How about one in English?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110220/tc_afp/mideastpoliticsunrestusinternettwitter_20110220162104

Clinton says Twitter helps US tap into youth unrest

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Sunday highlighted the need for the US government to use Twitter and other social media to connect with young people amid turbulent change in the Middle East and North Africa.

Following revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt fueled by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube exchanges, the US State Department set up Twitter accounts last week in Farsi, Arabic and other languages to get its message across.

"What we expect to do is to be communicating through the new social media with literally millions of people around the world because we want them to hear directly from us what our policies are," Clinton said.

(Related) It's interesting what you can find if you sift through enough data...

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229218847&subSection=

Seven Breakthrough Sentiment Analysis Scenarios

Could sentiment analysis -- the automated mining of attitudes, opinions, and emotions from text, speech, and database sources -- have foretold the demise of Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak?

Can this fast-emerging technology and discipline predict the movement of Oracle's share price based on online and social reactions to company and market news? Could it quantify reactions to Groupon's widely panned SuperBowl ad and tell the ad-agency creative types what particular aspects viewers disliked? And in a more mundane, everyday application, could it identify product defects to help convert dissatisfied customers into promoters?

… In the pre-Net, pre-text analytics world, sentiment analysis was of very limited scope or limited to indirect measures. We had focus groups and other forms of "qualitative research" that, because they are expensive and generate voluminous text transcripts requiring laborious human analysis, can be used for only small samples.

Survey "verbatims" (free-text responses) are similarly expensive to analyze, so indicators such as the U.S. Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) have also been based on samples, with question responses limited to not-very-illuminating positive/negative/neutral responses.

Text analytics is a limit breaker. Solutions automate large-scale information collection, filtering, and classification technologies via natural language processing and data mining technologies that handle both factual and subjective information. Subjective information: That would be attitudes, moods, opinions, and emotions -- the province of sentiment analysis.

Will this approach become critical for any company whose reputation is challenged?

http://mashable.com/2011/02/17/taco-bell-social-media-defense/

What Brands Can Learn From Taco Bell’s Social Media Lawsuit Defense

When it comes to high profile lawsuits, it’s often been the plaintiff’s use of social media that makes headlines and wins those ever-important battles in the Court of Public Opinion. Blogs raise awareness of issues that could lead to lucrative litigation, and smart SEO and SEM campaigns can dominate the online conversation. Social media is used recruit potential class action clients. All the while, the target of the litigation — the defender — often stands mute, from a digital perspective. Commonly, the defender will cede control of the Internet’s messaging high ground to adversaries.

But the “no comment” strategy has increasingly been cast aside in an age when instant impressions can cause lasting reputation damage. More and more companies are realizing the benefits of mounting a digital defense when plaintiffs come knocking. As evidenced by the recent lawsuit against Taco Bell — alleging that its “seasoned beef” doesn’t meet USDA requirements for that label — defense messages are starting to compete for attention in the online space. Over the last several weeks, Taco Bell has written a template for digital litigation communications that — while certainly more aggressive than many lawsuits call for — has highlighted a number of best practices that every company playing social media defense should consider.