Did you see the tweet that came from the Associated Press Twitter account earlier today?

The tweet claimed The White House was under an attack of some sort and that the President Obama was injured. Coming so soon after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, many folks believed it and retweeted it.

Some hacks are funny, like when Burger King got hacked - or they’re mostly harmless razzing, but this one could’ve caused widespread panic  - and it DID cause a change in the stock market.

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The Super Bowl was a wild success for advertisers who knew how to leverage Twitter and other social networks, but many advertisers apparently still just don’t get it.

Twitter knows this, yet it doesn’t focus on the hard sell by aggressively advertising. Why? It doesn’t have to.

Twitter has its own brand ambassadors proving Twitter’s value every day. And there’s one VERY smart way Twitter has created a win-win scenario that is the stuff magnificent marketing campaigns are made of: sponsored tweets.

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It must be tough to be in the traditional journalism field. Us tech bloggers have cut our teeth on social media, making mistakes and learning the ropes as we grew. But traditional journalists have had it tougher when it comes to social: they have big brother Associated Press telling them what to tweet and what not to tweet.

It’s all in the name of journalistic integrity, of course, but it must be tough for journalists to keep up with the policy changes over at the AP. Today’s change to their social media guidelines marks the third in the past year.
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The Associated Press has settled a lawsuit with an NBA referee who felt he was defamed by a tweet from one of their writers.

The AP has agreed to pay $20,000 in damages to the referee to cover his legal costs, as well as remove the tweet from the writer’s account.
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Just two weeks after laying down the law when it comes to retweets, the Associated Press is cracking down on reporters for turning to Twitter to… well, tweet about their own arrests at Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan.
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This week, journalists on Twitter have been feverishly discussing the new AP guidelines for retweeting. In a nutshell, the AP outlined how journalists should retweet without endorsing the original tweet – but many thought their method was archaic, out of touch or just plain strange.

Enter Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman. Sonderman put forward a suggestion that journalists use “NT” to mean “neutral retweet” when they want to eliminate bias in their retweeting. But despite his best intentions, this was received as a joke, at best, or inane at worst.
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The Associated Press has issued new social media guidelines that target their journalists’ tweeting.
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Did you know that Herman Cain is the Republican Presidential candidate most likely to be retweeted? Or that Newt Gingrich tweets nearly 500 times in a week?

The Associated Press took a hard look at how the Presidential candidates are using Twitter to promote themselves and their campaigns, and found that 140-character skills among the political elite varied wildly.
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