This whole affair, to coin a phrase, has left football fans around the country chuckling away and the reputation of one of British football’s greats in tatters. But it shows that all the money in the world cannot buy you good public relations support.

Giggs has clearly been badly advised. His team of legal and public relations advisors have taken on too much and lost it all in the eyes of the public. And it could have been so different if he hadn’t been so desperate to cover this up. In the days of Twitter and social media, there was only going to be one winner. And that was the masses.

Of course hindsight is easy. But Giggs had the reputation among sports fans and the media alike that he was a saint. A respected winner. Let’s get away from the stupidity of his indiscretion; after all, he’s a footballer and they all do it. What should he have done? He should have taken the likely one hit – a front page of the News of the World – with people up and down the country thinking something along the lines of ‘what a load of rubbish, as if Giggsy would do that’. It would have been forgotten the next day, no-one would have taken it seriously and he’d be able to brush it off. Whether he should be able to or not is another matter, but that’s what likely would have happened.

This whole case sets a precedent. Can newspapers outside of UK jurisdiction now just out a case like this and then let the internet do the rest? After all, Twitter went after this like vultures, in a mob-like manner. But I am sure that the Sunday Herald doesn’t care too much – reports suggest that they had over 1 million views on Sunday to their website when they broke the story (even though it wasn’t even covered online) and almost 2 million views on Monday as the story started to really unfold. Apparently, their online readership grew 220%. With these kinds of figures, plus the rise in print circulation from the day itself, it is unlikely to deter other papers in the future.

And now? Well, he’s the man who tried to take on Twitter. He’s the man who tried desperately to block it. He’s the man who cannot deny it. And he’s the man who stands here today with a reputation in tatters, a laughing stock, and as he approaches the end of his career, something that he’s likely to be remembered for. It could have been so different.

I don’t really care about footballer’s private lives; it doesn’t really interest me and he’s a complete idiot for doing what he did. But I, like so many others, now find it pretty funny. I’m particularly enjoying ribbing our resident Man Utd fan here in the office who’s devastated that her hero has been revealed as a love cheat. He’ll probably score the winner on Saturday night at Wembley. It might be the last time he scores away from home though.

Much has been said about the inevitable impact that Twitter and Facebook have had on our social lives (including this interesting piece from Gord Hotchkiss), but it really is incredible how strong the urge is to reach for the nearest mobile device when consuming media which once upon a time, used to be enough all on its own.  Take Masterchef, for example. I love Masterchef, as my colleagues and family will tell you, proven by my bookshelves groaning with cookbooks and my constant droning about how much I love Dhruv Baker, last year’s winner. However, when the long-awaited new series started last week, I spent so much time tweeting about how much I disliked the new format and finding out through Twitter / Facebook what everyone else thought, that I actually missed over half the programme.  When I tuned in again the next night, I forced myself to put the Blackberry down (well, actually, I was forced to because the rollerball broke), I realised that I actually loved the new format and I’d missed some cracking dishes the night before.

It’s not just about television, either.  As Hotchkiss rightly points out, we’ve now got to a point where social networking is starting to overshadow social interaction.  And I mean basic conversations with our friends and families.  I heard a client talking the other day about her two teenage children, who will sit on the sofa chatting to their friends for hours.  ‘How perfectly normal’, I hear you cry.  But these teenagers were not chatting in the verbal sense.  They were writing on each other’s Facebook walls. How sad that something so full of potential and innovation has turned into something which actually starts to negate all that it stood for in the first place: the ability to communicate.

So the moral of the story is that although it’s fantastic that we now have a medium, literally at our fingertips, with which to share and express opinions and pure joy about the programmes we love and the world around us, maybe it’s time we all gave in to the broken rollerball once in a while?  As my husband loves to tell me, maybe we all need to “stop talking about it and flipping watch it!!” And maybe even talk to each other once in a while?  Verbally?  Now there’s a thought…

Everyone knows colleagues are important; you’d have to be a pretty cold sort of person to spend the majority of your waking life in the company of people you didn’t enjoy. And even if you’re not best mates with every single one of them, being able to pull together in a crisis, share biscuits at the 3pm afternoon lull, or talk about last night’s TV round the proverbial water cooler, all help to make Mondays to Fridays that little bit more comfortable.

At Eulogy!, and I’m sure the same can be said by many other agencies, we pride ourselves on the culture we’ve created. Even after the changes (in size, staff and structure) I’ve witnessed over the last nine years, our culture has remained intact, and continues to be something that we eulogise about to prospects, clients and peers alike.

And even today; a day when I’ve been left smarting by a particularly well orchestrated ‘let’s all unfollow Phil on Twitter because he’s about to hit 100 followers’ campaign by my (bastard) colleagues, I still love working here. It really is that good.

That or I’m a sadist (which if you’d seen the size of the high heels I was wearing, you’d fully believe).

But then the phenomenon of twitter quickly came into the consciousness of footballers, and suddenly put a little dent into this vast gulf. Players could no longer fall asleep on the coach to a game without the picture being posted up by a cheeky teammate. Pictures of players relaxing and chilling out together doing things that the regular football fan does, helped to show the human side of these highly paid celebrities for the first time in years.

We all envy their lifestyle; get up late, pop along for training in the morning, and then go home and play their team-mates online at FIFA11. But twitter has helped create a more attainable and attractive personality for certain Premiership footballers. They seem, on the whole, to be relatively normal people who just happen to be famous and well paid footballers at the same time. Of course there are some players who write a load of absolute codswallop, but many players, particularly some of your high profile candidates, seem to engage with their fans in a way that is not controlled by their agents. It has even become a medium for some to apologise to their fans for a poor performance, something unheard of over the last few years as egos and salaries grew out of control.

Finally, football fans who shell out vast amounts of money to follow their team have started to feel in touch with their heroes again. And that can’t be a bad thing, unless you’re the suits at the archaic Football Association who got a little uptight at a Liverpool player mocking a referee through a tweet.

So what’s the conclusion for us? It harks back to the old social media notion of tangibility. Twitter, in particular, is an ideal platform for brands to create a personality and identity for themselves, and truly engage with their customers. And footballers are doing just that; for so long untouchable and unreachable, fans can now see the human side of their heroes.

If brands use and manage Twitter in the right way, they can create a brand personality and connect with their target consumer audiences, just as footballers are. Some brands are doing this well – Gatwick Airport for example, during the snow. Regular updates, prompt and quick personal responses and a wealth of information helped travellers stay in touch with developments as the snow took over.  They bridged the gap by showing real personality.. , engaging with consumers in a human way. Do Goliath brands need to transform themselves into many different Davids?  We can’t all have the appeal of Beckham, but we can learn a few tricks from his fellow team-mates.

Since Barack Obama embraced social networking as one of the core foundations of his 2008 Presidential campaign, the medium has been championed as the great new form of political engagement. It’s not difficult to see why.

Social networks such as Twitter offer politicians a unique opportunity to interact with their electorate on a mutually fair platform on a regular basis. For example, UK politicians like Kerry McCarthy MP, Dan Hannan MEP and even John Prescott MP have seen the virtues of social media in creating a dialogue with their constituents.

Blogging, too, has become a growing political force. A brief look at services such as Social Media Affairs, which catalogues political blogs, demonstrates the growing list of increasingly influential voices online, such as Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes.

Social media has also emphatically demonstrated how it can bring cohesion to a social movement. Whether it has been to tell a company that what it’s doing is wrong, to protest against someone’s actions, or even to protest against Governments, platforms such as Twitter have provided ‘average Joe’ with a phenomenal vehicle for uniting behind a common cause.

Obama has more than 2.7 million followers on Twitter, while the use of his website, MyBarackObama.com, to organise support is well documented. It helped to cement his placement as a grassroots candidate during his 2008 election, as well as encouraging individuals to become directly involved in Obama’s campaign.

It’s a point that brands should take note of. The level of engagement that enveloped Obama’s supporters provided them with an investment in the campaign and as such they went that extra mile, providing millions of fundraising dollars and eventually elevating Obama to the White House.

By engaging with their customers, brands could build a similarly loyal group of advocates who they can rely upon to champion their brand which, in the current competitive economic climate, could be vital to a company’s survival.

It goes without saying that a strong online presence is high on the agenda for a growing number of brands these days. And it’s easy to see why; a strong presence in social media offers a huge opportunity to create a dialogue with consumers and offer a real human aspect to brands that may otherwise seem distant and faceless.

Whole Foods Market is an example of a brand getting its approach to social media spot on. The US supermarket chain has 150 Twitter accounts, each providing highly targeted content and offering a responsive customer service. As a result, the brand has received plaudits for being highly engaged with consumers and creating a strong customer service dialogue.

Starbucks has also been innovative in its approach to social media. The coffee brand offered people a free pastry with their drink for one day, which led to 600,000 fans confirming their ‘attendance’ of the event on the Facebook group, while Starbucks became the number one topic on Twitter. That indicates nearly 1 per cent of total tweets mentioned the brand – nearly 10 times the amount of mentions on a typical day.

Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford, said recently that 90 per cent of social media for brands is showing up, and that it’s the other 10 per cent that’s the hard part. It’s true that success requires creativity and innovation, but the opportunities social media gives to offer a personal touch to consumers (not to mention extended brand exposure) means that it’s something brands can no longer afford to ignore.