We’re sure there’s been numerous jokes made about social media and its disposable nature, but those making such jokes probably never envisioned that they would be taken as literally as this.

Shitter, boasting the tagline “Social media has never been so disposable”, is a service that will take one or more feeds from your Twitter account and print them out on toilet roll. For only $35, you can get your tweets or someone else’s printed out on four rolls and have it delivered straight to your door.

After logging in, you can choose for your own tweets, timeline, favourites, or any lists you have to be printed out. While the standard order is four rolls, the people behind Shitter say that they can accommodate larger orders which you’ll have to email for.

While there’s an obvious novelty (and hilarity) factor behind this, we’re just hoping that, for $36, the paper used to create these rolls is high quality.

With Twitter placing an added focus on generating advertising revenue, and convincing businesses that using their sponsored stories and tweets service is of benefit to them, the company are planning to make significant changes to its brand pages over the coming months.

Having originally launched in December, the pages currently show the brand’s Twitter feed and accompanying images, almost similar to a personal profile except for a customisable header and the option to keep a specific tweet fixed at the top of the timeline. However, Adage are reporting that Twitter is planning to add different experiences to their pages such as e-commerce, contests and sweepstakes after confirming it with three executives familiar with the matter.

The new product will allow app developers to build experiences on Twitter, similar to what brands do on Facebook through apps. The features themselves will be contained within the brand’s tweet timeline, deviating from the traditional 140 character tweets that are synonymous with the service.

When Twitter launched brand pages in December, it had 21 famous brands such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and Nike as part of its launch group. Come January, more brands got on board after committing $25,000 in advertising which Twitter requires to activate a page.

However, concerns have been raised about the usefulness of such pages as there wasn’t much to differentiate it from traditional pages. Yet the prospect of developing content that is unique to Twitter and using them to drive users to their own pages could make the prospect of brand pages – and their value – that much greater.

While no date has been set for the release of the product, Twitter has been telling clients that they should expect it to arrive this year.

Everybody knows the rules of Scrabble (and Words With Friends which made it social) and this campaign from Duval Guillaume Modem is a fantastic way of promoting the new game, Scrabble Trickster. With a set of 100 randomly generated characters, you must write the highest scoring sentence you can think of before tweeting it. Every day, the highest scoring tweet wins a Scrabble Trickster game for themselves.

The reason it’s brilliant is that it highlights what Twitter and Scrabble have in common (limited characters) and creates a game that anyone can get involved in. The popularity of games like Words With Friends is mainly down to the social element and this certainly gets people competing against each other. Also, each tweet is directed at @twitsscrabble so that the name and the brand is spread throughout the Twittersphere in a non-intrusive manner.

Those interested in playing can find the site here. The site is in Dutch (for now) but the site is clear enough for you to formulate sentences without any hinderance.

For social media marketing to work, business and brands must realise that its a give and take relationship between them and the customer. Everyone wants to be talked about but you have to give a good reason for people to mention you on status updates and tweets, mainly offering something that they wouldn’t usually get.

American Express, who obviously have a considerable budget for this to work, is offering its cardholders a new reason to tweet about its promotional offers by offering savings for special hashtag tweets.

The company launched a ‘Tweet Your Way To Savings‘ campaign and site where its members can sync their American Express cards with Twitter and tweet special offer hashtags in exchange for savings in verified stores.

How it works is simple: Cardholders can sign in with Twitter to sync their account. When they have this step completed, they are then eligible to tweet any of the current hashtag offers out there to receive savings that are automatically applied when you make an eligible purchase. The campaign doesn’t require you to download digital coupons as it will be verified once you make the purchase.

Many brands have gotten involved in the campaign, including McDonalds, FedEX, Dell, Best Buy Deals and H&M USA. So for mentioning the company and the related brand, you can get savings for promoting those brands.

It’s an idea that’s been explored with many companies, the most recent example being Domino UK’s pizza auction where each tweet relating to their deal took £0.01 off the final price, and it will be a trend that will continue as marketers and brands think up of different ways to get people talking about them online.

Mercedes have recently launched a series of cars that include a new feature which alerts you when there is a car parking space free as you drive past. The smart new technology is set to be fitted to all future cars and to make people aware of the new feature, they developed a smart campaign that featured a fleet of tweeting cars that drove around a city looking for free parking spaces.

The campaign ran during the busy Christmas period where parking spaces are notoriously hard to find, and every time one of the cars drove past an empty space, they automatically sent a tweet to a special feed to alert followers. So rather than people having to spend hours driving around a city looking for that elusive space they could simply open up Twitter and get a run down of all the spaces in the area.

It’s a smart campaign from Mercedes and it highlights the feature in a brilliant way while providing something of real use to owners of all cars. The only thing I worry about is how lazy technology is making us all, long gone are the days when we could simply park our own cars!

Even though most people won’t admit it they all obsess about how many Twitter followers they have. “Only 3 more followers and I get to 1000″ and similar tweets appear on a fairly frequent basis in my timeline. Brands and businesses are no different expect that they have slightly more resources and can throw money at the cause through competitions, innovative campaigns and by using it as a customer service tool. Of course Twitter shouldn’t be all about the followers with the level of engagement being far more important but that hasn’t stopped people trying to jockey the system with scripts over the years. All that is about to change though with Twitter announcing their own self service platform this week which means that brands, businesses and individuals will be able to effectively buy Twitter followers. It will be Twitter’s Facebook like button moment and they’ll start raking the cash in over the next year. But will it work for the end user? Should you and will you be being Twitter followers soon?

The Case For

For arguments sake lets say the followers cost $1 each. Lets also assume that there is some pretty smart targeting in there meaning the people I target my ads are relevant by geography and perhaps even by topic. Paying $10,000 could get you a huge amount of new people following you. It’s nearly impossible to engage with that amount of new people personally but if you were a brand and they followed you and you followed that up with good strong engaging content that was retweeted and shared that could be like marketing gold. Some brands have been on Twitter for years and have thousands of followers but some haven’t even started yet so this new ad tool could help them get to the races very quickly indeed.

The Case Against

Personally I’ve spent about 4 years building up the people who follow me. I engage with them and know who a good chunk of them are. If I just added in 10,000 new people I’d have no way of knowing who they were and I’d simply be broadcasting out to them. By all accounts Twitter advertising is working brilliantly at the moment because there are only a handful of select partners on the site. What happens when my feed starts getting clogged up with cheap insurance offers, credit cards, Groupon deals and massages? Twitter is your earned media and followers are often massively engaged because they have made an implicit call to follow the brand or person. Shoving the ability to follow in a person’s feed is something completely different and I’m not sure it will work. The numbers of followers will soar but engagement will drop.

Social media analytics site Klout has always been popular in the social media world – the idea of being able to summarise your influence into a easy to digest score has won it many users during its three year lifespan (not to mention critics).

Now the company is expanding their service further by announcing either partnerships or acquisitions with three startups, suggesting that 2012 may be the year the company begins to focus on becoming a more attractive proposition for brands to invest in.

The main acquisition is the mobile community organiser Blockboard. The startup focuses on creating a local-mobile service that connects neighbours together and build stronger communities through technology. The app gives people a way to communicate with their neighbours about a wide number of topics from local news to odd jobs to local requests.

On the other end of the spectrum, the company has announced or developed their partnerships with two other startups which focus on analytics. The first partnership is with Badgeville, a startup who focus on creating social loyalty as well as gamification, allowing brands to analyse their reputation on their web and mobile sites. The second is with Simply Measured, a social analytics tool which shows brands who drives and influences the conversation on their site. Their service will now include and analyse people’s Klout scores to further measure the influence of your audience.

While Badgeville and Simply Measured will get Klout integrated into its services, Blockboard will become apart of Klout to make the service geographical and measure the influence of those based in the same areas as well as increase their reach on mobile platforms.

Although they haven’t revealed what way each company will fit into Klout’s vision, the chances are that for Blockboard, the acquisition will give Klout a better idea of who are the most influential members of a community outside social media and identify them. If they can give them scores for their influence offline, it could give the company further leverage with brands and companies who would want to use the service.

Presumably, the Badgeville and Simply Measured partnerships would work in the same manner, but as yet how all these services will come together to improve the service is unclear, as each partnership has only been recently announced. But such questions will become clear over the coming weeks as they being to integrate these changes.