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People are painting social networks red to publicise their support for Comic Relief.  Individuals are changing their profile pictures on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere to red squares to demonstrate their allegiance to the charity.  As red nose day approaches expect these square to pop up all over the social media space. It already has the backing of high profile media influencers Chris Moyles producer (@ahf on twitter) was one of the first to go red.

This phenomenon is not entirely new.  In the last ten days campaigners have been using black squares to show their opposition to  New Zealand’s controversial ‘three strikes’ copyright law which would mean that if a person is accused of downloading copyrighted material three times their internet account would face closure - even if there is no proof to the allegations.

Stephen Fry was one of the highest profile campaigners replacing his Twitter picture with a black square.   There is no hard evidence that the campaign worked but New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has revealed that the implementation of the law will now take place on 27 March this year.

At the heady summit of social media marketing lies the promise of effective measurement and evaluation.   There is no doubt that twitter is the flavour of the month and a new application called Twittersheep provides a fascinating measurement tool which helps us take a few more steps towards this objective.

I decided to start with the most followed twitter account; that of US president Barack Obama who has close to 300,000 followers.  What Twittersheep does is to make a word cloud from the profiles of all of a user’s followers. Whilst Obama’s following is far from a random sample it is a big number so we might draw some broad conclusions.  Twitter has a high student following. It appears that the male female split is roughly equal with husband and wife evenly weighted in Obama’s cloud.  It also looks like the marketing industry is providing a good proportion of the social networks’ early adopters.

Potentially Twittersheep and similar apps could provide brands that use twitter and build large follower groups with highly valuable insights into both the demographic and psychographic profiles of consumers with an interest in their brand. 

Buying decisions are increasingly in the will of the Web, according to new research by Gartner.

Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester analyst whose Tweet alerted me to this research has given the findings a broad thumbs up, which is a recommendation in itself.

In fact, the research suggests that by 2012, half of what we buy - including offline purchases - will be directly affected by the Internet in the form of seeking recommendations on blogs, comparing prices, etc. We may end up buying from a bricks and mortar outlet, but the impetus will have come from from the digital world.

But, as the article from Gartner goes on, companies should beware of rushing headlong into using online social networks as part of the business plan in the belief that just being there will generate sales.

Still, Gartner predicts a flourishing of Web-based customer communication in any recession as a cost-effective way of keeping relationships alive.