It has been announced that the ASA is to be given the same powers online as it has over traditional media advertising. This means the Authority will be able to intervene when a social media campaigns in breach of its regulations.

Reports so far are calling this ‘one of the world’s most ambitious attempts at policing online marketing‘ and that half of all complaints coming into the ASA last year fell outside of its current remit. The ASA believes this new move to be a massive step. Here are the fast facts on what the new ASA rules:

Brands have until March 2011 to fall in line

Twitter and Facebook activity will be included under the ASA’s new remit

YouTube MAY also be included

Sanctions to shame offenders will include online naming and shaming by the ASA

Search engine results will flag up offending social media campaigns - the search engines are working with the ASA

Brands should begin brushing up on how the ASA explains its regulation

Keep an eye out over the next six months as more information will come through on how the new system will be communicated

33 Digital is growing. We are looking for someone with 3-5 years experience in PR and/or social media consultancy to further grow our team. Client or agency side experience would be great. And an ability to conceive and manage some of the most cutting edge social media projects around.

We offer a bunch of benefits you might like. We are based in Clerkenwell, in London. We have copious supplies of good coffee. We will give you gadgets coming out of your ear holes, flexi-time, flexi-location and flexi-rulers to help you do great work the way you like to. And the salary is designed to attract the best.

Get in touch with us even if you’d just like to hear more – email, Twitter or pop in and say hello.

Tonight we’re having a party with some of our clients and friends. Thanks to everyone who has supported us in our first year, we’ll be raising a glass to you later. We’re hugely indebted to the support we’ve been given from everyone around us, and to the efforts of our stellar team. Here’s to the next 12 months.

Click on the link below to see 33 Digital’s #LeadersDebate Buzz Monitor for the event. Subscribe to receive updates for the coming debates on BBC and Sky which will be taking place in the coming weeks:

Download 33 Digital #LeadersDebate Buzz Monitor - 16/04/2010

33 Digital Leaders Debate Buzz Monitor

We’ve seen that the first brands to be trialling this with Twitter are Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.

But many people haven’t seen any Promoted Tweets in the wild. Here’s how to do to it, and we’ve captured a few for you below for you to see.

1. Go to Twitter.com and log in
2. Go to the search bar on the right hand side. Type in a term such as Coffee
3. Regard the beauty of the new kind of advertising that appears atop your stream. As of right now a tweet from Starbucks from 9th April appears saying: “Another day in the cupping room … Our coffee quality team tastes thousands of cups a year to ensure quality http://yfrog.com/2gbb6xj” (it’s a link to a photo)

So far, we are seeing promoted Tweets live for Starbucks, Best Buy and Red Bull. Starbucks are buying ads against the term ‘coffee’, and the others are buying against their brand name as far as we can tell right now. Here’s what the ads look like on Twitter:

Starbucks Promoted Tweet

Red Bull Promoted Tweet

Best Buy Promoted Tweet

Let us know what else you’re noticing, now that you can see how to find them.

Because of the first thing, Drew’s just been added to PR Week’s annual ‘Power Book’ for 2010. He’s been dropped straight into the top 5 for digital, among some very good company. You can’t actually read the entries online (you’ll need to buy a copy for that) but you can read generally about the launch on the PR Week site.

Because of the second, we’ve decided to sneak this post out without telling him because he’d not want to blow his own trumpet. I’m betting that he hears about it through Boxcar before we get chance to tell him we’ve done it.

Well done Drew, we’re very very proud of you here at 33.

On the Twitter blog Biz explains  ”web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting”, and “sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors”.

For a large part of the Twitter community, this will be unremarkable. Twitter’s appeal has been its open APIs, which mean mobile apps and partner sites can send tweets with your permission. By embedding Twitter into other websites (and these are major websites with millions of visitors) the messaging platform can reach the valuable mainstream audience and increase the volume of tweets people send because it’s as easy as a single click, rather than visiting a separate web site.

This will inevitably make Twitter more noisy too. If sites go down the ‘one-click tweet’ route, to recommend a product or comment on a news article, the content will largely be pre-written by the site, so branding and commercial messages are going to increase. Think of the official implementation of Retweet by Twitter, which added better measurement but at the expense of being able to edit the content and personalise your tweet.

So we’ll be watching closely how @anywhere develops and how retailers pick up on it. We expect to see some innovative uses but also an increase in less-personal, commercial messages.

[our new digs]

Our new headquarters are on Clerkenwell Green in London. We are looking forward to having oodles of open space to expand (our first nine months as an agency have been kind on us - we’ve grown in every way a company can). All of us will miss the Hotwire team that we have been part of (sob!). And most of us will be looking forward to frequenting the new luxury of having our own coffee bar on-site.

Thank you everyone for your support so far. Look out for our 1 year birthday celebrations which will be coming up in May.

You can follow our move on our Flickr stream and on Twitter.

[pic courtesy of dylans]

After my stint presenting the 33 Digital bit of Social Media Week last week, I got into two separate conversations about social media monitoring tools for teams.

Specifically, people in large organisations are looking for a killer product with good workflow management. They’re big enough to need whole teams of people to share the duty of responding to customers via social media. An essential feature is the ability to assign ownership when there’s follow-up required.

One person shared their current shortlist: SM2, CoTweet and truPulse were all being considered.

Reasons for growing demand?

• As soon as different work patterns and physical sites are involved you’ll need a system that can deliver good results for your customers.
• Good companies appreciate how important social media is for ongoing relationships, rather than looking to simply milk the platforms for marketing promotions. With my ‘consumer’ hat on, I’m happy because we use social media to share and solve problems, not listen to a sales pitch.

So - I thought I’d post and ask for some current opinion. Do you use one of the services mentioned above? Or a different service that’s better? I’d love to hear from a mix of companies and agencies to see if this makes a difference.

If you leave a comment or @ me on Twitter, I’ll summarise the best tools in an updated post.

UPDATE 08/02 - if you work for a brand or company and prefer to remain anonymous, you can email me instead.

We just wanted to take an opportunity to say thanks to everyone who came and took part. And dig into some of the discussions that took place around the future of PR and social media.

Some of the points brought up by the group:

• How online communities will respond to increasing brand activity. Opt in, opt out, or desert the whole network?
• How B2B was an early adopter of social media for internal and external communications
• How do brands track the value of social media engagement? Dashboards versus ‘management accounts’ style information
• How often does a digital PR agency that does social media campaigns get to influence day to day comms? (as much as most PR agencies! So a lot)

What now remains to be seen is whether some of the predictions put forward around the room will become a reality sooner rather than later. Anybody with views on some of our pet areas of social TV or the internet (or social network) of things should tell us below in the comments box.