Social media now accounts for 22% of all the time that we spend online. So how did we spend that time in 2011? And how will that change in the next year? The top stories to watch in 2012 include the intersection of social, local and mobile, the changing role of marketers, privacy issues, and the elusive social media ROI…

Social media now accounts for 22% of all the time that we spend online. So how did we spend that time in 2011? And how will that change in the next year? The top stories on social media in 2011 include the Arab Spring, Weinergate and social TV…

On July 26, the Seattle Police Department used its @SeattlePD Twitter account to post fragments of dispatch calls between 6am and 6pm – and in the process lost several hundred followers. This outcome, and the controversy around the Seattle PD Twitter campaign, stands in sharp contrast to a similar experiment conducted by the Greater Manchester Police in October 2010, which was declared a PR success with 11,000 followers gained and a global trending hashtag. Read our in-depth analysis of the Twitter campaigns and future social media plans for the Seattle PD and the Greater Manchester Police.

If you think social media is about being friends with your customers or winning more followers, you’re missing the point. The social graph is the conduit that allows brands to create real business value, rather than the value itself. With the rise of social, mobile, geolocation and realtime services, brands have a massive opportunity to solve the two age-old problems of advertising:
1. How do you get a customer’s attention when they don’t really want to be interrupted?
2. How do you get the right message in front of the right customer at the right time?