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Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised.

A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.

These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

“It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.”

The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement.

FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING

An' logics can do a Iotta things that ain't been found out yet.

In theory, a censor block is gonna come on an' the screen will say severely, "Public Policy Forbids This Service."

The screen says, "Service question: What is your name?" She is kinda puzzled, but she punches it. The screen sputters an' then says: "Secretarial Service Demonstration! You—" It reels off her name, address, age, sex, coloring, the amounts of all her charge accounts in all the stores, my name as her husband, how much I get a week, the fact that I've been pinched three times—twice was traffic stuff, and once for a argument I got in with a guy—and the interestin' item that once when she was mad with me she left me for three weeks an' had her address changed to her folks' home. Then it says, brisk: "Logics Service will hereafter keep your personal accounts, take messages, and locate persons you may wish to get in touch with. This demonstration is to introduce the service."

Then I sweat!

Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run!

That couldn't be allowed out general, of course. You gotta make room for kids to grow up. But it's a pretty good world, now Joe's turned off. Maybe I'll turn him on long enough to learn how to stay in it. But on the other hand, maybe—

One European clothing company, popular with inner city youth in the United States, admits privately that its social media team is baffled by its customers' ever changing slang, and even the online Urban Dictionary provides little help.

Social media is quickly becoming a customer relationship management system, as companies have "for the first time access to people's minds in real-time," says Jorn Lyseggen. The tools on offer provide companies with dashboards that show trends, hot topics, the reach of brands, customer mood and how competitors are doing.

Social media may be all the buzz, but in reality "only a few firms get it [and use it], it's of peripheral interest for most", says Tom Austin at technology consultancy Gartner. Few realise that using social media has become much more than customer service and reputation management.

many social media tools are poorly integrated into the corporate workflow

But there are dangers. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway warns that the obsession with social networking can make management lose focus.

To survive the world of social media, companies have to throw away their old marketing playbook.

"don't push... and don't pretend you are hip"

"Once companies have worked out that they should do something with social media, they usually don't know how to do it,"

"If you want to influence the people who influence your customers, that's a very powerful game, but it's also very dangerous if you get it wrong."

it's not about how many friends or followers somebody has, but whether they make an impact.

When Virgin America recently launched new routes from California to Toronto, it used Klout to identify a small group of social media "influencers" and gave them free flights. This generated thousands of tweets, triggered press coverage and delivered more immediate impact than traditional advertising.

"Consumers are spending their attention on social media," he says, but firms don't know how to repay them properly. "There's no manual for that yet."

Social media are dynamic, and today's Twitter may be tomorrow's forgotten website. "Don't assume that what works today will work tomorrow," says Tom Austin at Gartner. "Your model has to be continually adapted."