(c) Can Stock PhotoAs I was preparing this week’s Wrap, I had to force myself to stop. The week’s collection of stories that may have escaped your attention featured a lot of releases of reports and studies, several PR kerfuffles, a load of stories about great use of social and digital media, and several salient analyses. You can see all the stories I tagged this week at my link blog, LinksFromShel.tumblr.com. In the meantime, here are the ones I found most interesting or useful.

NTSB turns to social media to feed insatiable public appetite for Asiana updates

The crash landing of the Asiana Boeing 777 at San Francisco International Airport (I saw the wreckage as I took off for D.C. on Tuesday) has riveted the news-consuming public, which is hungry for the latest information. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is turning to social media, and Twitter in particular, to feed that appetite. Not everybody is happy about the near-real-time release of information. The Air Line Pilots Association—America’s largest pilot’s union—was “stunned” at the amount of information the NTSB was releasing, and fears a rush to judgment based on incomplete or inaccurate information. But the practice wasn’t implemented just for the high-profile Asiana crash; the NTSB used Twitter to release photos and updates from a crash that happened in Alaska on July 7, which resulted in 10 deaths. A BusinessWeek article by Justin Bachman quotes NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway noting, “We’ve been told by the media that they follow people on Twitter, and we notice that since we’ve been doing it, folks have been following us.” A better answer came from NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman, who said transparency is required for an agency that is responsible to U.S. citizens and, in particular, the traveling public. “We believe it’s important to show our work and tell people what we are doing.” Travel industry analysts agree. Interestingly, the agency hasn’t yet set up a Facebook page.

Fortune 500 getting more social

More Fortune 500 companies are using a wider array of social media platforms, according to the most recent study from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. It’s good to see a rise in the number of public-facing blogs among the biggest companies, which stood at 16% five years ago and has risen to 34% in 2013. “The 171 Fortune 500 corporations with blogs represented 58 of 75 industries in the Fortune 500,” according to a Marketing Charts report. “Of those industries, telecommunications led in adoption percentage, with 53% of its companies maintaining a blog (9 of the 17). Next were specialty retailers, with 46% adoption (10 of 22).” The top 200-ranked companies were more likely to have a blog than the next 300 on the list. Twitter is the most-used tool, with 77% of the Fortune 500 using the microblogging tool. Facebook use stands at 70% among the 500, and YouTube is third. Each of the three has experience an increase in usage among the Fortune 500 over last year. Thirty-five percent of the 500 have active Google+ accounts, while 19% have set up accounts that aren’t active. Pinterest usage rose from 2% last year to 9% this year. For the first time, the list included Foursquare (at 9%) and Instagram (at 8%). Take a look at the report; there’s a lot more data.

Social media plan accompanies Twinkie’s comeback

A lot of public lamentation accompanied the announcement that Hostess, maker of the iconic Twinkie, was shutting its doors. And there was jubilation when the brand was purchased and the return of the Twinkie announced. The spongy dessert cake returns officially on Monday, and the new Hostess is planning to make sure everyone engaging in social media knows about it. “The Sweetest Comeback in the History of Ever” is the tagline the company is using to get the public licking its lips in anticipation. The company’s Facebook page “began to tease the return of the treats at the end of June with posts like, ‘We’re back online. And pretty soon we’ll be back in the snack aisle,’ writes USA Today‘s Rebecca Castagna. Twitter is ablaze with consumers awaiting the snack’s return, and the company is promising to be active in social media in order to be relevant to a younger audience.

Golden Corral can thank Reddit for its social media crisis

If you’re not monitoring Reddit yet, the PR crisis fast food company Golden Corral is facing may be enough to get you started. Images of “purported disgusting kitchen conditions and a video by an alleged employee charged that the chain keeps its meat by the dumpster” were shared on Reddit where users spread the word, according to Todd Wasserman, writing for Mashable. The conversation resulted in a subReddit devoted solely to Golden Corral. Knowing that Reddit—where Internet memes are born—is talking about your company can let you at best try to head off the crisis at the source and at least serve as early warning the the shit is about to hit the fan.

You may want to reconsider using that Twitter bot

Companies that use bots to respond to Twitter queries and references may want to reconsider the practice after the embarrassing situation in which Bank of America found itself. A protester was in front of a Manhattan branch of the bank drawing chalk protest messages on the sidewalk. He tweeted that he was chased away by the police and included the Bank of America Twitter account in the message. The bot responded asking if the bank could help with his account. As others began engaging in the discussion, nearly every message that contained the bank’s Twitter handle earned the same response, including one to the OccupyLA account: “We’d be happy to review your account with you and discuss any concerns. Please let us know if you need assistance.” The more it happened, the more people jumped in and began sharing the hilarity—all at Bank of America’s expense. Gizmodo writer Casey Chan writes, “You’d think the robot behind these tweets would have better filters that would allow it to ignore people who don’t have Bank of America bank accounts and are clearly making fun of Bank of America but NOPE. You’d think there might be some human oversight but NOPE. It’s just large corporations making a fool of themselves on the Internet.”

It may be possible to identify fake images on Twitter

It was possible to identify tweets that contained fake images of Hurricane Sandy, and to do so with nearly 100% accuracy, according to a research paper from the indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, IBM Research Labs and the university of Maryland. “The vast majority of tweets containing fake images were retweets (86 percent), according to Craig Silverman, writing for The Poynter Institute. “For journalists, this reinforces the importance of verifying material before retweeting it. During a crisis situation, the rule of retweets not equally endorsements doesn’t really apply.” The researchers also found that “the social network of a user on Twitter had little impact on making these images viral.” It turns out there was only “an 11% overlap between the retweet and follower graphs of tweets containing fake images.” In a crisis situation, people rely on Twitter’s advanced search features; they also create lists so they can identify people on the ground, then track their activity. As a result, they wind up retweeting material from people with whom they weren’t already familiar, leading to the amplification of tweets regardless of whether they already have established the source’s credibility. Further, the retweets containing fake images came from a small influencer group. “Our results show that top 30 users out of 10,215 users (0.3%) resulted in 90% of the rewteets of fake images; also network links such as follower relationships of Twitter, contributed very less (only 11%) to the spread of these fake photos URLs.” The images didn’t begin to spread until about 12 hours after they first appeared. Automating the detection of fake images involved algorithms to analyze two specific sets of information: user features and tweet features, producing 97% accuracy in identifying the fakes.

Real-time marketing needs to align with your brand

I stood up and cheered—literally—when I read Jack MacLeod’s article in AdAge Digital; it so closely aligns with my own views, about which I have been quite vocal. (Not to worry; I was alone in my hotel room, so nobody wondered what the heck I was excited about.) “When a brand swiftly publishes creative and tasteful content tied to the latest news headlines, it dramatically maximizes the impact and ultimately the success of that content,” MacLeod writes. “But that success can be fleeting and actually hurt you if you’re not laser-focused on telling the bigger brand story.” Tell it, brother.

Can promoted posts help your business?

For some time now, Facebook has been pushing promoted posts as a way to gain visibility for your brand’s updates (and, of course, to generate revenue). When you think about it, promoted posts make sense. They’re not classic advertising. They’re posts—yours or someone writing about your brand—which means they’re genuine. You’re just spending money to expand their reach. Lauren Drell provides a primer on Facebook’s promoted posts, but buries the lead when she addresses whether they work. According to one test, “a small business with 7,764 fans…spent just $10 to promote a post, which nearly doubled the reach (more than 3,000 people) of the content by targeting the post (to) Facebook users in New York and Brooklyn.” Sounds like a low-cost success to me. The post was written for American Express’s Open Forum and reposted to Mashable.

Soon you’ll see who +1’d your content

It’s exciting to see a bunch of +1s on your Google+ content. It would be nicer—especially for brands—if you knew who had given that update his or her stamp of approval. Soon, that information will be easy to see. Google is about to “start highlighting posts that have been +1’d by people in your circles on your stream, as well as highlighting some of your own well-received posts to your friends in their main stream on Google+,” writes Emily Price for Mashable.