It's usually a bit tricky to try to explain Romanian campaigns, but this one should be fairly easy to relate to due to its, erm, rather international nature (though I am going to try my best to cover as much of the context as possible).

Two weeks ago, my former colleagues from McCann Romania launched a quite contentious campaign for ROM, a very traditional Romanian chocolate bar and one of the only brands to have survived the communist era (it's been around for over 45 years). Check out one of the ads:

And here's the other one. This was backed by print & outdoor ads, in-store promotions and all of that offline bit - but most of the activity came from the website and the campaign's Facebook page. Obviously, people went crazy over the fact that a brand was telling them it's 'cool' and 'refreshing' to replace the Romanian flag on the label with the Star-Spangled Banner. So they channeled their disappointment through home-made videos, the campaign website's comments box and through hate pages and causes on Facebook (apparently there have been over 10.000 reactions so far just across Facebook, according to a preliminary estimate). Here's my favourite.

Then people found out that it was all meant to more-or-less trigger a show of hands on who loves the old ROM - check out the updated website for the reveal - and to brilliantly support the brand's tagline (which I will roughly try to translate): 'strong Romanian sensations since 1964'.

One of the best campaigns I've seen in a while... Congrats to the team!

Some first thoughts on Twitter's new web interface - I don't think it changes that many things for most of us (I, for one, use the API for most of my tweets), but I guess these are still worth pointing out.

• it feels like the interface's evolution is very natural - essentially the sidebar is larger in width and more functional
  
• due to that increased width, custom backgrounds are likely to become a thing of the past - although there may be some potential in the sidebar's slight transparency
  
• AJAX is certainly slowing things down a bit
• noticed some new keyboard shortcuts ('r' to reply, 't' to retweet, etc)
• new interface for DMs (including threaded view)

Apparently, BP does seem to care. Well mostly because their stocks are currently plummeting. So here's how the story goes:

• there's a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to BP
• someone opens up a fake BP Twitter account: @BPGlobalPR
• the fake Twitter account currently has about 10x more followers than the official BP account

Now, I've been watching BP's official Twitter activity ever since reading this article. What they have done in the meantime:

• they managed to get the Verified Account badge
• tweeting several times per day - not too much interaction but it's still good that they're quite active
• they're using the page's background to keep people updated on the spill (as of this writing, the last update was on June 1st)
• they're also using it to promote their official social pages
• apparently their CEO Tony Hayward also tweets from this account

So what else should BP do? Have the fake account shut down? Or perhaps start working with the authors the way Coca-Cola did with that Facebook page? Here's an interesting opinion...

I find online travel agency Travelocity to be a great example of how a company should handle its online communication efforts and include social media in the mix. I had used Travelocity to book a BA flight through Heathrow (which is supposed to be next week) - here's how the story goes:

• About two weeks ago, Travelocity sent me an email informing me of the strike BA is going through at the moment and that it may affect my flight. The email linked to a very specific page on ba.com where I could check whether my flight would be cancelled or not. BA also sent me an email, but only days later. I tweeted about it - they picked it up and tweeted back, and also started following me.
• A few days later, they emailed me again saying that the strike would be called off. BA didn't even bother emailing me again. I tweeted again, they replied again.
• After the BA union won its appeal and the strike was back on, Travelocity emailed me once again concerning the new developments (within hours after the story broke).
  
• Then they went on to include me in their Follow Friday list (their Twitter account has over 38,000 followers).
• They asked me via email to complete a survey about how I thought they handled this situation - I instantly responded, quite positively as you may be able to tell.

Right now, European airlines have to deal with an unprecedented global flight disruption, and its cause is completely out of their hands. Millions of passengers are stranded or seeing their plans go up in smoke. So how are these airlines communicating with their customers - by telling everyone to just call their offices?

Needless to say, their annoying automated-answering-machine-powered call centers are an option for frustrated travellers. But most of them also have social pages, so why not make proper use of them?

While I'm trying to put together a nice case study about this, so far I have only noticed Lufthansa to actively engage their customers via their Facebook fan page (with a few updates a day + responding to their fans' wall posts) and their US Twitter account (tweeting latest news and @replying to people).

Facebook is most definitely a pioneer in online privacy, but I think they need to step things up a notch.

For example, let's take this from a business perspective (even though a lot of PR people are saying that Facebook shouldn't be used for such purposes). So let's say that one of the people you work with (let's say a journalist) inevitably finds you and adds you at some point (unless of course you value your online privacy so much that you don't even let your profile appear in any kind of search results) - and you don't really want to accept their request as you have a lot of personal stuff you don't want any of them seeing. Are you seriously going to ignore the request and hope they just forget about it, or start bulking up on privacy settings? The latter obviously sounds right, but here are the three things I think are still missing in order to get everything right:

1. photos and videos you've been tagged in: right now, if you don't want a group of people to see a few specific photos you've been tagged in (we're not referring to the whole album here), you can't do it - you have to block them out of the entire "tagged photos" album
2. links you post to your wall: right now there's only a general setting for everything (covering status updates, links, notes, photos, videos)
3. item-by-item privacy: right now you can choose who sees what you post when you post it, but you can't go back and modify it

I'm also saying that a lot of people still really need to work through their Facebook privacy settings before showcasing (sometimes very) inappropriate content to their business contacts.