Social media optimisation was the big topic of the last year in the industry, and at the moment agencies are trying to build a business model around it. Most of them are going down the consultancy path plus offering specific services in the way of building widgets or Facebook applications to boost viral campaigns. Most of them are struggling to give value out of it and most companies marketing departments are still reticent to invest money on not so tangible services.

The erroneous way to approach Social Media services, advocated by some other agencies, it is the pay per profile, pay per automatic tools to be present in social networks or per tweets/Facebook friends/Linkedin contacts, etc. This approach is the equivalent of blog comment spam or automated link requests and goes against the intrinsic nature of social media which is based in engaging in the conversation.

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Spanish media association On, accused the official Spanish online ratings bureau(Oficina de la Justificación de Difusión (OJD)) and also Nielsen,  alleged “irregularities” in the way Internet audience is measured in Spain. As a result of the recent published data about Internet ratings in Spain, a couple of very big offline publishers came up on top of the list (Elmundo.es s and Marca.com) which sparked controversy and opened up the debate about what methodology should be used to create the ratings.

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During the symposium on Web 2.0  which took place in Madrid on February 18, in Camilo Jose Cela University, the Director of Communications of Tuenti, Icarus Moyano, defended the privacy provided by social networks compared to the lack of regard for security showed by the traditional media outlets which have no scruples to reproduce private information from social media sites.

Spanish Social Networks have been under the scrutiny of traditional media channels which have deemed social media outlets in Spain as partly responsible of indiscriminate violence. A journalist found out that the 17 year old girl killed in Seville, Marta Castillo, had a profile on Tuenti, the most popular Spanish social network among teenagers, and so did her friends. One of them has confessed being the criminal.

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