Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The concept behind This is deceptively simple, and if you’re the kind of person it’s meant to appeal to its allure should be immediately obvious: It’s a link-sharing network where every user is only allowed to share one link per day. That’s it.

There are no bells and whistles. There isn’t even a mobile app yet. Yet in the past two months since its soft launch it’s quickly catapulted to the top of the list of sites I visit daily, and I’m not alone.

Some of the most prominent journalists in media, from The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates to Slate’s David Plotz to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, are among its early adopters, and thousands more are clamoring for invites once they become available.

Though the site wasn’t created to specifically service journalists, many of its earliest users work in media, most likely because the initial invites were sent out to Andrew Golis’s professional circle of friends and colleagues. And This also happens to solve a problem faced by the very people — journalists — who spend all their time staring at content feeds all day: media overload....

As Israeli and Palestinian forces clash in Gaza this week, those same armies are engaging in a real-time battle of hashtags and twitpics, trying to win the hearts and minds of watchers around the globe.

Propaganda used to be about full-color posters and dropping leaflets from airplanes. Now, the Israel Defense Forces and the Hamas military Al Qassam Brigades are taking to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, instantly sharing photos, videos and granular news bites in English, so that they can reach the broadest possible audience.

"What is happening here is that both Israel and Hamas are using social media to communicate over to the other side in the conflict and the broader international community," Charles Ries, former ambassador to Greece and vice president of the international division of the RAND Corporation, told NBC News....

[War for the words and minds on social media? ~ Jeff]

Chanel posted its first Instagram photos and videos Monday and already has 1.8 million followers. The images-based digital platform doesn't allow users to see exactly when companies or people join it—like Twitter does—but it appears that the brand opened its account some time ago, built up a considerable backing organically and then finally saw fit to post content. An email inquiry to the Paris-based company went unanswered.

As The New York Observer reported, the posts were born from a campaign party Chanel threw Monday for its new TV spot starring supermodel Gisele Bundchen. The brand's first Instagram post was a video (see below) that features a brief snippet of the commercial and garnered nearly 40,000 likes. Chanel's social marketing team then followed up with eight photographs from the soirée that collectively drew 158,000 likes....