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Engaging in social media backfires for Nestle. Due to the Greenpeace protest against the company with regards to how the company uses palm oil in its products, a number of people posted their distaste on Nestle's Facebook page. Unfortunately for the company, the representative in charge of replying to comments was far from being amiable, or even courteous. Sample exchange of comments: Nestle: "You have freedom of speech and expression. Here, there are some rules we set. As in almost any other forum. It's to keep things clear." Paul Griffin: "Your page, your rules, true, and you just lost a customer, won the battle and lost the war! Happy?" Nestle: "Oh please...it's like we're censoring everything to allow positive comments." Social media has significant benefits for companies and how they market the products to consumers. However, if used wrongly, as with this case, massive PR clean-up is inevitable.

This article argues that reputation - such as in Apple's iPad - can be more important than need and functionality when it comes to technology. The phenomena of 'the fad' is not new, but is especially relevant with technological products and innovation. It will be interesting to see whether items such as the iPad do fill gaps in a market or are simply fad toys. The iPad's claimed 'killer function' - that of reading and subscriptions - will prove interesting when we look at how the publishing industry repsponds and whether standards much develop for newspapers/books/magazines.

What are consumers really agreeing to when they purchase something online and have to agree to pages and pages of small print? How do we control the power of the retailer and educate consumers, so they are not suckered into agreements that negatively effect them? Can this retailer really own souls? Will their be legal action as a result of these agreements?

Even though people are aware that when they tweet it is public record, but most would assume that these tweets were not being documented. Will people censor what they say once they know it is going to be on printed public record?