Social Media Digest: Colin Was Here, Bing Adds Facebook and Eurovision Buzz

Welcome to this week’s Social Media Digest! Let us know your favourite social media stories of the week (and if you know who/what/where Colin might be) in the comments or via Twitter – @Allllliiiii / @Umpf

1. An American restaurant has unleashed a very public and very embarrassing tirade of abuse on its Facebook page following its appearance on the Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. The restaurateurs’ stubborn behaviour on the show caught the attention of Redditors who were quick to poke fun at Amy’s Baking Company on Facebook – leading to the most brilliant of meltdowns on Facebook. File under ‘what NOT to do’…

2. From today, search engine Bing will now show Facebook comments by your friends that are relevant to your search in its Social Sidebar. You can like and comment on people’s posts directly via Bing, or click through to see the original post on Facebook. Bing notes that this addition makes the link between searching and doing – for example, if you search for an event you can immediately see if any of your Facebook friends are attending. It’s a clever addition, but will it turn people away from Google?

3. Capitalising on the coolest feature of Google+, Google has announced that it will be upgrading its Hangouts service as a stand-along web app. Introducing the new app, Vic Gundotra said that Google aims to ‘get gadgets out of the way’ so that people could connect with their friends regardless of operating systems or platform. Hangouts can include text, photos and videos which will be stored so that they can be referred back to later and contacts will be ranked by how often you chat to them.

4. ‘Colin was here’. Three short words that caused uproar this week on Twitter when Sky News’ Twitter posted the mysterious tweet. The tweet was quickly deleted and Sky has blamed the tweet on a hack, saying that ‘action was swiftly taken and we are working with Twitter and our in house security to ensure this cannot happen again’, but of course the internet was quick to respond. Colin has not yet come forward to take the blame / spotlight.

5. Ahead of Eurovision this Saturday, Brandwatch have created a Eurovision dataviz that tracks Twitter buzz in real-time. As tweets happen, they’ll be categorised by country and then further drilled down into topic, including outfit, political, sex factor, appearance, dance routine, stagecraft, performance, voice and song. The dataviz launches Saturday night at 8pm – give it a go while you’re rooting for Bonnie!