Due to my internet saga with o2 I haven’t been able to write and publish much content lately. (By the way I am supposed to get everything installed on 23 September, so fingers crossed!)

There have been a few new things in the social media area that I’ve wanted to talk about, so today I am going to focus on the ‘biggest’ news of all - the new Facebook guidelines and rules for running promotions and contests. You could say that it’s not really news anymore, as it happened a few weeks ago, but it’s still worth discussing and providing some useful information to those of you who haven’t yet had the chance to familiarise themselves with the subject.

From now on Facebook pages are not required to use third-party applications to run competitions, promotions, draws or giveaways, but can simply do so on their Timeline, i.e. Wall.

Basically fans can now enter a contest or promotion by:

Because I work in social media and communications I know how difficult it is to deal with negative reviews of products or clients, which is why I purposefully try not to express my anger or dissatisfaction with such on the Social Web. However, I recently had a terrible experience (well, I am still having it, as it has not yet been resolved) and it is such a good example of how NOT to do customer service via social media that I couldn’t resist telling you about it.

First, I’d like to ask you a question: Was there a time when you didn’t have internet at home for a while? How long was that and how did you feel?

I just set a record – over two weeks without internet connection! I’ve never been without internet at home for so long… Well, yes, I do have internet on my smartphone, but that’s not enough – you just can’t do everything on it, in many cases a laptop is naturally the preferable device, like for example when writing and publishing a blog post. (If you wonder how I am posting this story, I bought one of those internet USB sticks from Tchibo for this month, although the limit is almost gone and it’s unbelievably slow…)

So, what happened?

If you’ve been following my blog, I’m sure you already know about my love for research. I’ve shared multiple research findings in the fields of social media and PR and I’ve also conducted some serious examinations in the areas myself, including my two BA dissertations, the first one about social media’s impact on PR and the second one about social media communications for sustainability.

So, staying true to my passion for data and research, today I want to show you some interesting findings about the current state of the social networks landscape and specifically about Instagram – a platform I’ve been using just for a while, but I already love.

In case you are not that familiar with Instagram, it’s a mobile social media network based entirely on visuals. So, basically you take a shot on your smartphone and you can publish it on Instagram in a square format, adding some cool image editing effects, if you want to. At the beginning, Instagram was only available on mobiles, but there’s now a website version too. You can check out my profile here to get an overview.

Instagram’s popularity has grown extremely quickly. The platform currently has over

This is not a regular blog post that you are about to read. With the following I want to share with you one of the proudest moments and biggest achievements of my life that just confirms my passion for social media and PR and my drive and motivation to have a stellar career in the industry.

What am I talking about? Well, I am mentioned as a student pioneer in building a personal brand online in one of the most awaited books of the year on social media and PR.

The book in question is the follow-up of the best-selling Share This, published by The Chartered Institute for Public Relations – the UK’s professional body for PR practitioners. The sequel, Share This Too, is a practical book, written by 24 public relations professionals to address the use of social media for PR and offer guidelines for various areas such as online media relations, measuring and monitoring etc., which practitioners can apply in their work. The foreword of the book was written by Brian Solis – a pioneer in the field (whom I am a big fan of), which only shows how important this book for the industry is. Furthermore, the book is already a best seller being the number 1 in Amazon Hot New Releases as well as among the top 20 PR books. It is also attracting a lot of online buzz.

I am proud to be part of one of the book chapters,

Over the last few years two relatively new business philosophies have become the trendy buzzwords in the corporate space – social media and sustainability. The rise of social media has provoked a complex cultural and communications shift in the way people share information and participate in conversations, resulting in the empowerment of the individual to demand change as well as to expect responsibility and social consciousness from brands to strike the triple bottom line balance.

This new social economy is based on engagement, relationships and mutual trust where relevance to the individual is a main currency for meaningful communications. Thus, innovation has become crucial for companies to reach, educate and inspire this new consumer about sustainability, but there is still both a need and a demand to raise sustainability awareness, break down silos and improve communications practices and knowledge management.

To analyse and explain social media’s impact on sustainability communications and offer practical guidance for companies interested in exploring these new opportunities I chose to examine the power of social media as a communications channel for creating business sustainability value for my second BA dissertation.

The main research objective was to discover whether social media can be a support tool or a menace for corporate sustainability.

I examined the importance and the current state of social media for sustainability communications and the opportunities and the risks of social media comms for creating business sustainability value.

As a result, I developed a best practice guide for utilising the power of social media and avoiding potential pitfalls, which you can see in the infographic at the end of this post.