Natural disasters, royal nuptials, Hollywood breakups as well as football and its scandals stole Aussies attention online this year.

As I’ve written about before, we’re in an amazing period of the consumer Internet.  Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built.

No access to Facebook or Twitter? Big deal! Australian brands are finding their way around the ‘Great Firewall of China’ and building a strong social media presence in the Chinese market.

An overwhelming majority of reality TV fans use some form of social media whilst they are watching programs new research has found and almost all admit to being influenced by the advertising therein.

The recent surveys revealing that companies generally fail to respond to customer complaints in social media are interesting, but hardly surprising. Companies can be big, slow-moving organisations with unwieldy structures and stretched resources. Sometimes, even a complaint made through the regular channels can take ages to resolve. It’s no great shock that complaints in social media should be the same (that’s no justification for such poor service — just an unfortunate fact).