Ford has launched a fascinating  social media initiative to speak with audiences who don’t read the motoring press or who don’t read motoring blogs. It is a collaborative art project where people are encouraged to share images which express their sense of now and it is linked to the Ford web site. It is an interesting example of using social media in a highly creative way to engage with stakeholders who feel traditional media has nothing to offer them.

At ItsOpen we are developing blogger outreach programmes and increasingly I think companies will realise that they need to use social media more imaginatively in order to gain interest and attention. Traditional ways of communicating do not work well within a social media context. It is time for a different kind of conversation.

How is social media going to affect society? What impact will it have on mass movements for change? Pete Burden, who used to act as an advisor for ItsOpen, has written an imaginative post about how Ghandi might have used social media. It raises some interesting thoughts about the role of social media and what contribution it can make to our society.

American journalist Dan Baum has written an account of how he got fired from his staff job at the New Yorker.

Nothing odd about that, except he chose to do it through Twitter, in a series of tweets that he posted earlier this month, between May 8 and May 12.

People are forever coming up with surprising and innovative uses of Twitter, but if I wanted to publish a 4,000-word article, I wouldn’t choose a medium that allowed only 140 characters at a time. Still, as a gimmick to promote Baum’s new book, it clearly worked – people are writing about it all over the place, including here, here and here.

And if you’d like to follow Baum on Twitter, you can find him here.

A survey from McCann Erickson UK confirms, yet again, that many companies still aren’t getting the point about social media. Two thirds of the senior marketers polled freely admit that they don’t really know how to use it.

While 86% acknowledge social media is not a fad but is here to stay, almost half (46%) say their companies’ IT department actually block access to popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Clearly that makes it impossible for them to monitor what is being said about their brands – one of the most fundamental reasons why they should be getting to grips with it.

Some common misconceptions also surfaced, for instance that social media is really just for the under 25s, claimed by just over two thirds of marketers polled. That doesn’t really apply: according to Nielsen, people using Twitter tend to be older with 35-49 year olds making up 42% of traffic, and most (62%) accessing it only at work. It certainly doesn’t take account of LinkedIn, which is becoming increasingly important to business professionals.

Other views were surveyed, for instance on how social media impacts on traditional forms of communication and its role in business, commercial communication and marketing activity. Full details here.