Ethan Hunt, David Copperfield, Luke Skywalker and even Julius Malema have each had their fair share of boldly attempting the truly unfathomable. From near impossible missions and unbelievable feats, to head-to-head battles with Darth Vader and the courage to take on Twitter, these individuals have all succeeded in achieving the seemingly impossible.But even they would struggle when attempting to quantify the Return on Investment (ROI) of a social media campaign.Our interwebs are littered with blogs discussing the impact ...

An American woman with the Twitter name @theashes who was bombarded by messages about cricket was offered a free flight to Australia and started selling her own commemorative T-shirt Monday.The Massachusetts woman, who usually tweets about knitting and the "Glee" TV show, was the subject of a Twitter campaign, ">#gettheashestotheashes, after snapping at microblogs about the Ashes series between Australia and England.Imagine her exasperation when she received messages like this. "I've argued for years that this is when Cook is ...

According to Clay Shirky, renowned digital media commentator, “communication tools don’t become socially interesting until they become technologically boring.” Now while I’ll never consider SMS boring, I’d argue that SMS has become so entrenched in our day-to-day lives that it meets this criterion, and has not only become socially interesting, but is impacting our society in significant ways.“The moment we are living through is seeing the largest increase in expressive capability in human history” says Shirky. SMS is definitely a ...

The economic downturn has US cable television companies shedding subscribers in record numbers and Americans increasingly "cutting the cord" in favour of cheaper online options, new research shows.The findings point to a growing pool of potential customers for online services such as Hulu and Netflix and newcomers like Apple TV and Google TV, which offer lower prices and more flexibility, analysts say.According to research firm SNL Kagan, US cable operators lost 741,000 basic video customers in the third quarter of ...

Sometimes it just so happens that a new technology service really speaks to you. The first time I saw Groupon, I thought that it was one of the most compelling services seen in quite some time. Clearly I was not the only one. Google is rumoured to have made an offer to acquire Groupon for US$3-billion.My first look at Evly however did not elicit quite the same initial reaction.The crowdsourcing social network had a soft launch this month. Its founder, ...

While Google Instant Preview pretty much stole the show this month, it wasn't the only development in the wonderful world of search. Here’s a brief look at three subtle changes to text ads that occurred in November, which may affect user behaviour and ultimately click through rates from the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).Sponsored Links are now AdsSponsored Links have now been labelled as Ads. This change came into effect during November after testing was reported in October. It ...

It used to take teacher Mahabir Pun more than two days to check his email from his home in the remote Himalayan village of Nagi in western Nepal. The 55-year-old would walk for seven hours to the nearest road before taking a three-hour bus ride along precarious mountain tracks to the only town in the area with an internet connection.Today, all Pun has to do is log on to the wireless network he has set up over the past few ...

Salesforce.com has been on a tear this year with financial results exceeding Wall Street estimates; a massive expansion of its headquarters in San Francisco; a gift of $100 million to build a Children's hospital; and now: luring JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at UK Telecom giant BT to assume the same position at Salesforce. Larry Dignan, writing at ZDNet, reports: "...Rangaswami will contribute to the company's product strategy and be an evangelist for cloud computing around the globe. Rangaswami will ...

WikiLeaks has unleashed a fresh torrent of more than a quarter million confidential US cables detailing a wide array of potentially explosive and embarrassing diplomatic communiques.The episode is now being dubbed "#cablegate" after the Twitter hashtag, which started to trend on Sunday night after selected information from the cables was released to global media. Just hours before the revelations hit the press, WikiLeaks had suffered a DDoS (Denial of Service Attack), prompting the organisation to send out this desperate ...

Governments around the world braced for the release of millions of potentially embarrassing US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks as Washington raced to contain the fallout.The whistle-blower website is expected to put online three million leaked cables covering US dealings and confidential views of countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Russia and Turkey.US diplomats skipped their Thanksgiving holiday weekend and headed to foreign ministries hoping to stave off anger over the cables, which are internal messages that often lack the niceties ...