "The day of the release the Twitter chatter was more positive than negative: as an analyst, if you had known that, you would not have sold your Apple shares and you would have made a lot of money."

Later this year, Topsy will begin marketing its historical and real-time data to trading firms and equities analysts. Ghosh, like everyone else interviewed for this article, stressed that the social media sentiment data was just one component used by Wall Street to build trading models.

"The big-picture social media content data we provide can augment, if not totally replace, the news media content," he said. "One of the advantages of the news media is its curated and it doesn't have a lot of noise; what we do is take the noise out of the social media sentiment data."

Do's And Don'ts Of Trading On Social Media Sentiment

How much of an advantage does social media sentiment give a trader? Last year WiseWindow commissioned an independent researcher to track its stock-picking model as it followed four stocks - Ford, General Motors, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines - for the first six months of 2011. The model imporved performance between 30% and 48% on an annualized basis.

"One area we haven't really been able to get into these models is consumer sentiment: survey data," said Marshall Toplansky of WiseWindow. "If you do a traditional survey, you may be able to get 1,200 or 1,500 comments. With social media we can get tens of millions of comments per month."

For Toplansky, there are several keys to using social media sentiment to predict movement in an individual stock, including:

• Using data from several different platforms, including Facebook, blogs and even comments left on YouTube videos. "Twitter on its own is not a leading indicator," he said. "You have to take into account all of the different forms of social media."
• Tracking conversations on a stock or a $ thread on Twitter won't cut it either. Toplansky found that the biggest predictor of a stock's price are comments about product quality, which often don't mention a ticker symbol or even the company by name.
• That can mean tracking up to 2 million social media messages in a month, as opposed to the few thousand WiseWindow would uncover if it only focused on discussions about a company's share price. "You continually have to go out and look for patterns -- it's almost a 24-7 kind of thing," Toplansky said. "You have to do the math over time and see what trends evolve and emerge."

Strategy Doesn't Work For Individual Investors - Yet

And therein lies the problem for individual investors, as well as many investing firms: Sybase's McGovern said the upfront costs and the lack of a proven track record make it difficult for most investors to justify adding a sophisticated sentiment analysis component to their trading models.

"The reason all of this is appealing to people is there's a general understanding that shares obviously don't just move on the underlying aspects of the company," McGovern said. "The fact that stocks can go up 5% or10% day, which is unusual but not unheard of, can often be because of rumors in the market. This all seems to make sense to people in the markets as a way to be able to tap into those rumors and help their short-term trading strategies."

Traditional polls still did a better job of predicting the outcome of Saturday's South Carolina primary, but a backwards look at Twitter may show why and how Newt Gingrich scored such a decisive, 12-point victory over national front runner Mitt Romney. And in some regards, social media was able to tell a story in South Carolina that polls could not.

Public Policy Polling did a much better job than social media analytics by GlobalPoint in predicting the actual results of Saturday's results, in large part because Ron Paul's votes have yet to catch up with his social media mentions. To its credit, though, Global point saw Gingrich with 31 percent of the vote to Romney's 19 percent, while the traditional poll was prediciting a much tighter, six-point race.

What social media did do better than traditional polls, however, is show how Gingrich's support surged followed Thursday night's debate. That night could have been a toss-up for Gingrich: while pundits said Gingrich held his own and Romney may have lost ground, Gingrich had the added potential pitfall of an ABC News interview with his ex-wife that night.

Twitter almost instantly showed that the ABC interview was not going to be a factor, and any mentions of the interview - positive or negative - may have actually helped Gingrich by pushing negative, social media comments about his debate performance to the background.

Meanwhile, OhMyGov is reporting that Gingrich saw a surge in Facebook fans and Twitter followers in the hours that followed the debate. That followed a surge of social media activity (and a corresponding bump in the polls) for Gingrich following the first of two debates in South Carolina on Jan. 16.

The lesson thus far in the 2012 election that social media, like traditional polling, can't accurately predict races (particularly races involving Ron Paul, it would seem). But as researchers spend more time analyzing the data, social media is showing itself as an effective tool in better understanding a presidential campaign, which amounts to a daily war of attrition for public sentiment.

News.me got popular with its iPad app, but it also offers an email digest with Summify-like functionality. Today it's announcing a slew of new features: Facebook support, time zone support, and control over the number of articles and sending time for the email digest. News.me also wants to know what features Summify users want.

But the News.me team says in its blog post that solving the problem is "not that hard to do (shhh...)." Summify's users need a place to go now. Fortunately for them, News.me's business is more well-rounded with the iOS app and subscription plans. Support for links from Facebook expands News.me's usefulness, and the new email features offer more control over the digests than Summify users had.

But the best part is asking for suggestions. News.me asks Summify users:

• What did you like best about the service that you'd love to see us implement?
• What did you wish you could have but that Summify never built?

If you'd like to chime in, comment on the News.me blog post.

Do you use a service like this to generate automated digests of your social networks?