We’re busily involved in a rebranding process for the Middleton-based company and will shortly be commencing a website redesign. We’re very excited by how things are shaping up – we’ll keep you posted.

Presumably the accuracy of long-range forecasting will improve eventually, but we at least no longer need to rely on the Met Office for shorter-term forecasts. For that, we have Twitter.

The current, prolonged cold snap have once again proven the worth of Twitter (and other social media tools) for quickly disseminating accurate information about weather conditions. Barely has the first snowflake hit the ground before #uksnow is trending, but when the weather is as extreme as it is at the moment, Twitter really does come into its own.

Once all this information is organised more smartly – see Ben Marsh’s #uksnow map for a tantalising glimpse into how much smarter we could be at communicating weather information – then we’ll never need to rely on the Met Office again.

The deal recently struck between search engines Google and Bing and social networks Facebook and Twitter could have potentially massive implications for businesses.

From now on, real-time messages posted on Facebook and Twitter will be included alongside the usual search engine results you find on Google and Bing.

As search engines place a high degree of importance on recency and the number of inbound links a particular piece of content has, it’s realistic to suggest that soon we will be seeing heavily retweeted tweets jostling for position with standard web pages.

So what could this actually mean for businesses? Potentially, if you search for “Manchester hotel” in the future, the leading results may not be the selection of big-name hotels you get now, but rather a review of a Manchester hotel recently posted on Twitter that has for one reason or another proven popular.

It will be interesting to how social search unfolds as there is a question mark over the relevancy of results that include user-generated, and thus potentially unreliable, information.

What it increasingly means however is that, whatever your business, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to participate and engage in social media. Not doing so and on in time it could be your search engine presence that suffers.

Social media has of course changed all that. Now the internet is used and created by the many; in a sense, it’s publishing’s golden age.

The full scale of this shift is graphically emphasised below by Gary Hayes’ Social Media Count application. The one that really excites me is the last stat – sometimes it’s easy to forget that there are 10s of millions of people worldwide who still haven’t even gone online at all yet.

I’ll take them in turn.

• If this is a site intended to encourage donating, why is the donation page so darned hard to find? Not only do you have to register first, but you then have to dig around a couple of pages before finally you’re met with a donate facility, hidden away on a specific campaign page. And where are the signposts pointing you there?
• If you’re going to have a bold, white-on-colour statement on the home page, make it a good one. “THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS YOU CAN DO. VOTING IS JUST ONE OF THEM.” is not a good one. In fact I can barely get halfway through without suddenly inhabiting the voice of John Major.
• The introductory copywriting manages to say in several paragraphs what should have been said in one or two. “And you can learn more about the site by watching the video on the right” is hardly necessary since the said video takes up most of the home page and includes the headline “Eric Pickles introduces MyConservatives.com”. The copy needed to be punchier, clearer and simply more memorable. Make it seem like a political revolution.
• I’d been on the site about three times before actually discovering the “Register” button in the bottom right-hand corner. As you can’t really do anything before you register – and there is only one other tiny call to action in the top corner – this is decidedly bad practice.
• The Dashboard is a nice idea, but needs work. Upon logging in today I was informed that I’d made 23 telephone calls so far. That was correct in every way apart from the 23 bit.
• Hurray! I can participate! But oh dear, all the activities already seem to have happened. Has nobody been charged with maintaining this thing?
• Parts of the site go a bit haywire in Chrome, my browser.
• Ask Sam. Silly question, but who’s Sam? (You have to delve beyond the registration wall for this one).
• I’m sold! I want to join the Tory Party! OK fine, just follow the ugly long URL here and… it’s that man again. Nice.

I appreciate that the site is in Beta stage, but for such a high-profile launch, it appears to have been handled very sloppily (it crashed straightaway on launch day last Friday).

My.BarackObama it ain’t, and for a leader who had appeared to be sold on the potential of the internet, a worrying disappointment.

Well the fellows at Canadian conversion marketing company Unbounce believe the crucial period is only actually five seconds. In other words, you’d better have landing pages that are compelling, clear and immediate.

Interestingly, Unbounce have given the 5-Second Test to Time’s “50 Best Sites of 2009″, scoring the top 10 according to common criteria for great landing pages.

The results are fascinating – take a look here.

Pleasanton Unified School District is a group of schools in California: nine elementary, three middle, two comprehensive high and one alternative high. Like most schools in the economically battered States, Pleasanton’s have had to make swingeing cuts to their budgets.

In an attempt to raise money, the district put forward a parcel tax (a kind of land tax) that would see all taxpayers in the district pay a uniform amount that would go towards improving the schools.

But the ballot did not receive the required two-thirds support, and two weeks later two education foundations, in cooperation with the district, launched an ambitious fund-raising campaign. The goal was to raise $2.8million in eight weeks to fund four key educational programmes.

The problem, however, was that the campaign was launched on the last day of school, leaving parents and supporters without access to school newsletters, flyers and other means of communicating with their core constituency.

Plan B kicked into place: a volunteer committee decided to communicate with Pleasanton residents via Facebook, Twitter, email, two websites and a weekly e-newsletter. Elizabeth Rajs set up the Facebook page and Twitter account and managed both through the entire campaign. Denise Watkins also set up a Facebook page focusing specifically on saving the Elementary Band and Strings programme.  The goal was to raise as much money as possible in eight weeks: the campaign had to end by August 15th so that the district could implement any raised funds by the start of term of August 25th.

Volunteer Rajs, a freelance writer, explains how she built support for the cause through social media. “Once I established the Facebook page, I suggested it to every Pleasanton friend in my own network and asked them to do the same,” she says.

“The web master immediately installed a Facebook and Twitter link on both websites and every email sent by the education foundation – Pleasanton Partnerships in Education – as well as the weekly newsletter had links to the Facebook page. For whatever reason, the Twitter following never picked up steam, but by the time the eight-week campaign ended, there were 905 fans on the Facebook page.”

“Very quickly, local businesses jumped on board in support of the campaign. We heavily promoted patronage of their fund-raising activities via Facebook, the website and email.

“We all learned quickly that word was getting out when a local pizza take-out offered for two days in July to donate 35% of every sale with a flyer back to the school campaign. On the second day, they were so swamped, they literally ran out of pizza! Two weeks later, a family-style brew pub offered 20% on every table to the schools and were woefully unprepared for the crowds that showed up all day. Clearly the message was getting out!”

As well as help from local businesses, Rajs and her small team of fellow volunteers needed local residents to donate. Facebook proved invaluable.

“We installed links for online donations on the two websites and the Facebook page,” she adds. “We sent frequent reminders via Facebook and email that everyone in Pleasanton should donate some amount of money as everyone benefits from top ranked schools.

“The suggested donation amount was $189 per child in the district for families with school-age kids, and $233 (the amount of the failed parcel tax) for homeowners without kids in the district. Flyers were also handed out to local businesses and a couple of volunteers handed them out at the Saturday morning Farmer’s market.

“We kept our audience updated on the campaign with weekly announcements via Facebook and email about the current tally and always reminded them to send in their donations at the same time.”

Why does she think Facebook worked so well as a fundraising tool? “The important part about Facebook is that it allows two-way communication,” she says. “This page was set up to allow fans to post fund-raising ideas, reminders and encouragement. Because people opt in as fans, there is a different level of participation and energy than other, traditional means allow.”

The Facebook page also promoted an auction site set up by a fellow parent that raised almost $15,000 for the campaign, selling everything from jewellery to gift certificates and holidays.

By August 15th, the eight-week campaign, run by a handful of local moms, had raised a staggering $463,000. The money was instantly used to re-hire reading specialists and counsellors and restore the elementary band and strings program for 5th grade for the 2009-10 school year.

“I’ve been involved in lots and lots of school fund-raisers in the last 12 years (dinner auctions, carnivals, relays, etc.) and the amount raised in this two-month campaign far surpassed anything I’ve been a part of in the past,” adds Rajs.

Well done to Elizabeth and the rest of the volunteer team behind the Pleasanton campaign – an inspirational tale.

California-based Netflix has revolutionised the DVD rental business in the States. Where once a trip to the local rental store saw you at the mercy of space and availability, Americans can now choose from a limitless range and enjoy a vastly superior level of service. Netflix pays the postage both ways, so all the customer has to do is order online, open the parcel, watch the film and re-post it.

Such a simple process masks an extraordinarily complex distribution process, particularly as 10million Americans subscribe to Netflix (up to 2.2million discs are shipped on a typical day). An average employee – all in Netflix red t-shirts – can go through 650 discs in an hour.

The above video is a fascinating insight into the workings of an online success story.

Joe Pulizzi, author of the recommended Get Content. Get Customers. has put together a handy list of 42 blogs that are regularly churning out some inspirational writing. I’m completely unfamiliar with some of them, but they’ll be bookmarked on both laptop and iPhone before long.

And while we’re at it, I thought I’d present a list of 10 blogs which we here at Social Magnet couldn’t do without. They are:

• Web Ink Now: If you had to come up with a single thought-leader in this niche, it would be David Meerman Scott. His New Rules of Marketing and PR is a convincing encapsulation of the paradigm shift in marketing that Web 2.0 has enabled. His latest, World Wide Rave, is packed with great case studies to prove the theory and his blog is consistently thought-provoking.
• PR 2.0: Brian Solis is an adopter on the prehistoric side of early. Generally seems to know about stuff years ahead of others. Also recommended is his recent Putting the Public Back in Public Relations book.
• Andrew McAfee: A former Harvard Business School lecturer, now at MIT, McAfee brings an academic’s rigour to his musings on ‘Enterprise 2.0′, the term he coined to describe the changing face of business in a web 2.0 world.

• Avinash Kaushik: Author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and an authority on the whole area of web analytics. Contagiously passionate about his subject.
• Lifehacker: “Tips and downloads for getting things done” reads the strapline, but Lifehacker is much more than that. Covers just about every area of life you can think of – a quick look today reveals everything from a Firefox 3.6 preview to an article entitled “Make Your Own Toxin-Free Insect Repellent with a Splash of Vodka”.
• Sphinn: Highly useful one-stop for internet marketers.
• Steve Rubel: Consistently interesting read from someone at the sharp end of emerging technologies.
• Chris Brogan: Prolific blogger, tweeter and all-round social media star. Can be simply too prolific – a bit skimmable sometimes – but he still manages to produce an incredible level of original and thought-provoking content.
• Google Webmaster Blog: An essential read to ensure we stay with the programme.
• Peter Kim: Not actually Peter’s blog – it’s his social media marketing examples wiki that we find ourselves going back to time and time again whenever the well of inspiration dries up.