So here’s what happened. A couple in Naples, Florida bought a home with cash (no mortgage) in 2009. In 2010, Bank of America began foreclosure proceedings against them. This was Bank of America’s mistake, of course. This couple, the Nyerges, hired an attorney to help defend them against this foreclosure, and then Bank of America realized their mistake and dropped it. Well, it’s great that it’s been dropped, but the Nyerges are out $2,534 in legal fees. So they’ve requested that Bank of America cover the cost multiple times over the phone and in writing. They finally get a judge to order that Bank of America pay the fees. When they still haven’t gotten their check after five months of more calls and letters, they obtained an order of foreclosure against the bank.

Read the whole thing here.

While this has been reported in the news, Social Media has really run wild with the story. Using Newsdesk 4, I plotted out the mention of Bank of America and foreclosures (in their various permutations). You can see the huge spike of blog posts vs traditional news coverage.

For the last 30 days, Social Media and News coverage have been trending together rather evenly. For this story, however, blogs blew the news sites out of the water.

A lot of people are chasing after the nature of what makes a story viral. In this case it seems rather clear that the populist angle in this story is appealing. It is human nature to celebrate the little guy winning over the big guy.

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

The analysis picks up on products mentioned across these articles. The graph simultaneously highlights why Microsoft purchased Skype -witness the iPhone and all the Google related services- and how it plugs into its own line of products: Windows Phone, Xbox, Kinect, etc.

Content marketing can be a little shy when it comes to asking its readers and viewers to take the next step. (No offense intended to content marketers: heck, I spent most of high school pursuing a content marketing strategy.) Conversion rate marketing, landing page optimization, on the other hand, can be a little like honing pick-up lines. But, hey, sometimes people don’t want to be picked up.

If you put these on a scale, ranging from free love to used car salesman, content marketing is on one end, conversion rate marketing is on the other.

But what if we mashed-up the best practices of each in the middle?

It’s well worth the read!

There has been a lot of buzz about the reaction in Social Media to the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. The story broke late Sunday and people plugged into the Social Media pipeline learned about it a full hour before President Obama made the announcement on television.

In comparison, let’s look at how online News sites reacted:

On Saturday, April 30th, the biggest story involving Osama bin Laden was a story about a bombing in Morocco, possibly connected to al-Qaida. There were few than 100 mentions of his name.

On Sunday, May 1st, that number jumped to nearly 3000, up 3135% from the day before.

By Monday, news mentions exploded to nearly 40,000. That’s roughly a 1400% increase from Sunday.

From Saturday to Monday, there was a 44,475% increase in news coverage about Osama bin Laden.

Monday, May 2nd, was the day with the most mentions of Osama bin Laden. Nearly 15% of all news worldwide mentioned his name.

Here we can see how US vs. Middle Eastern coverage of Osama bin Laden has been for the last 30 days. This chart includes searches for Osama’s name in Arabic (أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن), so it is likely that there is some noise in the red bars below.

We can see that news and social media both react strongly to trends. At its peak, a single story can dominate the world’s headlines. It also shows that coverage tends to fall off quickly, even in the affected area, like the US in the chart above.

Also, when we look at products that are mentioned most in connection to Osama bin Laden, there is one clear – and extraordinarily pervasive – winner.

Anyone can make their very own clone of Twitter, but not everyone has what it takes to confront the Social Media giant head-on. UberMedia, owner of UberSocial and Twidroyd, may be looking to do just that:

According to CNN, UberMedia — the company responsible for UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd — is looking into developing its own Twitter-like competitor. CNN cites three people briefed on the matter (but not authorized to speak publicly) as describing the service as a response to some of the most common complaints about Twitter, including restrictions on message length. Read the full post here.

Will anyone people able to displace Twitter from its top spot in the microblogging world?

In other Twitter news: Former CEO says original co-founder didn’t get enough credit

Love her or hate her, there is no denying Rebecca Black is a Web phenomenon right now with her “Friday” song clocking in at just over 47 million views on YouTube.  When the video was first pointed out to me this time last week (thanks to office superfan Mick!)  “Friday” had a paltry 14 million or so hits, but the past seven days has seen that number skyrocket.  While only a few million of those could realistically be attributed to our office superfan, it seems there are a whole bunch of you out there who just can’t get enough of Rebecca Black and “Friday”, so bringing the people what they want here is that now infamous video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0]

Coverage of the ongoing unrest in North Africa has declined in the same space of time, with mentions of ‘Libya’ dropping over 50% between Thursday last week and yesterday, illustrated in the chart below:

For real-time coverage of both these events then subscribe to our free RSS feeds, Japan disaster news and Libya unrest news.

More importantly, should you wish to help support relief efforts in either Japan or North Africa then donate at the Red Cross here or here.

The past year saw the worlds of news and mobile collide, as the iPhone and iPad both grew in market share, the article in particular cites the innovative apps from the Washington Post and CNN, both integrating a social media element to them taking them beyond the realms of traditional news.  From here the article predicts a further grow in mobile applications, but a greater focus on social media as the social web continues to change our online experience.

Beyond social and mobile, the article also looks at the influence of WikiLeaks, the M&A climate, location-based services and the future of news syndication.  But for the full low down, read the full article here.

We’d love to know your musings and thoughts for the upcoming year, either on news or further afield.  If 2010 was the year of Facebook, can we expect more of the same in 2011?

Which seamlessly carries us into the news that blogging tool of the moment, Tumblr, has raised an extra $30 million in funding.  Tumblr has been a perfect example of how blogging continues to evolve and change, so to see them get this Sequoia Capital investment will only serve to push that innovation further and perhaps see “lifestreaming” overtake blogging on the Web.

How has your blogging behaviour changed over the years?  Have the newer microblogging tools taken the place in your heart of more standard blogging platforms.. let us know below!