Few statements about the power of social media could have been more impactful than the one made by the State Dept. to Twitter. The microblogging service was asked by U.S. government officials not to go down for maintenance as it had planned, because people protesting in Iran were relying on tweets to inform the outside world. Overnight, all of the arguments and silly rants about how Twitter was a vehicle for navel gazing and mundane reports, a cocktail party where everyone was shouting and nobody was listening, seemed to fall away. Evan Williams and Biz Stone could harldy have asked …

Social Media is like the gateway drug for networkers (or maybe it is the crack). When Tech Crunch editor Eric Schonfeld tried posting his apartment listing in Cobble Hill on Twitter, Gawker posted his tweet. So, if you try to sell something through Twitter apparently you are really selling via Gawker.

Twilight and The Unborn depended on online buzz to fill seats. Welcome to the tale of two films -- one a pop culture phenomenon that turned its actors into full-blown celebrities and the other a scary movie that brought in double its small budget.

If the click-through in display advertising were human, it would be someone to pity -- so few people have anything nice to say about it. In fact, the status of the display ad click is so low that some smarter advertisers are using it to get themselves better deals.

Despite the usual hype this year around Super Bowl ads, one of the most talked about campaigns so far in 2009 couldn’t have been more different than one of those big-budget extravaganzas: Skittles-maker Mars and Agency.com, came up with the new site after asking themselves, “How can we sort of play up the unexpectedness of what Skittles is about?” according to Mars spokesperson Ryan Bowling.People who visited the new skittles.com, which launched on Feb. 27, were redirected to one of five rotating social media sites — Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia — and the chatter each contained concerning the …

Chili's "better than bland" ad campaign hinges on poking fun at a fake competitor -- P.J. Bland's, a restaurant chain that serves food literally made of cardboard. But while P.J. Bland's lacks an edible menu, most real restaurants would envy its Web presence.

Communities can be so … messy, so uncontrolled. And often, the bigger the brand, the tighter the lock it likes to keep on its brand messaging. Companies too skittish to let consumers air their laundry in public can test the waters with gated online communities. Just like their real-life counterparts, private online communities keep out undesirables, while screening activity from the hoi polloi.Brands including JCPenney, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz USA have launched private communities using Passenger’s platform and tools. These private groups let marketers and product folk float ideas and get feedback without all the snark; Passenger advises a minimum of …

The biggest knock of television ratings has been that they are antiquated. So why then are the new media digerati trying to imitate that which they have scorned by creating a new online metric that imitates the standard TV one? Media agency Mindshare recently partnered with online video advertising network YuMe to create the "Internet Gross Rating Point," or iGRP, specifically so marketers can compare their online videos buys to their television buys. But isn't online video supposed to be the renegade child forging new and innovative ground in measurement?

Given the disparate nature of online publishing, there's probably no simple way to compare the underlying advertising value derived by the industry's top publishers. The sheer reach of a portal like Yahoo or MSN vs. the targeted delivery of a NYTimes.com or Forbes.com. But that doesn't stop trade magazine editors from at least attempting to come up with a common denominator.

It's Internet television in reverse. In one of those wild and woolly everything-comes-full-circle kind of moments, technology start-up Clearleap wants to bring Web shows back to the TV set. Sure, that's been the goal all along for some -- incubating a hit show online and moving it to the tube. But let's get this straight: Is the business of Web video -- bred on the meritocratic notion that creators who were roadblocked from TV for whatever reason finally had an outlet to reach audiences thanks to the Internet -- now headed back to the living room? Apparently so.