Social Media

• Most Topular Stories

• Facebook Addiction: Fact or Fad?

  Mike's Lifestream

  27 May 2012 | 3:41 pm

• The Future of Branding

  Gauravonomics

  gauravonomics@gmail.com (Gaurav Mishra)

  27 May 2012 | 3:11 am

  Imagining the Future of Branding In previous essays, I wrote about possible futures of social networking and media, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself. I used a 2×2 matrix with likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis, leading to four scenarios. I said that the likely/ negative quadrant is the default, as our world seems to devolve into chaos, when left to its own devices; if we reach out for our better selves, we might create a better world, in the likely/ positive quadrant; if we are lucky, we might even exceed…

• Managing Social Media in a Crisis: The Good News, the Bad News, and What You Can Do About It

  Social Media Today - The world's best thinkers on social media

  StanMag

  27 May 2012 | 11:26 pm

  What social network sciences can tell us about managing social media in a crisis...

• 6 Powerful Reasons Why you Should include Images in your Marketing – Infographic

  Jeffbullas's Blog

  Jeff Bullas

  27 May 2012 | 3:21 pm

  Tweet I have become a habitual Instagrammer. When I am out cycling, walking or just sitting admiring the view or the passing parade, I am looking for photo oportunities that I can snap and then share on my Instagram “app”. All I need to be carrying is my iPhone or iPad and with my Instagram app waiting patiently for me, I can capture that photo, apply a snazzy filter and click the Facebook and the Twitter share buttons and it flies around the world. It then showcases in my follower’s streams and updates and invites them to engage with me by commenting, liking or sharing.

• What Is YouTube’s Partner Program?

  Sprout Insights

  Jennifer Beese

  28 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  When it comes to social media, a loyal audience is arguably more important than a large one. Most often this is achieved by having an active presence on social networking sites, but the same level of detail should be applied to the media you’re sharing as well. YouTube does a great job of helping small businesses and large brands create meaningful relationships with customers, and drive sales, through the use of video. Consistently creating compelling content can be a challenge, however. The company’s Partner Program — which recently opened to all content creators — provides…

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  building43

• Engagio: The Online Conversations Inbox

  Robert Scoble

  25 May 2012 | 6:12 am

  Engagio is your inbox for online conversations, relationships and a social conversations network. Engagio is a Gmail-like productivity tool to manage your conversations in social networks and commenting systems. Engagio gives you visibility about the people behind these conversations and reveals their social identities profile, saving you time and allowing you to connect with them. Powerful search capabilities make Engagio an absorbing platform for analyzing what’s being said in your social circles, while also letting you manage interactions. Engagio aggregates social sites with an aim…

• Ask Ziggy: Phone a Friend Hands Free

  Robert Scoble

  16 May 2012 | 9:03 am

  The Ask Ziggy app for Windows Phone 7 platform is a free program that translates human speech into transcribed text. Use Ask Ziggy to call contacts, send texts, emails and tweets, get local weather, and update your social networks. The app can also switch from female to male voice as well. “Natural language processing is a big part of this. What we try to do is take natural language, and we break it down into different parts of speech,” explains Shai Leib, Ask Ziggy founder & CEO. “The parts of speech like the nouns, the verbs, the adjectives and the different phrases that they…

• AngelPad: Building Great Startups!

  Robert Scoble

  8 May 2012 | 8:36 am

  AngelPad is a mentorship program founded by Thomas Korte with a team of ex-Google employees to help technology startups build better products, attract seed funding and grow more successful businesses. AngelPad provides founders with funding, mentorship and the chance to work alongside other great founders at the AngelPad office in San Francisco. “AngelPad is in the business of taking companies from a very early stage, anytime from idea to some prototyping, all the way through fundraising and beyond as they become part of the network of companies in AngelPad,” explains Thomas Korte,…

• Firebase: Syncing Data between Clients

  Robert Scoble

  7 May 2012 | 7:17 am

  Firebase is a cloud service that automatically synchronizes data between clients and with their cloud servers. It frees developers from worrying about how their data will be communicated and stored, and allows them to focus on their own application logic. Apps built with Firebase can be written entirely with client-side JavaScript, update in real-time out-of-the-box, are inherently scalable, and interoperate well with existing services. “Firebase is a scalable real-time backend. What that means in layman terms is it’s like Dropbox for your applications data. It really let you build great…

• BoostCTR: Improving Online Ad Copy

  Robert Scoble

  7 May 2012 | 6:25 am

  BoostCTR powers leading advertisers and agencies to optimize ad content across search and social networks. It is the first comprehensive and systematic approach to optimizing ad content. The Boost Method combines proprietary technology with its network of 500+ expert copywriters to deliver highly effective, performance-driven online ad copy at scale. Founded three and a half years ago in Miami, BoostCTR is now headquartered in San Francisco. David Greenbaum, CEO of BoostCTR says, “BoostCTR is a service that is focused and dedicated on one thing – which is improving pay-per-click (PPC) ad…

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  Social Media Examiner

• 5 Simple Metrics to Track Your Social Media Efforts

  Jason Miller

  28 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Are you looking for simple, straightforward metrics to measure the impact of your social media efforts?Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online (accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet) according to a recent Nielsen report on social media, .While we all know how important it is to market through the various social networks, it is vital to track and measure your efforts for success.Here are five simple metrics to find out whether your social media effort is paying dividends.#1: Examine Referring TrafficGoogle Analytics is a…

• Facebook Camera App: This Week in Social Media

  Cindy King

  26 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.What’s New This Week?Facebook Releases Camera: The new Camera Facebook app has similar features to Instagram which was recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion.The new Camera app enables you to "share photos on Facebook faster than ever, and see all your friends' latest shots in one place."Play Games Directly in Your Facebook News Feed:  Facebook is launching “the ability for people to…

• Win Free Tickets to Content Marketing World 2012

  Michael Stelzner

  25 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Want to win a free ticket to the largest content marketing event on the planet?Our friends at the Content Marketing Institute have put together an amazing event taking place in Columbus, Ohio this year.  And they’ve agreed to let us give away two tickets to this special event.First, what is this event?Content Marketing World 2012 is the largest in-person conference dedicated to helping marketers and business owners master content marketing.  This year’s conference takes place September 4-6, 2012 at the Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio (just outside the Ohio State…

• 5 New Twitter Tools to Boost Your Marketing

  Leon Widrich

  24 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Are you seeing the results you want from your Twitter activities?There are over 1,000,000 different apps for Twitter and a new one is added every second.This means it is often quite easy to get confused finding those that actually add real value to your day-to-day tweeting.I took a look at some of the latest and most promising Twitter tools to get you tweeting like a pro.So, if you think it is time to up your game with some new tools, keep reading.Here are 5 tools to help you power up your Twitter marketing efforts.#1: Twylah—Make Your Tweets Live LongerOne of the tools that can make a huge…

• How to Promote Your Blog With Social Media

  Marc Pitman

  23 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Are you looking to use social media to promote your blog?Sharing your blog posts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and even Tumblr can help your content gain significant exposure.But each social media platform is distinct with different benefits and abilities. You need a simple process to tailor your social sharing to generate as much engagement as you can on each of these platforms.Here’s a process you can use to ensure your posts get maximum mileage. Consider these steps and adapt them to the social platforms where you find your customers.#1: TumblrI’ve…

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  TechCrunch

• Backstage at Disrupt, Cornell’s Dan Huttenlocher is Bringing Big Red to the Big Apple

  Semil Shah

  28 May 2012 | 8:00 am

  Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil Cornell University made big news earlier in the year when it was announced the Ivy League school, located in upstate New York, would open a technology campus in New York City. Leading the charge for Big Red will be Dan Huttenlocher, dean of computing and information science — and a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Dean Huttenlocher was kind enough to come backstage after his session to discuss more details about the campus and program. Cornell will build a technology…

• Surprise! Announcing The TC Mini-Meet Up In Philadelphia On June 19

  John Biggs

  28 May 2012 | 7:28 am

  If you’re in the City of Brotherly Love, you’re in a for a treat. Thanks to constant entreaties by one of your own, Anthony Coombs, we’re going to hold a mini-meet up in Philly on June 19 at the Field House, 1150 Filbert St. Please RSVP here. As is our wont, we like to hold these on neutral ground and we’d love to sit down with you to chat about what you’re working on during the day. We’ll have very limited time, so if you’d like to sit with us, please submit a request through ohours.org. We’re holding office hours at Caribou Cafe near the…

• The Authors Of Space Quest Are Back With Another Adventure

  John Biggs

  28 May 2012 | 6:59 am

  If you’re an older gamer, you will remember the holy trinity of Sierra RPGs – King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest. All three of these games used something called “imagination” and “storytelling” to immerse early gamers in an Ad Lib sound card-induced gaming coma. Now you can re-live those heady days with a new game by the makers of Space Quest, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (aka “The Two Guys from Andromeda”). Their new game, called SpaceVenture, is a refresh of the old Sierra series and promises spills, chills, and horrible jokes.

• GameStop Rolls Out Android Tablets With Pre-Loaded Games To 1,600 Stores

  Matt Burns

  28 May 2012 | 6:49 am

  Diversification is the key to longevity. With that likely in mind, GameStop just announced widespread availability of Android tablets throughout its chain of retail stores. This comes after a 200 store trial that started last October. These aren’t ordinary Android tablets, though. GameStop is pre-loading the Samsung, Asus, Acer, and Toshiba with extra gaming titles such as Sonic CD, Riptide, the Kongregate Arcade app and a free issue of GameStop’s gaming mag, Game Informer. Thanks to these extras and with prices that are inline with other stores, GameStop actually has a chance to…

• Fast Track To A Facebook Phone — Buy INQ Mobile?

  Mike Butcher

  28 May 2012 | 6:21 am

  As the heat around the “Facebook Phone” story gets higher, our thoughts turn to the days a couple of years ago when it emerged Facebook had been thinking about developing an actual phone. Back then, it transpired that Facebook was working with INQ Mobile on a smartphone. The phone duly emerged – the INQ1 – and did indeed have great Facebook integration. Even if it hasn’t exactly been a smash hit, it’s fared well enough. Indeed, HTC has also released their own “Facebook” phone, such HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa respectively. INQ’s runs on Google’s…

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  ReadWriteWeb

• The Latest iOS Jailbreak Is Here - Should You Bother?

  28 May 2012 | 8:00 am

  A mere three weeks after Apple released iOS 5.1.1, the jailbreaking community has cracked it wide open. The latest version of the Absinthe jailbreaking tool is now available for download and it covers most iOS 5-compatible generations of the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Because of changes in hardware - most notably the A5 processor - it took hackers several months to jailbreak iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. Now that the biggest technical hurdles have been overcome, these new jailbreaks are coming out more rapidly.  Who Is Absinthe 2.0 For?  The new version of Absinthe…

• The Tech CEO Hall of Shame

  28 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  In the grand pantheon of disgraced technology company CEOs, the resume blunder of ousted Yahoo Chief Executive Scott Thompson seems almost trivial. Claiming an unearned degree pales in comparison to the true titans of tech transgressions - whose careers were toppled by everything from massive fraud and grand larceny to inappropriate dalliances with underlings. Each imploded in their own particular way, but all their stories come mixed with heaping helpings of arrogance and a dollop of coverup. Here’s your chance to meet the real world of Horrible Bosses, and get a glimpse of how they were…

• [Video] We Bet Yahoo Will Buy Pinterest

  28 May 2012 | 4:00 am

  In this ReadWriteWeb Hangout, Robyn and Jon speculate wildly about who, if anyone, will acquire Pinterest. Robyn collected responses to the question from RWW readers all week, and they discussed all the possibilities. Jon was pretty sure of himself at first, but Robyn convinced him of her pick by the end. Here are links to the posts and topics we talked about: RWW Storify: Who do you think will buy Pinterest? (embedded below) RWW: Why Flickr & Pinterest Need Each Other Engauge: Pinterest: A Review of Social Media's Newest Sweetheart Google+ conversation on this Hangout with Greg Cohn from…

• Why Microsoft Killed Windows Live

  28 May 2012 | 12:32 am

  Microsoft is finally killing off the confusing "Windows Live" brand. It's being replaced with a renewed focus on Microsoft's biggest piece of software - the Windows OS - together with a new and all-encompassing identity system named "Microsoft account." Windows Live has been Microsoft's online branding since it was unveiled back in November 2005. But Windows Live never worked, mainly because the brand was applied to Microsoft products inconsistently and seemingly at random. The change in branding was recently explained by Chris Jones, VP of the Windows Live group. The…

• Cartoon: ROTF in Melancholy Despair

  27 May 2012 | 12:20 pm

  See more of Rob's cartoons at Noise to Signal.

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  Mashable!

• Veteran Central: A Career-Oriented Social Network for Vets

  Lauren Hockenson

  28 May 2012 | 8:33 am

  After spending nine years on tour with the Navy, Michael Barrett found that adjusting to civilian life — especially finding a stable and well-paying job — was a tough and arduous process. “It’s a difficult transition, because we don’t have a profession to speak of,” Barrett explains. “We’re handicapped in that regard, and we’re less marketable in the work world.” While entrepreneur Jonathon Lunardi was researching veteran suicide with his brother-in-law, Paul McDonald, he became familiar with Barrett’s sentiments and saw a need…

• 10 Insanely Clickable Banner Ads

  Todd Wasserman

  28 May 2012 | 7:21 am

  It’s no secret that at one in 1,000, the average click-through rate for banner ad is rather pitiful. Think of other things with similar probabilities. For instance, over the course of your life, you have a one in 3,000 chance of getting struck by lightning. Despite the challenging odds, a few intrepid ad executives still see banners as promising terrain. The fact that display ads are often seen as a backwater controlled by direct-response marketers doesn’t daunt such modern day Mad Men, who think they can redefine the medium and, yes, even get readers to click. The 10 examples…

• Can These Video Games Help You Make Better Life Choices?

  Kate Freeman

  28 May 2012 | 7:04 am

  The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place. Name: WILL Interactive Big Idea: WILL Interactive develops Virtual Experience Immersive Learning Simulations (VEILS), which are interactive movies that force users to make serious decisions as a learning experience. Why It’s Working: With more than 70 games on topics including the military, financial decision-making and youth education, WILL Interactive has developed a new form of educational and therapeutic media. Walk in the…

• Nokia to Launch Batman-Themed Lumia 900

  Stan Schroeder

  28 May 2012 | 6:50 am

  The Dark Knight does not care about iPhones or Androids — he’s all about Windows Phone 7, wrapped into a black polycarbonate shell of a Lumia 900. That, at least, is what Nokia wants us to believe as it prepares a Batman-themed Lumia 900, announced via Twitter. The device, Pocket-lint learns, will be “extremely limited,” and will come only in black, with a laser-etched Batman logo on the back. It’s safe to assume that, functionality-wise, it will be exactly the same as the standard Lumia 900. The packaging of the device might be different from the standard Lumia…

• Zuckerberg, Chan Make Bizarre Cameo in Chinese Documentary [VIDEO]

  Todd Wasserman

  28 May 2012 | 5:35 am

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his bride, Priscilla Chan, have made a bizarre, odds-beating cameo in a Chinese documentary that’s become a viral sensation in that country. The doc, from China Central Television, shows the two cavorting in Shanghai in March, weeks before their recent wedding. The pair visited the country that month for a personal trip. According to CNet, the images of Zuck and Chan have since gone viral in China on Sina Weibo, a popular social media site. The 40-second clip above shows the two apparently caught at random during the shooting of the doc — an…

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  Charlene Li

• Beyond the IPO: Ten Implications of a Public Facebook

  Charlene Li

  8 May 2012 | 8:05 am

  By Susan Etlinger, Charlene Li and Rebecca Lieb The run-up to Facebook’s IPO reminds me a bit of a wedding: everyone’s attention is on the big day (expected to be Friday May 18), without much regard for the weeks, months and years afterward. Charlene Li, Rebecca Lieb, and I sat down to discuss some of the implications of a newly public Facebook: on shareholders, business and Facebook itself. — SE  (Cross-posted from altimetergroup.com.) Whether or not Facebook’s IPO ends up being one of the world’s largest (this Washington Post article places it 6th, between…

• Webinar: A Foundation For Mobile Business

  Charlene Li

  20 Mar 2012 | 10:46 am

  Now for a word on mobile in the enterprise. Altimeter’s mobile analyst, Chris Silva, is working on a report that explores how managers on the business-side – not the IT – side of the organization are increasingly leading the charge to bring mobility to their workforce. A key challenge is how to build the control and security foundation for a mobile business strategy. Chris and I will be hosting an open, no-cost webinar on Wed March 28th at 10am PT/1pm ET that will discuss the key elements of the mobile control layer, its importance, and how both the technologies and leadership…

• Report: Making The Business Case For Enterprise Social Networks

  Charlene Li

  22 Feb 2012 | 1:58 am

  In 2011, the US hit a milestone — more than half of all adults visit social networking sites at least once a month. But when it comes to using social-networking technologies inside organizations, many business leaders are at a loss to understand what value can be created from Facebook-like status updates within the enterprise. Some organizations have deployed social-networking features with an initial enthusiastic reception, only to see these early efforts wither to just a few stalwart participants. The problem: Most companies approach enterprise social networks as a technology deployment…

• New Report: “Make An App For That: Mobile Strategies For Retailers”

  Charlene Li

  7 Feb 2012 | 10:16 am

  When it comes to shopping, I have a love/hate relationship with my iPhone. Some apps are actually helpful, letting me explore products or buy something immediate. But the vast majority of the retailer apps litter my screens, sitting unused after an initial, disappointing whirl. My frustration is reflected in the findings of my colleague Chris Silva‘s new report, entitled “Make An App For That: Mobile Strategies For Retailers“. Of particular value is that Chris pivots the report around two major strategies retails can use when it comes to mobile: Enrich: These strategies are…

• Jerry Yang’s departure signals a New Day for Yahoo!, the passing of an era for Tech

  Charlene Li

  17 Jan 2012 | 4:30 pm

  My first reaction to the news that Jerry Yang is leaving Yahoo! was that this was the passing of an era. I first met Jerry in 1994 when he was still a PhD student at Stanford, before he and David Filo left to run Yahoo! full time. Through bubbles and two economic downturns, Jerry has always been omnipresent in Silicon Valley. But all good things come to pass. With the arrival of Scott Thompson as the new CEO of Yahoo!, it makes sense that Scott be given a clean slate upon which to write the future of Yahoo!. This is very much the norm for incoming CEOs, where founders are asked to take a…

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  SmartBrief on Social Media

• Analysis: Google's "Hangouts on Air" is a big deal

  25 May 2012 | 8:54 am

  Google's "Hangouts on Air" service, which lets brands open up their Google+ video chats to a wider audience, turns the social -More- 

• Commentary: 6 more image-sharing apps Facebook should snap up

  25 May 2012 | 8:54 am

   -More- 

• Why did Facebook build an Instagram clone?

  25 May 2012 | 8:54 am

  Facebook has announced the launch of Camera, a mobile application that bears a striking resemblance to Instagram, the social  -More- 

• What Facebook learned from Chinese communism

  25 May 2012 | 8:54 am

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to run an open, democratic community, but his methods are actually closer to those -More- 

• SmartBrief will not publish Monday

  25 May 2012 | 8:54 am

  In observance of Memorial Day in the U.S., SmartBrief will not be published Monday. Publication will resume Tuesday. -More- Account Supervisor - Digital - PR Edelman

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  Social Media Today - The world's best thinkers on social media

• 'Yelp! I've Fallen! And, I Can't Get Up!' (6 Ways to Prevent and Resolve Negative Online Reviews)

  Eric Harr-Resonate Social Media

  28 May 2012 | 2:38 am

  If you're a business owner, the pain of getting "Yelped" falls somewhere between a moderate migraine and a worm burrowing in your brain.There you are: cheerfully flitting about, running a beautiful business--and BLAMO! A rageaholic on a bad day (or rather, a bad life) spends an inordinate amount of time churning out pure vitriol about your brand. Vitriol that spews every minute of every day rearing its sinister head--sending potential customers into the warm embrace of...your competition.

• Managing Social Media in a Crisis: The Good News, the Bad News, and What You Can Do About It

  StanMag

  27 May 2012 | 11:26 pm

  What social network sciences can tell us about managing social media in a crisis...

• The 3 Missing Links In Twitter

  Prasant Naidu

  27 May 2012 | 6:30 pm

  Three things that are missing from Twitter and having them will definitely increase the user experience.

• Facebook’s Plans for the World Wide Web

  David Amerland

  27 May 2012 | 8:10 am

  When you’re the world’s largest social network you find it difficult to let defeat slow you down. Facebook may be autocratic in the way it deals with its membership base and it may want to own the web and all its content but it is also the place where everyone goes to hangout online with their friends and it just keeps on growing...

• Cookie Law in UK: Business Stalking vs. User Engagement

  LaurentFrancois

  27 May 2012 | 8:10 am

  EU e-Privacy law (aka Cookie Law in UK media...) has been tackled by many e-commerce lobbies. ICO has finally accepted that implied consent was acceptable. But does it solve the true issue when it comes to social consumers? Isn't it time to think Social Business at a global level, not to just generate "buzz"?

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  Social Media Explorer

• Memorial Day Thoughts From SME

  Jason Falls

  28 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  A happy Memorial Day to you all, especially those who might be somber today because of a loved one lost in the service of his or her country. Know that they did not die in vain. Whether in combat or not, stateside or abroad, each person who has had the bravery and valor to serve their country deserves our gratitude. And though this holiday is primarily celebrated by Americans, we’d like to extend the same gratitude and respect to anyone who has served, regardless of country. Sacrificing one’s safety to pursue principles larger than ones self is awesome. Paying the ultimate…

• SoLoMo Show Episode 20: BIG Announcements (and Social-Loco Ticket Giveaway)

  Adam Helweh

  25 May 2012 | 11:00 pm

  The SoLoMo Show is a weekly podcast hosted by Adam Helweh and Cory OBrien. Each week they discuss topics, trends and tactics related to social, local and mobile marketing. Every weekend we will publish the latest episode, related show notes and links to all of the topics discussed on the show here on Social Media Explorer. This episode Adam and Cory discuss BIG announcements about the SoLoMo Show, including an appearance at the Social-Loco conference, a weekly feature on Social Media Explorer, and the availability of the show live on Google+ Hangouts On Air, an infographic that compares…

• Social Media Explorer Welcomes the SoLoMo Show on Weekends

  Adam Helweh

  25 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  Well if you didn’t consider all of the great social media and digital marketing goodness here on SME enough to wet your whistle, I’m happy to share some great news with you. A little backstory first. Since January 1st 2012, friend Cory OBrien and I have been hosting The SoLoMo Show a weekly podcast where we discuss the intersection of social, local and mobile marketing and advertising. Cory and I are both incredibly passionate about these topics and in late 2011 decided we wanted to share our thoughts with passionate professionals and practitioners. Where better to find…

• Social Media Measurement Model [Infographic]

  Mark Smiciklas

  24 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  As social media becomes more widely accepted as a business tool, organizations embracing the medium are slowly becoming more adept at creating content and engaging with their audiences. The next step for organizations that are comfortable with the content side of things is the development of a strategy and tactics to measure the performance of their social media activity. The following model is a work in progress that aims to build on a social media measurement framework developed by John Lovett and Jeremiah Owyang. Here are some notes about the model components: Business Goals – In…

• Testing A New Blogging Platform … Wanna Join Me?

  Jason Falls

  23 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  I’m super excited to be testing a new blogging platform that will be unveiled publicly at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in New York next month. Overblog (client) is one of the top blogging platforms in Europe. Until now, they haven’t had a U.S.-focused product. That all changes with not just an English version of the France-based company’s platform, but a whole new platform. No, I’m not testing Overblog here on Social Media Explorer. I’m running my personal blog, Falls, Off The Rocker, with it. In fact, Overblog’s new platform is actually focused on the…

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  @ProBlogger

• The Naked Marketing Guide to Getting Dramatically More Traffic and Subscribers

  Guest Blogger

  28 May 2012 | 7:07 am

  This guest post is by Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing Let’s be real for a second. There’s a lot of information out there about traffic. Tons of it. Entire blogs. Some good, some bad, and some just in between. And tons of posts about it, too—including right here on this blog. So with all this information out there, let me ask you something: Do you have all the traffic you want? Hmmm, I thought not. Okay, then just what the heck is going on? Why isn’t any of this working?! Maybe your traffic problem … isn’t a traffic problem! Considering all of the great information that’s…

• Secure Your WordPress Blog Without Touching Any Code

  Guest Blogger

  27 May 2012 | 7:03 am

  This guest post is by Karol K of ThemeFuse. Right now WordPress powers 48 of the top 100 blogs online. More than that, WordPress actually powers 19% of the web as a whole. Essentially, this is great. Such a strong community of users and developers means that the platform is sure to evolve even further and provide us with lots of cool features that are yet to be developed. Unfortunately, this creates some dangers as well… Whenever there’s a big number of people trying to make something happen, there’s another group of people trying to take it all down. The cases where a blog…

• 5 Surefire Ways to Never Get Noticed by Anybody

  Guest Blogger

  26 May 2012 | 7:09 am

  This guest post is by Steve of thecodeofextraordinarychange.com. I’m a quiet man. Shy in some circumstances. I like my own company and my own time. Left unchecked, these qualities would be enough to ensure that I lived out the rest of my life as a small man in a tiresome job, never making a difference and never getting noticed by anybody. But I can’t imagine a worse hell than that. Really, I can’t. I know that I’ll never leave my fingerprints on the world unless I deliberately engage with it, and I’ll never put my dent in the universe unless I get out there…

• What Blog Products Are You Working On?

  Darren Rowse

  25 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  At the start of this month, I began releasing details of this year’s ProBlogger Training Day. This is a big event for me and my team, and there’s a lot to organize. The Training Day won’t take place until October, but already we’ve spent months organizing speakers, booking venues, releasing earlybird tickets, and so on. Around the same time I put out a call for alpha testers on the new ProBlogger Marketplace we’ve been working on. Something that occurred to me as I was busily preparing these announcements was just how much work goes into the products and services…

• 14 Proven Ways to Simplify Your Blogging and Get More Done

  Guest Blogger

  24 May 2012 | 1:09 pm

  This guest post is by Nick Thacker of Livehacked.com. We’ve all had that feeling of impending doom: “My readers are expecting me to post tomorrow, but I haven’t even answered my emails, check my Analytics stats, or responded to the Twitter shout-outs. There’s just no way I can get it all done…” Or something like that. If you’ve ever felt like the pressures of maintaining a blog—not to mention the rest of your business—are becoming too much, it could be time to simplify what you’re doing. Here are 14 proven methods for getting more blogging done in less time. And what’s…

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  Social Fresh

• Facebook Launches Promoted Posts, Pay As Little As $5 For More Fans To See Page Content

  Lauren K. Gray

  23 May 2012 | 10:58 am

  Facebook’s Promoted posts are live for some pages in the US, as of yesterday. And are rolling out to many more. Some are reporting that pages with fewer than 500 fans may not yet see the feature. This means pages can now pay to “promote” a post from their Timeline so that it will reach a greater percentage of their fans on Facebook. This feature has been reported on for the last month or so as being beta tested. The starting price for promoting individual posts is $5.00 and the highest price $300.00. The promotion stretches across a 3 day period according to Facebook:…

• Oh great, Facebook has fallen in love with gradients on photos

  Jason Keath

  23 May 2012 | 6:21 am

  Facebook is 8 years old. And often acts like it. As a child wants to be something new everyday or to paint their room a new color every new month — Facebook does it a little differently, and instead enjoys making significant changes to profiles and pages. Every month changes roll out. And every month users cope, like house guests bending to the will of child with super powers. Yes, that was a Twilight Zone reference. Sometimes the changes are good. And sometimes they seem trivial. Recently, it is someone at Facebook’s job to put black gradients on all the photos of the site. Now…

• Facebook makes managing pages easier with new app

  Lauren K. Gray

  22 May 2012 | 8:00 am

  Facebook launched a new app on Monday that lets you manage your Facebook pages from your iPhone. And while lots of Facebook page admins had difficulty downloading and launching the app yesterday, because of high demand, it seems to be working smoothly today and we had a chance to do a full walkthrough. Simply put, managing Facebook pages from your iPhone just got a lot easier. So if you are on the go, or always have your iPhone on you as a Facebook page admin, this is a must download. Now, let’s look at the features. Using the new Facebook Pages Manager app you can Post status updates…

• 7 cool social media trends in the travel industry

  David Urmann

  22 May 2012 | 7:47 am

  It seems that everyday we are greeted by a host of new social networks vying to catch our attention. The travel industry is no exception and a host of sites have launched in the past several years all trying to capture the attention of the traveler and take a piece of the online travel market. Despite the dominance of the big players, such as Expedia and Priceline, several new social travel sites have been able to attract large audiences and significant outside investments in relatively quick time periods. Here is a quick look at the top 7 trends that the newest social travel sites are…

• 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Flip The Script with Social Media

  Jason Mollica

  22 May 2012 | 7:13 am

  We’ve all heard that social media can help grow your business and brand, financially. But say you are a Mom and Pop coffee shop in a small town. Why would you want to use Facebook? Why NOT?! Small town businesses can use social media to grow their customer base. I work with these types of businesses and their owners often do not see the connection between social and more foot traffic. Let’s be honest, there are still many businesses that recoil when they hear the words Facebook and Twitter. These five tips can be effective when talking to any small business. What can social media do for…

• 

  socialmouths

• Why Small Business Have A Huge Advantage Over Brands In Social Media

  Francisco Rosales

  10 May 2012 | 10:18 am

  I currently have the fortune to experience two different fronts of digital marketing. Under Plural, I work with brands and, with SocialMouths I mostly jam with small business, personal brands, and bloggers. One of the reasons I absolutely love this setup is that they are two different worlds in how the social web is approached, how it’s handled and how success is measured. So I’m here to tell you that, despite the ridiculous budgets and unlimited resources, small business has a huuuge advantage over brands when it come to social media. Here are my thoughts: Strategy. Or Not? This…

• How to Display Social Media Buttons

  Brad Shorr

  8 May 2012 | 10:05 am

  Guest post by Brad Shorr from Straight North. Effective display of social media buttons on your blog and website becomes more critical every day: On the people side, social media for business has gone mainstream, so building a community around your company pages opens up huge opportunities for sales, leads and referrals. On the SEO side, social shares are being given more weight by Google and other search engines. Content that is liked, tweeted and +1’d will perform better in SERPs than lonely, unloved blog posts and web pages. This post includes several suggestions for displaying social…

• The 4 Economic Reasons to Rebrand Your Business

  Sookie Shuen

  4 May 2012 | 7:41 am

  This is a guest post by Sookie Shuen from Tomorrow People. How much can your company benefit from a timely rebranding and revitalization? When considering this question, one must keep in mind that rebranding does not necessarily address the wants and needs of the company directly, but rather speaks to the wants and needs of that company’s current and prospective customers.  Therefore, the important factors to consider when assessing the value of a rebrand include equity measurement; market differentiation and accessibility; brand awareness, relevance and vitality; and consumer personality,…

• 10 Blog Conversion Tips From Derek Halpern

  Francisco Rosales

  2 May 2012 | 7:28 am

  This week I want to talk about blog conversion, the art of making your visitors take action whether that means spending more time reading your content, buying one of your products or subscribing to your email list. There is plenty of content out there on how to convert your readers to subscribers and buyers and, if you take your blogging seriously as an integral part of your marketing, you’ve probably read tens or even hundreds of posts about the topic. Me? I went to Derek Halpern for advice on how to improve SocialMouths. Derek is the author of SocialTriggers, where he writes about…

• Video Blogging As A Powerful Lead Generation Tool

  Ryan Critchett

  26 Apr 2012 | 8:56 am

  This is a guest post from Ryan Critchett from RMC Tech. Editor’s note: I usually don’t do this but in this case I thought it was important to point out that, the intention behind this type of content is to showcase real entrepreneurs and their stories of successful use of social media marketing, rather than presenting the usual suspects nobody can relate to, like Redbull or Starbucks. These are real examples you can put into action. The story is told by Ryan and, if you have something similar going on, share it with me. Here goes… It’s no secret, video blogging is a…

• 

  Bazaarvoice Blog

• CEOs’ top priority: understanding and serving “markets of one”

  Tara DeMarco

  24 May 2012 | 8:19 am

  “Fundamentally, the only competitive advantage one has is client knowledge,” says Thomas Kalaris, CEO of Barclays Wealth and Investment Management. Understanding customers as individuals has become priority one for CEOs – as a group, they’re investing more in consumer insights than any other area. After in-person interviews with over 1,700 CEOs from 18 industries across 64 countries, IBM released the results of their biennial Global CEO Study. Here are three key takeaways from the study. Data will finally define “markets of one” Among the traits of a great CEO, 61% of those…

• More than a fling: word of mouth creates lasting relationships

  Emily Reagan

  22 May 2012 | 7:15 am

  Maker’s Mark treats its best customers much like a doting lover. The bourbon brand spends 30% of its marketing budget on members of its Ambassador program: tattooing their names on aging bourbon barrels, printing business cards to help Ambassadors brag on the brand, and faithfully sending annual Christmas gifts – like last year’s “ugly Christmas sweater” for the bottle. When I arrived at  Word of Mouth Crash Course, I expected some breakfast, coffee, and lots of buzzwords. I didn’t expect an opening keynote from Andy Sernovitz about love and relationships. At first glance, you…

• Companies: Stop blogging like you’re Kim Kardashian

  Ian Greenleigh

  21 May 2012 | 8:03 am

  The best company blogs don’t know they’re company blogs. They hold their own when compared to the blogs of any type. They aren’t weighed down by the jargon and promotional language typical of corporate content—the kind of content that Made to Stick was born to combat. The best blogs, corporate or otherwise, are adventurous. They take risks, ponder important questions, and excite readers. Me! Me! Me! Many companies blog like they’re Kim Kardashian: “Let’s talk about me!” They place themselves at the center, and post only content that reflects this view of the world. Repurposed…

• 10 things you didn’t know about online consumers

  Ian Greenleigh

  15 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Note: This post originally ran on  iStrategy Blog , and is republished here with permission.  Online consumers love to share their opinions with each other on the things they buy. Savvy shoppers have always turned to this public feedback for guidance, but since more and more word of mouth data has been digitized, archived, and analyzed, companies are now able to rely on it for their own guidance. In the last year alone, our research has distilled tens of millions of consumer data points into a strikingly clear picture of today’s consumers. Here are ten of the most interesting things…

• Technology is child’s play (how toys, consumers, and marketers are connecting)

  Haylie Rudy

  9 May 2012 | 11:07 am

  The playroom we all live in I have a sister who is much younger than me.  I remember practicing my killer basketball skills on the courts in middle school when I received news that I needed to rush to the hospital to welcome baby Ellie into the world.   Ellie and I have been able to grow close over the years. I like to think I’m not the terrorizing, bossy older sister, but rather more like a caring aunt or even second, “cool” Mom. Ellie is now in middle school herself, obsessed with her iPhone and constantly documenting every moment of her life via Instagram.  Last weekend at a…

• 

  JasonKeath.com

• Facebook Dominating Google in Press Mentions

  Jason Keath

  24 May 2012 | 10:14 am

  Research tool, HighBeam Research, calculated the amount of media attention each company has received over the past several years. From 2004 when it was founded through 2008, Facebook remained well behind Google in the amount of media attention it received. Then, in 2009, Facebook took the top spot with more than 27,000 mentions in the media. Since that time, Facebook’s media attention has only grown; and so far in 2012, it remains on top with more than 42,000 mentions compared to Google’s 13,000. Is Facebook that much more important than Google? Really interesting story being told here.

• Is it possible to remove hatred from politics?

  Jason Keath

  10 May 2012 | 7:36 am

  “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” — Winston Churchill You may or may not know that I am against the amendment to ban gay marriage in the state of North Carolina, my home state. But I am also against the ugliness, insults and divisiveness that originates from both sides of issues like these. It is misplaced passion and unchecked anger. Neither of which do well to solve America’s deep bench of problems. I have fallen victim to this misplaced passion and…

• Every Person Has A Story, Epic Chick-fil-a Video

  Jason Keath

  13 Apr 2012 | 9:40 am

• Who uses the word “chalice”?

  Jason Keath

  12 Apr 2012 | 9:00 am

• Forget the Easy Button, TNT Creates An ‘Add Live Action Drama Button’

  Jason Keath

  11 Apr 2012 | 1:01 pm

• 

  Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

• See the Flowers and Every Other Good Free Thing

  ME Liz Strauss

  28 May 2012 | 5:45 am

  about the meaning and seeing. Every year on Memorial Day weekend my mom would put flowers on the graves of soldiers who had fought for us and were gone. Even when I was tiny,she would take me along to participate in this ritual, not that I understood what it was about. Never did she tell me about a single soldier only the story about soldiers fighting for freedom. BigStock: Flowers and Cemetery I’ve known people who have lived through war. I know people who have fought in them. I have heard true and personal stories of those who went to war and never came home. At this moment I’m…

• How Historic London Shoppers’ Markets Get Global

  ME Liz Strauss

  28 May 2012 | 2:22 am

  by Julien Renault The Past to the Future Markets are a particular feature of London which gives the city something vibrant, something that you cannot feel without living it. Have you ever asked yourself where London’s oldest market is – where it all began? Let’s go down memory lane, let’s turn back the wheels of time and return to the past. Image: AntiquePrings.DE When did it start? The first London market was set up around 1680. That’s pretty dated, isn’t it? Anyway, who started it? Sir Edward Hungerford had been authorized to hold a market three days a week who then gave his…

• What I learned from Walter Payton

  molly

  27 May 2012 | 1:00 am

  I grew up in the 1980s, when cable television was pretty much in its infancy and was All The Rage. I watched the first MTV video and can still remember when VH1 and MTV played videos. Another staple in my household that arrived through the cable airwaves? Chicago sports on WGN, which meant Cubs baseball in the summer and Bears football in the fall. If you have any awareness of professional football in the 80s, you will be familiar with one of the NFL’s greatest running backs of all time, and arguably one of the most talented men to ever grace astroturf. I am, of course, referring to Number…

• Thanks to Week 345 SOBs

  ME Liz Strauss

  26 May 2012 | 7:21 am

  Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Let me introduce the bloggers who have earned this official badge of achievement, and the right to call themselves Successful Blog SOBs. I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs. They take the conversation to their readers, contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger. I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on. Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community. Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award…

• 6 Ways to Promote Your Business Online Using Green

  ME Liz Strauss

  25 May 2012 | 5:16 am

  by Image Credit: Wind Energy by JanieHernandez Green Marketing A few days ago at a favorite deli there was a new sign. The sign said: “We are now Powered 100% by Wind Energy,” Unconsciously I gazed up. There aren’t any windmills around here! I thought. Yet the message stuck and it made me think: If a deli that specializes in large greasy meatball sandwiches on soft white bread is promoting Green, maybe more businesses need to start using Green marketing. These days Green marketing thrives far beyond co-ops and solar energy companies. Other businesses need to think about…

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  12 Most

• 12 Most Pioneering People Who Changed the News and Media By Susan Young

  Susan Young

  28 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  By Susan Young Influence, vision, power, and a bit of ego have driven most of these individuals to make their mark in the news and media. Many fought and endured hardships and battles that are unimaginable. Others were born into wealthy families and went on to build media empires that date back to the 1800s. [...]

• 12 Most Unforgiveable Pitch Mistakes By Chris Westfall

  Chris Westfall

  28 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  By Chris Westfall Getting ready to give a pitch, whether elevator, investor, or otherwise? An effective pitch can help you to get a job, get a raise, get a date and more. An effective pitch can improve your career, your finances, your relationships and your community. But, if you include one of these twelve show-stoppers, [...]

• 12 Most Unfashionable Twitter Faux Pas from DKNY By Peg Fitzpatrick

  Peg Fitzpatrick

  28 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  By Peg Fitzpatrick I recently had the pleasure of meeting Aliza Licht, Senior VP of Communications for Donna Karan International, at a conference in New York City. Aliza is the Blackberry behind the extremely popular Twitter account: @DKNY. Tweeting as DKNY PR Girl®, Aliza has captured an audience of almost 390,000 followers that she calls [...]

• 12 Most Tasteful Online Wine Resources By Shyam Subramanyan

  Shyam Subramanyan

  25 May 2012 | 8:00 am

  By Shyam Subramanyan “If your heart is warm with happiness, you’ll need a glass — if sorrow chills your heart, have two!” ~ Hannu Lehmusvuori If you have not seen the first List.ly post, here’s a quick link to turn the page back by a week. We have a simple goal — let the 12 [...]

• 12 Most Irritating Words and Phrases By Sharon Greenthal

  Sharon Greenthal

  25 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  By Sharon Greenthal Every decade has its words that became worn out from overuse. In the sixties, it has to have been “groovy.” The 70’s introduced the tired term “bummer.” In the 80’s, “bitchin’” turned everyone into a surfer dude. In the 90’s, I’d venture to say that “bling” became the word that no one [...]

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  chrisbrogan.com

• Guest Post- How to Increase Your Exposure By Defining Your Goals

  ceb

  23 May 2012 | 1:30 am

  The following is a guest post by someone I admire a great deal. Michael Hyatt is a writer, a publisher, a speaker, a mentor, and a leader. Here’s his post in support of his AMAZING new book. I’m convinced that one reason why many people fail at what they try to do (me included sometimes) is that they don’t properly define what they want to achieve. Let me unpack that a bit… If you are an author, professional speaker, business owners, entrepreneur, etc. then you need to know what you want to accomplish so that you can plot the proper course. More so than know, you need…

• Why Trust Agents Did So Well

  ceb

  22 May 2012 | 8:57 am

  I’m not fond of bragging. Though I can be as prideful as anyone, I just don’t see the point in it. So when I start my post with that title: Why Trust Agents Did So Well, I owe you an explanation fast. I just finished watching this video, “Scamworld,” which goes with this huge post about bad internet marketing, false schemes, and all kinds of deception. I will first say that I didn’t read the entire post, but that I feel it’s an important one to dig into (so I’ll get it all read in the next few days). The video is a decent way to see the thrust of the…

• I Closed My LinkedIn Account

  ceb

  21 May 2012 | 1:30 am

  I just closed my LinkedIn account. Why? Because at least a MONTH ago, I reported a fairly simple problem: I can’t seem to add people back when they request that we connect. Oh, that would be about the 2nd primary thing one does on the site. You make a profile and then you connect. That’s about it. The connecting part has been broken. I’m done. I don’t care. Whatever. Why post this? Because I’m forever asked by people why I don’t talk much about LinkedIn. Why? Because it hasn’t done much for me for business. Lots of people do great by it. Lewis Howes…

• Pushing A Hashtag Really Isn’t Going to Work Without Some Preexisting Love and Trust

  ceb

  20 May 2012 | 2:21 pm

  I saw a YouTube advertisement for the fast food restaurant, Wendy’s, where they were promoting the use of the Twitter hashtag #upgradeyourmeal (click that for your own real time search). Running over to Twitter to see what they were getting for responses, I saw the sampling above. Do any of those look like loyal Wendy’s diners to you? Do any of those tweets make the restaurant proud? Will this earn the restaurant any more buyers? When I see this, I wonder just how it was sold. I wonder what was promised. I wonder what the agency said to the client. Hey, Sometimes It Works When I…

• Cloning Yourself for Fun and Profit- Guest Post

  ceb

  17 May 2012 | 6:04 am

  The following is a guest post from someone I admire a great deal. Chris Guillebeau is out there doing some amazing things in the world of helping others design lifestyle businesses. His latest book, The $100 Startup (amazon affiliate link), is worth grabbing, too! 

It’s everyone’s fantasy. When you think about imaginary superpowers, you first wish for the ability to fly—doesn’t everyone? Then you wish for the power of invisibility, the ability to eat as much ice cream as you want, your own Batmobile, and so on. Specific superhero aspirations vary. But sooner or later…

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  Logic+Emotion

• Five (Intuitive) Reasons To Bet on Facebook

  David Armano

  18 May 2012 | 7:05 am

  There's no shortage of commentary around Facebook as the smoke literally builds around it's engine while the social media rocket prepares for IPO liftoff. This piece won't be full of rational analysis but rather gut intuition. Here are a few things to chew on as you think about the global future with or without Facebook. Zuckerberg Isn't Steve Jobs, But He's Jobs-LikeMark Zuckerberg gets social like Steve Jobs got design. Furthermore, both share a core foundational value which is irrationally committed to making products and experiences which please their own sensibilities first and the…

• Social Business: Where It's Been & Where It's Going

  David Armano

  6 May 2012 | 11:56 am

  "Chasing the past, I stumbled into the future". - T A Sachs I've always been a firm believer that in order to look to the future, we must look back to and fully grasp the past (and the present). Having had several recent engaging conversations with smart people who I respect, I've picked up a hint of exhaustion around usage of the word "social". Could it be that some who saw the "change" coming years ago are weary of having carried that torch for so many years as we move into the heavy lifting? It's natural to want to move to the next thing—but I'm convinced that today we are largely still…

• Own The Data, Own The Future

  David Armano

  14 Apr 2012 | 9:15 am

  Now that some of the dust is settling around Facebook's massive acquisition of Instagram this past week, we can all take a step back and think about the bigger picture. Yes, Facebook understands the critical role mobile will play in how billions of people interact and communicate but they also understand that interactions, engagement, consumption or whatever you want to call it generates one thing. Data. Facebook wants it. Google wants it. And all businesses will want to understand it. There is huge, big business to be built around all kinds of data. Targeted marketing is the first salvo and…

• Thoughts on the Future of Social-Digital Agency Services

  David Armano

  7 Apr 2012 | 10:29 am

  *The above does not reflect actual or estimated market share Now is as good a time as any to be thinking about the future of digital (and social) as defined by those of us who provide services or even products around these. If you work for any agency or consultancy—this article is relevant for you. If you're on the "client side" consider it relevant as well as ultimately it is your business model and needs which dictate the market conditions that affect your partners, vendors and professional service providers. I'm writing this piece from the perspective of having worked at several digital…

• Thoughts On Altimeter's Digital Influence Report

  David Armano

  21 Mar 2012 | 10:13 am

  Altimeter's most recent report titled "The Rise of Digital Influence" revolves around the theory and practice of "digital influence". A trend that will not die despite the industry's counter movement against platforms such as Klout and the scores of imitators which have subsequently followed. (Full disclosure, I was interviewed in depth for the report). Altimeter rightfully begins the analysis of "digital influence" by calling out the distinction from how we view influence traditionally and offering a brief definition:"Traditional influence is defined as the act, power, or capacity of causing…

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  Spiral16

• Social Campaigns Get Creative with ‘Dark Knight Rises’ Scavenger Hunt

  Eric Melin

  25 May 2012 | 4:33 am

  Did you enjoy the third and final trailer for The Dark Knight Rises? You may want to thank Kansas City for that. Social media campaigns are getting more and more creative. One of my other split personalities is as a movie critic, so the fact that I completely missed out on the international The Dark Knight Rises scavenger hunt speaks not only to the fact of how busy I am but also how much buzz and excitement there is for this movie. I might have missed it because the whole thing was over in about 10 hours. And the Batman fans in Kansas City more did their part. Of course, this kind of a…

• Be a Referral Engine: Your Business Can Market Itself

  Eric Melin

  24 May 2012 | 9:32 am

  Yesterday was the emfluence Marketing Platform User Conference (#emflconf) and, as usual, our pals at emfluence did a first-rate job. (Hosting the event at the swanky Boulevard Brewery Muehlebach Suite doesn’t hurt either.) Besides filling the day with their own presentations full of great content and best practices for digital marketing , they also had a really cool guest speaker as well. John Jantsch is the author of Duct Tape Marketing and the new book The Referral Engine, and although he lives right here in Kansas City, he speaks to small business leaders all over the world. 7…

• The Basics of Social Media Marketing Don’t Change

  Eric Melin

  22 May 2012 | 8:51 am

  Browsing all of the awesome social media business blogs as I do every morning, I ended up on Brian Solis‘ page today and saw a headline in the “Recent Comments” sidebar: Social Media is About Sociology Not Technology. I liked the headline so much, I clicked on the link. Much to my surprise, I found it was written way back in 2007. Besides showing how right-on and ahead of the curve Brian was five years ago, this article got me thinking: The basics of social media marketing will always be the same. It’s not about the technology, it’s about what you do with it.

• Can Social Media Boost Organic Search Ranking? [INFOGRAPHIC]

  Eric Melin

  21 May 2012 | 7:49 am

  What exactly is the relationship between social media activity and organic search engine rankings? We know that strategic social activity can aid in customer service, foster brand loyalty, and provide all kinds of useful information on what people think about your company, but how about getting better rankings in search engines? What does an active social presence get you in that department? This infographic provides some interesting statistics from one specific study designed to showcase the effect that social media activity and promotion can have on where your site ranks in search. SEO…

• Facebook IPO Causes Negative Sentiment, Doubt Online

  Eric Melin

  18 May 2012 | 2:44 am

  Today is the big day for Facebook. Shares will begin trading this morning. Last night, the social network set its final price at $38 a share, to get ready for its initial public offering (IPO) today. At $38 a share, Facebook is valued at $104 billion, the biggest-ever valuation by an American company at the time of its offering. This puts the company at #23 by market cap in the S&P 500, ahead of brands like Amazon.com and McDonald’s. At $38 a share, Facebook has entered the upper level of U.S. IPO history. According to the Wall Street Journal, “it is on its way to be the…

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  Flower Blossoms' Blog

• Ripped from Star Trek: Researchers say lasers could create tiny tractor beams

  Francis Unson

  25 May 2012 | 9:20 am

  Reblogged from VentureBeat: Star Trek science, meet the real world. A group of researchers at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute has possibly figured out a way to take the fictional tractor beam and make it real. Light’s ability to push objects has been known for some time, but what has evaded researchers so far is a way to create backwards force from a forward-moving beam. Read more… 168 more words With advances in the physics behind science fiction's tractor beam, Star Trek technology is much closer than we realize.

• Where the Wild Things Are

  Francis Unson

  24 May 2012 | 9:27 am

  Reblogged from the eff stop: I’m easily distracted by any photo op. After riding the rails to Denver, Karen and I caught a cab to the Car Rental lot in Denver near the airport. As she inspected the car I caught a glimpse of a bunny face-off in the small patch of grass separating the lot exit from the street. I dropped my luggage and grabbed my camera – I no longer cared about what kind of car we would rent, or mileage, or color, or insurance, or anything else. Read more… 1,355 more words The diversity of wildlife on this planet is enormous.

• Mt. Fuji "Shibazakura" Flower Festival

  Francis Unson

  23 May 2012 | 9:16 am

  Reblogged from life to reset: If there is one thing that best represent  Japan’s natural beauty, it has to be the highest mountain- Mt. Fuji.   The 3,766m symmetrical cone shaped mountain has inspired poet and artist for decades, where it was often depicted with the top- half covered in snow. My first visit to the mountain was last year, during the hiking season where the  picturesque snow-capped was gone.  Read more… 690 more words Festivals take place year-round in Japan. If Tokyo is too fast-paced for your tastes, try visiting the surrounding prefectures.

• RSS Aggregation: Adding a list of comments from other blogs

  Francis Unson

  21 May 2012 | 9:43 am

  Reblogged from Tandava's Technical Blog: A composite feed rom several blogs I have recently added a composite feed from a number of other blogs into the sidebar of my Hindu blog. I also created a page showing a summary of these items. To demonstrate how this was done I have decided to add (maybe temporarily) a feed of tips from a number of blogs on WordPress on my Tech blog. Read more… 435 more words If you would like to aggregate multiple RSS feeds into a single feed in Google Reader, follow these instructions.

• Google+ Gets A Big Refresh With New Navigation, A Redesigned Stream, A Dedicated Hangouts Page & More

  Francis Unson

  11 Apr 2012 | 3:11 am

  Reblogged from TechCrunch: Google this morning is announcing a new look for its social network, Google+, which introduces a revamped navigation, with drag-and-drop elements and actions that appear when you hover over each item, as well as the introduction of new features aimed at making it easier to discover conversations to join, new profile pages, a dedicated page for Google+ Hangouts (Google+’s multi-person video chat offering), and more. Read more… 391 more words Google+ users: How do you like the new design of the social network?

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  trendsspotting blog

• From “Smart Mobile Accessories” to the “Internet of Things”: Research indications

  Dr. Taly Weiss

  18 May 2012 | 6:05 am

  Trendsspotting’s recent innovation research on Mobile Accessories Trends as well as our ongoing consulting work with mobile companies, led me to generate insights on how the development of this market can enhance “Internet of Things” consumer behavior. Here are my conclusions: I. Technology perspective: 1. Mobile Objects: In the last few months, smartphones have extended the traditional use of communication. Incorporating hardware as well as apps improves the functionality of the device (upgraded photo/video/audio capabilities). Smartphones today have become effective tools…

• What’s the Plus? Giving Google Plus a second fair chance

  Dr. Taly Weiss

  29 Mar 2012 | 4:42 pm

  I’m used to the idea that most of the people I personally know aren’t interacting in new platforms. That has never stopped me from being among the first to try. When Google launched Google+ I was there anticipating that Google must have done it right this time . It was more than three years ago when I suggested that Google will “pagerank” and “map” peoples influence. The feature that attracted my attention at that time was the ability to select the people who I want to share my ideas with. As a very private person, I keep Facebook and Twitter as professional networks only,…

• “Trends and Innovations in Mobile Accessories” Research Report

  Dr. Taly Weiss

  1 Feb 2012 | 8:03 am

  We are happy to announce the release of a new TrendsSpotting research report  uncovering  major  trends  in  Mobile  Accessories. Based  on  exploration  of  over  2000  new  accessories  released  since  2011  +   CES  2012  and  a  market  analysis  of  major  market  trends  characterizing  this   growing  market, TrendsSpotting  has  identified  about  150  recently  released   products  that  reflect  new  emerging  trends  in  mobile  accessories. The  innovations  analyzed  in  this  report  are  profiled  according  to …

• LEADING DIGITAL WOMEN PREDICT 2012

  Dr. Taly Weiss

  11 Jan 2012 | 6:20 pm

  For the last five years TrendsSpotting trends research company has published prediction reports covering trends in tech, mobile and social media, suggested by leading technology and business experts. TrendsSpotting’s Influencers Prediction Reports 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 are read by thousands of readers and are used by leading companies to plan their future (viewership at Slideshare/TrendsSpotting). As TrendsSpotting is involved in re-placing the role of women in the digital world (see us at Microsoft’s Women Think Next and WIFT), we have decided that this year we will dedicate this…

• Emerging market for mobile health products

  Dr. Taly Weiss

  9 Nov 2011 | 3:15 am

  In the past year, products using mobile devices to monitor health conditions are becoming more popular with the first ones now getting accepted by the Food and Drug Administration. Among health care apps entering the market are blood pressure monitoring cuffs, CT-scan viewers, and pocket ultrasound machines. The market is still at its first steps but rapid growth is expected: according to mobile market consultancy research2guidance, by 2015 30 percent of the world’s smartphone users will be using mobile health products, up from 5 percent today. The big promise for consumers are…

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  BlogWorld & New Media Expo Blog

• The Many Different Ways to Brand Your Social Networking Pages

  Zac Johnson

  28 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  When it comes to social networks, everyone has their favorites. MySpace was a huge hit back in the day simply because it was one of the first social networks, but mainly because of the many different ways you could customize your profile pages and make them look however you like. Facebook came along and quickly out grew MySpace, but it wasn’t til recently that Facebook allowed you to give your profile a new look and feel with the introduction of their Timeline setup. In the end, it’s all about online relationships and leaving a lasting impression for the people who visit your…

• Evan White of Viddy Interview – Future of Publishing

  murray

  26 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Why can’t I just upload the video I just shot to Facebook, like I can with my pictures? How come Android makes me upload them to Google+? Well, now you can upload them to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media by using Viddy, an app that lets people do just that and also make minor artistic edits to the videos. Check out what Murray Newlands and Viddy CMO Evan White had to say at BlogWorld Los Angeles in this Future of Publishing episode: Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure check Future of Publishing out online at FutureOfPublishing.tv!

• Parties Announced for BlogWorld NY 2012

  Deb Ng

  25 May 2012 | 9:00 am

  At BlogWorld, days are spent networking and learning.  However, all work and no play makes a very dull conference. We also know it’s important to let our hair down once in a while. That’s why we’re so pleased to announce the parties for BlogWorld NY 2012. BlogWorld Speakers: Please check the speakers’ Facebook page for information regarding the speaker reception on Monday, June 4th. Here are your details: All pass holders are invited to attend. BlogWorld NY Opening Night Party When: Tuesday, June 5th Time: 7:00 to 10:00 Where: Amnesia 609 W. 29th Street Cash bar…

• 18 Brilliant Bloggers Talk About Storytelling

  Allison

  25 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Brilliant Bloggers is a bi-weekly series here at BlogWorld where we look at the best posts from around the web all surrounding a specific topic. Every other week, we’ll feature three of the most brilliant bloggers out there, along with a huge list of more resources where you can learn about the topic. You can see more Brilliant Blogger posts or learn how to submit your link for an upcoming edition here. This Week’s Topic: Storytelling Storytelling is an art, and one that the best bloggers, podcasters, and web TV producers must learn to master online. Even business owners promoting their…

• 008 The Podcast Report – Interview With Stitcher Radio’s CEO Noah Shanok

  Cliff Ravenscraft

  24 May 2012 | 3:53 pm

  Hey everyone, Cliff Ravenscraft here. I’m back with another episode of The Podcast Report. Interview With Noah Shanok of Stitcher Radio I was delighted to have the opportunity to interview Stitcher Radio’s CEO, Noah Shanok. Noah will be speaking on one of the panels for the Podcasting Track at #BWENY. The title of the panel that he will be on is “The Future of Podcast Distribution & Content Strategies.” You can attend this session on Wednesday, June 6th at 2:30pm Eastern Time. In this interview with Noah, I asked the following questions. Be sure to have a listen to…

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  News from SMP

• Transport for London creates Twitter handles for tube lines

  23 May 2012 | 5:00 pm

  Transport for London creates Twitter handles for tube linesTransport for London has created Twitter handles for all its tube lines in an effort to keep passengers up-to-date with the latest information across the London tube network....

• Will the Facebook IPO bubble burst?

  20 May 2012 | 5:00 pm

  Will the Facebook IPO bubble burst?Even before the recent Facebook IPO, there has been much speculation about the future of dot coms, whether they would experience boom and bust again.   Although there has been a number of IPOs this year...

• Flipboard spices up social magazines with sound

  16 May 2012 | 5:00 pm

  Flipboard spices up social magazines with soundSocial magazine Flipboard has brought sound to its publishing platform, delivering additional sticky hooks to its readership.Teaming up with NPR, Public International Radio (PRI) and SoundCloud, the l...

• How people spend time online

  7 May 2012 | 5:00 pm

  How people spend time onlineEver wondered how many people are online, where they hang out and what they do?  Well, this ‘How people spend their time online infographic’ by go-gulf takes a shot at cutting through the statistics.  Jammed p...

• Figaro Digital Social Media Marketing Conference April 2012 fast approaching

  2 Apr 2012 | 5:00 pm

  Figaro Digital Social Media Marketing Conference April 2012 fast approachingThese days, it seems there are more UK-based social media events that you can shake a stick at. As we approach the Easter weekend, Figaro Digital kicks off its Social Medi...

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  idaconcpts

• The (Forgotten) Power of Email

  Damian Davila

  25 May 2012 | 12:42 pm

  When working with business both in Hawaii and around the world, clients are often interested in jumping into social media. The conversation usually starts with a social media channel and how they can jump into it (e.g. “My friends told me about Facebook and they think it is the best way for me to reach potential customers. How can I get started?). Clients arrive with a correct answer to the wrong question. They are starting with the solution instead of focusing on the problem at hand. During the first meeting with a client, the first step that we take is to forget about their…

• Android Apps for National League Central Division Baseball Fans

  Martin Monroe

  25 May 2012 | 10:23 am

  The National League’s Central Division is full of surprises this year. Teams are jockeying for position to gain the right to compete in the playoffs in September. There is a lot of baseball to play before the winner is decided. So don’t let yourself be caught unawares. Make sure that you have one of these apps on your Android phone. Or you may spend the winter wondering just what happened. It is important to follow your favorite club no matter what. Don’t wimp out just because the odds are against your local nine. It isn’t over until every team is statistically…

• Create a Mail Merge from Existing Excel List

  Damian Davila

  23 May 2012 | 9:45 am

  Creating a Mail Merge from an existing list, especially when that list is being imported from Excel, is really quite an easy task. So easy, even Santa could do it. The first step is to create an Excel spreadsheet to house your recipient information. Create headers such as Name, Address, City, State, Zip Code etc. Underneath each header enter the appropriate information for each recipient. Depending on the headers you use, you may need to match the fields once you import the spreadsheet to perform the mail merge. Save your spreadsheet to a designated folder on your computer. To start, you…

• Overview of Twitter Ads [Prices, Screenshots, Terms]

  Damian Davila

  21 May 2012 | 3:53 pm

  Small businesses based in the United States now have the chance to take their Twitter marketing efforts to a new level. Starting in late March 2012, Twitter introduced a new advertising offering that makes it simple for companies of any size to grow their businesses using Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts products. Twitter partnered with American Express to make it easy for small business owners to advertise on Twitter. American Express Cardmembers and merchants based in the U.S. were invited to try this new advertising solution before anyone else, and American Express gave $100 in free…

• How to Use Mail Merge Lists in Word

  Damian Davila

  21 May 2012 | 9:27 am

  I don’t know about you, but many a time I have opened up a new Word document only to be met with the old familiar feeling of intimidation. There are so many fantastic features that seem to be hidden away in an endless array of tool bars and drop down menus. This intimidation surely has no place. Microsoft has done a wonderful job of making all features of their Office products rather user friendly. My first attempt at completing a mail merge was timid and slow as I familiarized myself with the process and its features. Once familiarized however, this process has become second nature. When…

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  Forum One Blog Posts - All Blogs

• Infographic: Insuring Those Who Served

  Andrew Cohen

  24 May 2012 | 3:01 pm

  Organizations are always looking for more effective ways to distill and distribute complex reports as digestible chunks. For example, for the past five years we've been working with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to increase the impact of their researchers' rich analysis on health insurance coverage. Infographics are a great way to distill and distribute complex reports as digestible chunks. read more

• Mobile Solution: Responsive Design on ictQATAR

  Nam-ho Park

  8 May 2012 | 8:31 am

  ictQATAR is the website for the Supreme Council of Information Communication and Technology for the Government of Qatar, which is in charge of technology innovation and implementation throughout the country. Forum One has worked with ictQatar since 2010 to design, develop, and launch their current English-Arabic bilingual site on the Drupal 6 platform, and has continued to support them with usability and site enhancements since. ictQATAR is the website for the Supreme Council of Information Communication and Technology for the Government of Qatar, which is in charge of technology…

• Nonprofit Technology Conference 2012: Our Reflections

  Brian Pagels

  3 May 2012 | 9:07 am

  After sometime to reflect on the ongoings of NTEN's 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference, we wanted to share our thoughts on what we learned, gained and enjoyed about the conference.  After sometime to reflect on the ongoings of NTEN's Nonprofit Technology Conference, we wanted to share our thoughts on what we learned, gained and enjoyed about the conference. read more

• GovTech Reports on Drupal Adoption

  Mike Shoag

  27 Apr 2012 | 9:31 am

  With over 150 federal government sites powered by Drupal, the open-source CMS is more than ever meeting the needs of big sites. GovTech.com, a top source of government IT news, reported today on the many new government sites that are confidently adopting Drupal as their CMS. Agencies have overcome concerns about security, integration, and departure from Microsoft products. They are now realizing that Drupal’s flexibility make it the most cost-effective solution. Our own CTO, Kurt Voelker, was quoted in the article: With over 150 federal government sites powered by Drupal, the…

• Drupal Tutorial: Pushing Drupal 6 Core Auto-Complete

  Keenan Holloway

  23 Apr 2012 | 2:20 pm

  Recently I had the task of creating a form that utilized an auto-complete text field that filtered on a specific field of a table. This seemed like a great candidate to use the core auto-complete and after a sprint of information gathering I had what I thought would be enough. After delivery I learned that there was one surprise feature. The auto-complete text field needs to be able to have filters applied to it via-form filter dropdown. Recently I had the task of creating a form that utilized an auto-complete text field that filtered on a specific field of a table. This seems like a great…

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  NowSourcing.Com » Blog

• This Week in Infographics: State of Social Media 2012 and Taming Big Data

  ashley

  25 May 2012 | 7:49 am

  This weeks theme – the internet. We all use it and without it we would all be lost. We begin with the state of social media in 2012. We take a look at some of our favorite social media sites and see how they have been doing so far in 2012. Next we take a look at big data and how the growing data monster can be tamed. Then, what about the Facebook IPO? We look at the winners of the recent Facebook IPO launch. And finally, we throw in some thoughts on military spending. 1 – How is Social Media Faring in 2012? The State of Social Media 2012 by The SEO Company 2 – Taming the Big Data…

• Good Client Bad Client

  rose

  22 May 2012 | 10:46 am

  We take our good clients for granted. The ones who give us total creative freedom, an outlet for genius ideas, and room for humor. These clients are god sent, but there is a darker side to clientele. The ones who have everything all figured out. In fact, they have it all figured out to the point where they could just do your job for you. So, they bombard you with “ideas”,  ”directions” and the like that aren’t necessarily Internet material. And even when you do follow directions, the clients are baffled at why it did nothing to promote their company. So, a…

• The State of Social Media 2012

  kevin

  21 May 2012 | 11:30 am

  The State of Social Media 2012 by The SEO Company

• Taming Big Data

  kevin

  21 May 2012 | 8:44 am

  Via: Wikibon Big Data

• Home Security – Biggest Heists

  kevin

  17 May 2012 | 12:19 pm

  © 2012 HomeSecuritySystem.com

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  Jessica Randazza

• Are You Better Online?

  jessicarandazza

  22 May 2012 | 9:35 am

  Even though I’ve worked  in the digital space for years, I’ve touted for a long time that I’m better in real life. That I’m wittier, quicker, more articulate, and sassier. That my online personality can only capture so much, and that I only provide it so many allowances. I’ve preached that if you distribute [...]

• Reclaiming Real-Life Conversation

  jessicarandazza

  26 Apr 2012 | 12:38 pm

  Recently I read an opinion piece in the New York Times called, “The Flight From Conversation,” that struck a chord, as I’m sure it does for many of us. It highlighted the current state of our “always on” culture –the seeming need for constant digital connectivity while sacrificing RL conversation for mere connection. And the [...]

• Social Networks Stealing the Punch?

  jessicarandazza

  23 Apr 2012 | 7:54 am

  This weekend I made the trek to celebrate my 10-year high school reunion from Homewood High School located in Homewood, AL – my hometown nestled in an area south of Red Mountain, and to locals, lovingly named the suburb community “over the mountain”.  It was an exceptional place to grow up, with all the resources [...]

• Breaking Up is Hard To Do

  jessicarandazza

  26 Mar 2012 | 7:00 am

  Neil Sedaka said it best in 1962, “breaking up is hard to do,” and with today’s technology and constant lines of communications to our former flings and romances, it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. Last year I went through a break up with someone I had dated for awhile that was also in [...]

• Climbing Off the Sx Wagon?

  jessicarandazza

  16 Mar 2012 | 12:15 pm

  Each year I eagerly await and anxiously plan my annual trips to Austin, TX for South by Southwest, known for being the cat’s meow of all nerd conferences. Where brands, marketers, technologists, and innovative startups intersect. The intensity and caliber of innovative technology and services that come out each year leave me in a head [...]

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  ManagingCommunities.com

• A Member of Your Online Community Lies About Committing Suicide: What Do You Do?

  Patrick

  24 May 2012 | 8:35 am

  photo credit: fallingwater123 Imagine this situation: you are contacted by the wife of a member of your community. The member registered six years ago and has made hundreds of comments. She tells you that this veteran member of your community is dead. He has committed suicide. For any community manager, this is a moment of [...]

• Members Shouldn’t Moderate Each Other

  Patrick

  21 May 2012 | 12:13 pm

  photo credit: susivinh I’m a big believer in leaving moderation to moderators and in having a word with any member that attempts to act like a moderator. By act like a moderator, I mean that they try to tell other people what they can and cannot post and where and when they can do so. [...]

• If a Member of Your Community is Promoting Activities That Make You Uncomfortable, Don’t Ignore It

  Patrick

  17 May 2012 | 10:58 am

  photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar Recently, a new member on PhotoshopForums.com posted a request where they were looking for someone to take a picture of a paper sign with some girls name on it and then make it look like a guy in a different photo was holding it. They said that it was for [...]

• 90% of Conversations in Social Media About Banking Occur in Online Forums

  Patrick

  14 May 2012 | 9:42 am

  photo credit: in search for a new country of residence Recently, Jason Falls shared an interesting fact with me. According to his research, collected through NetBase, 90% of the trackable conversations occurring online around banks and bank products were in online forums. Ninety percent! 5% related to consumer reviews, 3% on blogs and less than [...]

• How to Properly Use the Word “Forums” and the Term “Online Community”

  Patrick

  10 May 2012 | 1:28 pm

  photo credit: avlxyz Once in a while, I run across an article that uses the word “forums” or the term “online community” in a weird, misleading way. What disappoints me most is when someone does this when they are claiming to have expertise in this space – they have community in their job title, they [...]

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  Bokardo

• New Resource: Principles of User Interface Design

  Josh

  8 May 2012 | 2:53 am

  I’ve just published a new resource that I hope is useful: Principles of User Interface Design. It contains a list of 20 or so design principles that I refer to all the time. This was a good way to get them down into one spot…so I can point people there in the future. You’ll also notice that the page is very simple and (I hope) extremely easy to read. I wanted to start from scratch and really simplify the page much more than a normal blog post and make it easily readable on mobile devices as much as larger screens. I first started using media queries and planning out…

• Designing for the Next Step

  Josh

  16 Jan 2012 | 6:33 am

  Note: this is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Make them Care! In a recent post (Why you should bury the sign up button) I told the story of a redesign I did in which people just didn’t want to click the “sign up” button on the home page, no matter how beautiful or sexy that sign up button was. What I realized from that project is that there are cases in which no amount of visual design will significantly improve the state of things…instead we need to focus on making people care. Here’s another example. On cyber Monday this past November I received an email…

• Design is not Horsepoop

  Josh

  17 Dec 2011 | 4:37 am

  In his impassioned piece Design is Horseshit, YongFook suggests that the increased focus on designers as founders is misguided because design isn’t what makes most startups successful. In my recent post The Golden Age of Design in Startups I was bullish on designers as founders, so I’m here to call bullshit on Yongfook calling bullshit…or something like that. (actually, the idea of “calling bullshit” seems silly to me…why not just respectfully debate a point?) Yongfook’s argument is that design is not the reason why startups are successful. He suggests that…

• More on Burying the Sign Up Button

  Josh

  7 Dec 2011 | 8:49 am

  A couple weeks ago I published Why You Should Bury your Sign Up Button and got some really interesting feedback and comments from folks. One of the more interesting bits was a follow-up post by the folks at Zurb who had experienced the exact same phenomenon…when they took away the “sign up” button and instead put a “learn more” button at the bottom of the page they got a 350% increase in sign ups: Why Burying Sign Up Buttons Helps Get More Sign Ups Think about how counter-intuitive that is at first glance. You take away the call-to-action that says “sign…

• The Golden Age of Design in Startups

  Josh

  5 Dec 2011 | 2:59 am

  I just returned from Dave McClure’s excellent Warm Gun Conference, and I haven’t been this excited to be a designer in a while. The entire event was about design, metrics, and products, and even more importantly the people at the conference were many of the who’s who in Bay Area design. From what I saw and experienced there I daresay there are signs we’re entering a golden age of Design. The evidence: 1. The startups being invested in are designer-led. Take the new Designer Fund that funds startups with designer-founders and helps mentor them. Consider the companies in…

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  Collective Thoughts

• How Much Emphasis Should MBA Programs Place on Social Media?

  Brian Wallace

  24 May 2012 | 11:39 am

  For students earning an MBA degree, courses in social media trends have become an integral part of the curriculum. To capitalize on this growing marketing segment, some universities are even offering Social Media MBAs. Rutgers University, according to U.S. News and World Report, has started to offer what it calls a “mini-MBA” in social media marketing. Southern New Hampshire University has offered a Social Media Marketing MBA since 2010, and New England College has just launched an online MBA degree in Digital and Social Media. Social media has become an increasingly more important way of…

• Master Bruce Wayne: Business’s Best Potential Superheroes

  Kristina

  2 May 2012 | 6:40 am

  Most readers associate the name “Bruce Wayne” with Batman, the masked vigilante who has fought crime in comic books, TV shows and movies for over 70 years. Another side of the character, one that does not get as much attention as his rope-swinging, villain-punching alter ego, is the effort he puts forth with his “Wayne Foundation”, the charitable trust he established with his family’s fortune. Several real-life billionaires, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the late Steve Jobs, have also endeavored to give away much of their fortunes to charitable causes, setting the…

• Personal Privacy, Social Media and You

  Brian Wallace

  27 Apr 2012 | 6:58 am

  Today’s prevailing attitude about the free exchange information across multiple platforms and applications, known to many as Web 2.0 design, is causing users to take a hard look at what constitutes personal privacy. There are many pieces of information people use to conduct daily business on the Internet that shouldn’t be publicly shared, such as credit card information or Social Security numbers. Many are also concerned with the unintended consequences of content shared on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. As these concerns show no signs of disappearing, they have become a…

• My Dirty Valentine

  Kristina

  8 Feb 2012 | 10:50 am

  Valentine’s day can be awful for a respectable single – bring on the mushy lovers and the despair of the singleton articles, let’s get it over with. This is why I particularly love Keeping It Kleen’s new infographic – it is hilarious, disgusting, and someone finally thought outside of the box on this one. If you are single, it will make you happy that you don’t have a boyfriend who doesn’t brush his teeth, or a girlfriend who wears the same underwear two days in a row. If you are attached, I suggest you invest in some powerful hand sanitizer. © 2012…

• History of the Businessmen [Infographic]

  Kristina

  30 Jan 2012 | 2:40 pm

  What do cavemen, William Shakespear, Christopher Columbus, and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They were all shrewd businessmen in their time. Whether they were carving sticks, promoting plays, or trying to get funding to sail the world – these men have set the stage for where business is today, and where it will go. Business MBA’s new infographic does a wonderful job of putting these great men and their skills in order, and giving us an idea of where Generation Y will take us next. From: Business MBA

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  123 Social Media

• 7 Big Data Articles You Should Read

  Barry Hurd

  22 May 2012 | 2:00 pm

  If you are trying to understand how corporate social media interacts with your organization, you need to give a lot of thought about the types of data being generated in your marketplace. Many corporations suffer from an inability to ‘connect the dots’ between social media buzz and business revenue drivers. They usually focus on areas of ego driven competition to earn the most fans, engage in the most conversations, or earn fifteen minutes of product fame. The truth of the matter… Is that social media creates an insane amount of extremely valuable consumer data. It can tell…

• Building a Social Media Dashboard

  Barry Hurd

  9 May 2012 | 9:08 am

  There is no other way to say it: social media creates an insane amount of data from purchasing and conversation behavior, employee and consumer interaction, and daily lifestyle choices. How do we handle information overload? In order to figure out how to use social media for your benefit, one of the best starting points is understanding how you can discover, listen to, and cultivate social media into something you can act on. This leads us to the idea of creating a social media dashboard: a visualization of metrics and limitless data that needs to viewed through very specific types of…

• Social Media Policy & Employee Rights with National Labor Board

  Barry Hurd

  12 Mar 2012 | 5:14 pm

  While there are many social media policy documents floating around and we’ve covered the topic in-depth here many times before (see related articles below) - it is always interesting when social media policy is viewed strictly from a legal and labor relations perspective. On that note I want to draw your attention to cases from the acting general counsel of the U.S. National Labors Relations Board. While the NLRB has a very broad goal, its various rulings regarding existing social media policy and regulation is interesting. The most recent report (dated January 25, 2012) covers 14…

• Corporate Social Media Training, cookie cutter = bad

  Barry Hurd

  9 Mar 2012 | 2:27 pm

  On a daily basis we receive inquiries for social media training via webinar and on-demand platforms. The reality of the request is that most of the people want a “canned solution.” The general reasoning goes like this: They have a problem. They need it fixed. They want to buy something off the shelf to fix it. Unfortunately when it comes to corporate social media training, nothing exist on the shelf. There isn’t a single cookie-cutter item that can be universally applied to a corporate footprint that doesn’t cause more problems than it is worth. Typical examples…

• Social Media Training, a guide to no nonsense education

  Barry Hurd

  13 Feb 2012 | 11:21 am

  To help some of our readers I’ve collected a list of training articles that I have written over at BarryHurd.com that detail some of the core elements around types of media and how the interact in both the offline and online world. I typically add an additional article about once a month to this list in an effort to create a holistic resource to raise the common understanding of what ‘social media’ is and is not. This series of social media training documents is also a go-to list of ideas when I am researching client projects or developing tactical plans. If a ‘social…

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  Brian Solis

• Dear [insert business name], what’s your promise?

  Brian Solis

  24 May 2012 | 8:11 am

  You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words. You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people. Your employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors. You question the adoption of disruptive technology by your internal champions yet you’ve not…

• Discovery Communications Discovers the Meaning of Like

  Brian Solis

  21 May 2012 | 6:31 am

  The future of TV is much more than social, it’s a multi-screen experience that takes design. Often, producers, broadcast and movie marketers and brands alike underestimate the role social media plays as consumers watch, share, and interact. Whether its watching movies, TV shows or listening to music, consumers will have at least one-to-two other devices in grasp or within reach. Depending on the device, each screen is used differently and with purpose. As a result, each screen requires the thoughtful development of an engaging or entertaining experience. This is a topic that I have and…

• 4 Strategic Areas Where Facebook Must Invest Post-IPO

  Brian Solis

  18 May 2012 | 10:39 am

  Mark Zuckerberg by Brian Solis Mark Zuckerberg and 900 million of his friends hit Wallstreet with America’s largest IPO and has once again made history. Facebook’s first trade was $42.05 giving the social network a valuation of ~$115 billion.  In the process, Zuckerberg became the 29th-richest man in the world with another half dozen employees also becoming billionaires. It’s also estimated that U2′s Bono will make more from his investment in Facebook than in his entire 30-year music career. As the stock trades, investors will learn to Like Facebook as long as Mark…

• 9 Ways to Improve the Signal to Noise Ratio on Twitter

  Brian Solis

  17 May 2012 | 7:43 am

  Even at 250 million Tweets per day in addition to the updates across Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and every other feed that we willfully subscribe to, information overload is in of itself a fallacy. But the feeling the overload of information is very real and a reflection of our inability to pull the levers necessary to decrease noise and improve signal. Doing so, requires some very blatant actions that don’t simply reduce the volume of the information we don’t care to see as often, it requires disconnecting from human beings. Whether we’re severing ties with individuals or…

• The Fallacy of Information Overload

  Brian Solis

  15 May 2012 | 6:50 am

  Some of you know me through my work in studying how social media and disruptive technology impact business and culture. Others have worked with me in translating insights into action and change within the enterprise.  Every now and then, I share another side of myself that evokes the aspiring social scientist in me as I explore how all of this is affecting us as individuals and human beings. Not a day goes by when I’m not asked about whether or not the social media bubble will finally burst. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Pinterest, this all has to be too much right? More…

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  Social Business Advisor: Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0

• Collaboration in the Workplace: Where do You Start?

  Jacob Morgan

  24 May 2012 | 12:45 am

  Let’s say you’re an executive at a larger size organization with around 100,000 employees and are looking to infuse your company with collaboration, where do you start?  Now, I don’t mean starting in term of  developing use cases or reviewing vendors.  I mean, which department or group do you start with if you want to do a controlled pilot?  Assuming you have around 50-100 departments how do you figure out where you should begin?  A bit of a daunting and intimidating task! There are two approaches to this. What others are doing The first thing you can do is put…

• The Collaborative Organization Book Update: Contributors and Book Cover!

  Jacob Morgan

  18 May 2012 | 10:23 am

  As we’re nearing closer to the book launch date (July 9th) I’m going to be sharing more content around the book and also some announcements.  Today I’m happy to reveal who two of the contributors are to the foreword and afterword as well as what the book cover looks like! Gil Yehuda wrote the foreword for my book.  I’ve known Gil for quite a few years now and he has become a good friend, mentor, and adviser on many things.  I couldn’t think of a better person to have open up this book than Gil.  He has inspired, encouraged, and always supported me. Don…

• Free Webinar: Common Collaboration Problems with the CIO of Pabst Brewing Company

  Jacob Morgan

  15 May 2012 | 12:28 am

  This Wednesday the 16th at 10am PST Ben Haines, the CIO of Pabst Brewing Company will be joining me on a webinar to discuss some of the common collaboration problems that organizations face today.  We’re going to try to have a casual discussion around what obstacles organizations are running up against and how they are overcoming these obstacles.  The event is being powered by Cisco which is allowing us to host the event on their platform. Here are the details taken from the event site: Collaboration is not new. In fact, we have collaborated for thousands of years. However,…

• What Would Happen if Your Organization Didn’t Invest in Collaboration?

  Jacob Morgan

  10 May 2012 | 11:40 am

  I (and many others) have spent a great deal of time talking about why organizations should invest their resources in collaboration tools and strategies.  But let’s assume for a moment that you didn’t.  How long do you realistically see your organization going on without making this investment; 1 year, 2 years, 3 years?  Do you really see your organization waiting this long? At this point I have probably worked with, spoken with, and researched hundreds of companies and it’s rare to come across an organization that nothing in place when it comes to collaboration.  At the…

• Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at IBM

  Jacob Morgan

  8 May 2012 | 1:06 am

  I had the opportunity to have several in-depth conversations with John Rooney (CIO of Technical Strategy) and Ethan McCarty (Senior Manager, Digital and Social Strategy) of IBM.  The conversations resulted in our recently released case study on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at IBM.  Here is an overview of that case study. With over 420,000 employees in over 70 countries, IBM is one of the largest and most recognized companies in the world today.  A company of this size needs to be able to coordinate and collaborate, share business processes, and respond to market demands. In order to make…

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  GeekGirlfriends.com

• Going to Cooking School Online

  Christina Tynan-Wood

  25 May 2012 | 2:31 pm

  A few months ago, I attended cooking school with my husband and son. We didn’t spend a fortune. We didn’t go to France. In fact, we didn’t even leave the house. We attended a class in pan frying online at Rouxbe.com. Normally I do the cooking at home. I’ve been cooking all my life and [...]

• Five Great (Bargain) Finds

  Christina Tynan-Wood

  18 May 2012 | 10:20 am

  Steam Punk Bling Who says handmade and unique has to be expensive? I bought a pair of these earrings and love them. I’ll be going back for more of this artist’s creations. They turn humble hardware – washers, in this case – into a bit of casual bling. Hard to beat that $12 price tag – especially for something [...]

• Meet the Malibu Moms

  Christina Tynan-Wood

  16 May 2012 | 1:17 pm

  The folks at Chevrolet sent me this video showcasing the women who worked on the 2013 Chevy Malibu. I love it. And not just because I’ve been in that wind tunnel and the safety engineering room populated with crash-test dummies. I love it because I Chevrolet  has decided to showcase the women behind their products. I think when young women [...]

• A Technology That Changed Women’s Lives

  Christina Tynan-Wood

  10 May 2012 | 9:13 am

  The folks at JimmyJane sent me the preview of the movie Hysteria (above.) It looks hilarious. I’m a fan of technologies that make life more fun. And I’ll watch anything with Rupert Everett in it. So, even without the fascinating, hysterical, and apparently true(ish) history of how the invention of the vibrator changed medicine and [...]

• Do You Think the Internet is a Distraction?

  Christina Tynan-Wood

  4 May 2012 | 12:42 pm

  Okay, I’m procrastinating. My to-do list has 29 projects and 473 tasks on it. And writing a blog post where I intentionally set out to use the Internet to distract you from productive work is not even on that list. But I don’t care. I’m doing it. Every day I get upwards of 200 emails. [...]

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  Dan Zarrella

• Using Twitter Data to Map Emotions Geographically

  Dan Zarrella

  6 May 2012 | 9:30 pm

  A few weeks ago, I spoke at a federal agency conference in Arlington, VA and one of the most interesting topics was the potential use of social media, by intelligence agencies, to map out and predict social unrest. So I decided to start experimenting with the concept on my own. By combining the linguistic analysis systems of TweetPsych with Twitter’s geo tagging data (which isn’t great yet) and the Google Maps API, I was able to plot tweets on specific latitude and longitude codes based on their emotional content. Below you’ll see 6 maps of various kinds of psychological…

• Introducing TweetCharts: Get The Twitter Data You Need

  Dan Zarrella

  29 Apr 2012 | 10:15 pm

  It used to be that if you wanted to get data on a certain industry, keyword, hashtag or Twitter user you had to wait for a geeky, social media scientist type to write the scripts and run the reports for you. With my new tool TweetCharts.com that’s no longer the case. Enter any word, phrase, hashtag, URL or username and TweetCharts will return a comprehensive report, including data on reply, retweet, and link percentages as well as the most common words, most mentioned users, most used hashtags and more. I began working on TweetCharts a few weeks ago actually on a plane. I did some…

• [Infographic] How to Get More Pins and Repins on Pinterest

  Dan Zarrella

  10 Apr 2012 | 11:11 pm

  Data about Pinterest is sparse because they’ve been slow to release their API, but I was able to utilize search engine APIs to pull some data about the trendy new social site. I gathered information on over 11,000 pinned images and did some analysis to create the infographic below. This data should be useful for Pinterest users who’d like to get more repins on the images they’ve pinned, as well as content producers who want their content pinned and repinned more. I hope to be able to do more research into Pinterest, especially as they release their API. Let me know what data…

• [Infographic] How to Get More Clicks on Twitter

  Dan Zarrella

  24 Jan 2012 | 9:18 pm

  I’ve often said that the best use of Twitter is as a broadcast medium. You should be creating a ton of interesting content and sharing it with your followers. To that end I’ve done a bunch of research on how to optimize the clickthrough rate (CTR) of the links you’re tweeting. For the purposes of this data, I’ve calculated CTR as the number of clicks on a tweeted link divided by the number of followers the account had when it tweeted that link. Below is an infographic presenting some of my past findings as well as some entirely new data I’ve found about…

• [Infographic] What are the Best Times to Blog?

  Dan Zarrella

  22 Jan 2012 | 10:54 pm

  One of the most popular webinars I’ve ever worked on, The Science of Timing was also one of my favorite. If you haven’t seen it, go check out the on-demand recording now. In it, I present data I’ve collected over three years about the effect timing has on a variety of online marketing activities, including blogging. Below is an infographic that represents a collection of the three most important stats I have about when to publish blog posts. In the webinar, I also make the point that my results are based on huge aggregates of thousands, millions, or even in some cases,…

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  Bazaarvoice Blog

• CEOs’ top priority: understanding and serving “markets of one”

  Tara DeMarco

  24 May 2012 | 8:19 am

  “Fundamentally, the only competitive advantage one has is client knowledge,” says Thomas Kalaris, CEO of Barclays Wealth and Investment Management. Understanding customers as individuals has become priority one for CEOs – as a group, they’re investing more in consumer insights than any other area. After in-person interviews with over 1,700 CEOs from 18 industries across 64 countries, IBM released the results of their biennial Global CEO Study. Here are three key takeaways from the study. Data will finally define “markets of one” Among the traits of a great CEO, 61% of those…

• More than a fling: word of mouth creates lasting relationships

  Emily Reagan

  22 May 2012 | 7:15 am

  Maker’s Mark treats its best customers much like a doting lover. The bourbon brand spends 30% of its marketing budget on members of its Ambassador program: tattooing their names on aging bourbon barrels, printing business cards to help Ambassadors brag on the brand, and faithfully sending annual Christmas gifts – like last year’s “ugly Christmas sweater” for the bottle. When I arrived at  Word of Mouth Crash Course, I expected some breakfast, coffee, and lots of buzzwords. I didn’t expect an opening keynote from Andy Sernovitz about love and relationships. At first glance, you…

• Companies: Stop blogging like you’re Kim Kardashian

  Ian Greenleigh

  21 May 2012 | 8:03 am

  The best company blogs don’t know they’re company blogs. They hold their own when compared to the blogs of any type. They aren’t weighed down by the jargon and promotional language typical of corporate content—the kind of content that Made to Stick was born to combat. The best blogs, corporate or otherwise, are adventurous. They take risks, ponder important questions, and excite readers. Me! Me! Me! Many companies blog like they’re Kim Kardashian: “Let’s talk about me!” They place themselves at the center, and post only content that reflects this view of the world. Repurposed…

• 10 things you didn’t know about online consumers

  Ian Greenleigh

  15 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Note: This post originally ran on  iStrategy Blog , and is republished here with permission.  Online consumers love to share their opinions with each other on the things they buy. Savvy shoppers have always turned to this public feedback for guidance, but since more and more word of mouth data has been digitized, archived, and analyzed, companies are now able to rely on it for their own guidance. In the last year alone, our research has distilled tens of millions of consumer data points into a strikingly clear picture of today’s consumers. Here are ten of the most interesting things…

• Technology is child’s play (how toys, consumers, and marketers are connecting)

  Haylie Rudy

  9 May 2012 | 11:07 am

  The playroom we all live in I have a sister who is much younger than me.  I remember practicing my killer basketball skills on the courts in middle school when I received news that I needed to rush to the hospital to welcome baby Ellie into the world.   Ellie and I have been able to grow close over the years. I like to think I’m not the terrorizing, bossy older sister, but rather more like a caring aunt or even second, “cool” Mom. Ellie is now in middle school herself, obsessed with her iPhone and constantly documenting every moment of her life via Instagram.  Last weekend at a…

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  Beth’s Blog

• Book(s) Giveaway: Nonprofit Social Media Road Map

  Beth

  25 May 2012 | 8:35 am

  Source: Noland Hoshino - Pinterest Board My colleagues Noland Hoshino, Zan McColloch-Lussier, and Ash Shepherd have put together a nifty social media guide.  This passport size booklet is called the “Social Media Road Map” and is a practically guide and checklist to help nonprofits plan, post, and measure their social media.   Using the metaphor of a road tip, this book takes you through the basics plotting a strategy and executing it.      I  love “road rage” for how to deal with negative comments. My friends have generously offered to give away 20 the first 20…

• Women Who Tech Around the World

  Beth

  24 May 2012 | 8:13 am

  Women Who Tech Around the World View more presentations from Beth Kanter Yesterday, I had the honor of participating in the  4th annual Women Who Tech TeleSummit that brings together women breaking new ground in technology who use their tech savvy skills to transform the world and inspire change. Created by Alyson Kapin four years ago, WomenWhoTech is a network for thriving community of women in technology professions by giving women an open platform to share their talents, experiences, and insights. I organized and moderated a panel called “Women Who Tech Globally.”   Using a…

• Net Smart: How To Thrive Online

  Beth

  23 May 2012 | 10:15 am

  NetSmart is Howard Rheingold’s latest book.    It synthesizes his 30 years of experience if being a model digital citizen and what he has learned from asking other this simple question:  How to use social media intelligently and mindfully?   Lately, I have been working in far flung places which means long, very long airplane rides without Internet access!   This book has been my companion lately – not only because it is so rich (check out the table of contents) but it has given me a lot to think about and reflect on in terms of my own social media use – and how to be a…

• Getting Around Internet Censorship: VPN

  Beth

  22 May 2012 | 7:39 am

  Last month I did a Networked NGO training in Dubai for Pakistan NGOs where I experienced Internet censorship first hand.  The government blocks certain sites, including access to any group organizing features on social sites (shared photo pools for example), skype out, and tools like VPNs that can help you get around government censors.     Eventually, I was able to install a VPN and get to the sites I wanted to use. This week will be our first peer call to follow up from the training which included strategy development and learning best practices for tools like Twitter.   Unfortunately,…

• Winning at Pinning

  Beth

  21 May 2012 | 7:13 am

  Note from Beth: A few weeks ago, I asked folks on Facebook “What Nonprofits Are Crushing It on Pinterest?” and got a terrific list of examples.   There’s been a lot written about pinterest and lots of nonprofits experimenting, but how do you do it strategically?    Kate Kilbourne is the Web & Social Media Manager at Camfed USA shares her experience. Winning at Pinning – Guest Post by Kate Kilbourne I am a Pinterest convert. After some initial doubt, this little-social-network-that-could has become one of my favorite new tools, and I now firmly believe that for…

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  The Foush » Blog

• April 2012- Dublin Sandbox Launch, 2 TEDxVideos and a Magazine Article!

  Rahaf

  8 May 2012 | 11:44 am

  This month’s update is going to be short and sweet! After being on the road so much last month, I was really glad to have some time to relax at home. Despite March’s glorious weather, the majority of April was wet and cold. Not the best weather for touring the City of Light, but actually great weather for writing. While I did mostly stay put, I did go over to Dublin to participate in the week-long launch of the Dublin Sandbox Hub!   1) Dublin Sandbox Hub I was delighted to head over to Dublin to celebrate the launch of our newest Hub and welcome our Irish Sandboxers into the…

• March 2012 – Recap: London, Copenhagen, New York, Toronto and a Birthday!

  Rahaf

  11 Apr 2012 | 5:39 am

  March was a glorious month this year. The weather was unnaturally warm in every single place I visited! In Paris, it was around 21 degrees, and everyone finally abandoned their winter boots and coats in favor of light sweaters and flats. Even the French, notoriously monochromatic, accented their outfits with colourful silk scarves and bright spring bags. To my delight, within the first few weeks of the month, the trees had started growing leaves, adding splashes of green to the streets! It was a busy month, that involved a lot of whirlwind travel. I spent the first week of the month in…

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  Blogworks: Social Media Agency India, Branding, Marketing, Consumer Insights, Research, Brands for the Future.

• Facebook and India growth

  Rajesh

  17 May 2012 | 11:51 pm

  Jeremy Wagstaff, Chief Technology Correspondent, Asia for Reuters, spoke with me briefly about Facebook’s India prospects (opportunities, obstacles and what they are doing in this market). Here are some points that I shared with him: People usage Facebook has seen aggressive growth and now stands at around 51 million users from India making it an... Read more »

• Episode 2 of #satyamevjayate sees over 50% drop in mentions on Twitter compared to debut episode.

  vishesh

  14 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  We received great response to our analysis of Satyamev Jayate mentions last week and you must be curious to see what happened yesterday. Let me give you the top-line – conversations on Twitter saw a 52% drop over last week and we noted a total of 12565 mentions of #satyamevjayate (only this specific hashtag) In... Read more »

• Analysis of today’s Twitter conversations around Aamir Khan’s #SatyamevJayate

  vishesh

  6 May 2012 | 10:31 am

  The build-up for Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate has been unprecedented and a phenomenal 16700 posts were generated today (upto 15oo hours IST) as the show opened today. We decided to take a peek into Twitter conversations today. Hope you find this useful. Do share your thoughts on what you felt about the conversations today. Twitter... Read more »

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  gapingvoid

• Success has no purpose

  Hugh MacLeod

  24 May 2012 | 12:19 pm

• Alfred

  Hugh MacLeod

  19 May 2012 | 4:40 pm

• In praise of the email newsletter format

  Hugh MacLeod

  9 May 2012 | 8:40 am

  [Subscribe to the gapingvoid newsletter here.] This made me very happy– Austin Ray from Mailchimp interviewed me about my “fantastic open rates”. Mailchimp, as you know, is what powers my daily cartoon newsletter. With email newsletters, at least with Mailchimp, the average “open rate” is around 6%-8% i.e. for every hundred people you send out to, six to eight people actually open it and read it, as opposed to just sending it to the trash. Our newsletter is 40%+. That’s amazing. We were impressed to find out that Hugh MacLeod‘s MailChimp campaigns consistently maintain a…

• Leaving the mainstream…

  Hugh MacLeod

  9 May 2012 | 8:27 am

  This is the latest cartoon to go out in the newsletter. I’m not anti-mainstream; it has its place. That being said, it isn’t for for everyone. And yes, sometimes you have to leave it, to find out who you REALLY are. I can certainly relate…

• The trouble with big companies…

  Hugh MacLeod

  8 May 2012 | 10:03 am

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  Soshable | Social Media Blog

• Pinterest: The Salesman of Social Media?

  Justin Maas

  25 May 2012 | 11:07 pm

  Just a few months ago Pinterest was the new kid on the block, but now it is firmly the number three social network in the world. Since January 1st the number of users who visit Pinterest daily has grown by 145%. This is great news for marketers as Pinterest is proving to be highly effective for converting sales and driving traffic to websites. One of the main ways Pinterest helps those selling products is by allowing you to make the price of the product visible. While some people might think this would deter users, pins with prices actually get 36% more likes than those without a price. In…

• Building Relationships Through Social Media Networks

  Alexandru Rotaru

  24 May 2012 | 4:01 am

  Social networking has become part of world culture in the last decade or so. Facebook currently rules the roost, closing in on one billion users, while others such as Twitter and Google+, with over 100 million users each, are very popular and growing. There is also a wide variation of social networks available, from those that are music orientated like SoundCloud to professional networks like LinkedIn. People want to get in touch with others, from catching up with old school friends to making contacts in their field of work, and social media networks allow them to do just that. Inevitably,…

• 5 Apps that let You Video Chat with Facebook Friends

  Jason Phillips

  24 May 2012 | 1:08 am

  Facebook is currently one of the most popular internet mediums for socializing. In fact, it is well considered as the largest social media networking website in the entire world. So, you’d probably think that because Facebook is exactly a website for socializing, it does not need other alternative mediums for communication right? Well, sorry but you are absolutely wrong, because Facebook has many other apps that could even enhance your social experience in it. Here are 5 of the more basic applications for you to start with: On Conference If utmost simplicity is your priority for a Facebook…

• The Facebook IPO Song

  JD Rucker

  22 May 2012 | 9:45 pm

  The folks over at American Hipster put together this spoof music video to commemorate last week’s Facebook IPO. Instead of Lil Wayne and Bruno Mars singing “Mirror”, they have Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker singing a similar song. It’s about as over-the-top as spoof videos can get without being offensive, but it’s worth the 4 minutes. Related articles Why the Facebook IPO Failed and Why Their Prospects Are Not Positive (socialmediatoday.com) The microscope stays on as Facebook’s IPO needs further analysis (techi.com) Watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Sister…

• What the Heck is So.cl and What Does it Mean?

  Michael Gillen

  22 May 2012 | 9:33 pm

  At this point you’ve probably heard something about So.cl.  At first I heard people say that it was going to go up against Facebook and Google+, even though anyone with a cursory knowledge would know that it’s not the case.  I also have colleagues tell me that this shows that Facebook is getting into search engine marketing, but I think that’s not the case either. But, what, exactly, is it?  Right now, it looks sort of like Pinterest or a social bookmarking site.  Basically, people can search for things on So.cl and then post them.  In other words, So.cl is crowdsourcing the task…

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  Brains On Fire Blog

• Brains on Fire is looking for a vibrant, people-loving, financial and quality control freak!

  Robbin

  24 May 2012 | 9:04 am

  Thanks for helping us spread the word about about this very KEY position at Brains on Fire. Here’s the complete listing for the COO/Director of Client Services Role I just posted on Linked In: You’ll feel a different kind of energy within our office, just like our clients feel it in our work. That means we’re looking for a different kind of energy in a COO/Client Services Director, too. As an agency, we spend our days in a deliberate, constant, necessary dance between order and creative chaos. If you prefer everything in quiet, tidy boxes, you’ll likely go crazy here. In addition…

• What do you love?

  Robbin

  23 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  I love GOOD magazine. The online version is just one of my “feel good” breaks in the middle of the day. I visit it when I want to, well… feel good. My latest discovery is a series on “What do you love?” What a great question. So often we ask people what do you DO. What do you LOVE is a much more telling question to ask when you meet someone. So simple, yet so much more powerful. What do I love? My ten things (I went to 12, I could go on and on but we all have to work!): 1. Seeing my kids do things they love. 2. Those little potato sticks in a can 3. Necklaces that have…

• Word of Mouth via Toaster

  Eric Dodds

  22 May 2012 | 6:33 am

  My wife and I live in a small mill house, and storage space is a valuable commodity. Our kitchen is actually larger than many of the galley-style builds in similar houses, but the layout still leaves us with very little counter space. Which means we have to make choices. Microwave or toaster oven on the counter? (There’s not room for both.) Do we even need a toaster oven? Where am I going to set this steaming casserole down? It turns out that we like toast, but not enough to eat up counter space with a toaster. And we didn’t want to heat the oven up every time for such a simple…

• Defining Good Writing

  amy

  21 May 2012 | 7:46 am

  Last week someone posed an interesting question: “What makes writing good?” The more I tried to answer, the more it felt like trying to describe the color yellow or explain infinity. When you stumble across a piece of good writing, you just get it. You feel it before you know it. You’re compelled to save it, savor it, share it. A good writer fades into the background of their own story. They don’t just tell you about a place, they transport you there. Good writers don’t just describe characters, they introduce you to strangers who ultimately become friends. Good…

• We need your help.

  Robbin

  17 May 2012 | 8:13 am

  That’s Ramsey. We’re always looking for amazing talent. Brains on Fire is looking for another pirate to join our crew! We’re looking for a smart, eager to learn, WOMM loving, Public Relations savvy person to help us spread the Brains on Fire love around the world. You’ll be responsible for planning and executing our speaking team outreach and logistics – this means you need to be overly organized, a great planner, and a maniac about following up with people. You will also serve and be the ambassador for our book, Brains on Fire. This is an entry-level position with…

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  McBuzz Communications | Mark McLaren

• Comparing Internal and External Visitors in Google Analytics

  Mark McLaren

  18 May 2012 | 2:05 pm

  Recently, I got this question about tracking internal and external traffic using Google Analytics based on my post “How to Exclude Internal Visits/Visitors from Google Analytics Reports Using Asynchronous Code“. Do you know how to filter internal and external visitors so you can compare the two visits? I don’t want to exclude the internal visits from being counted in GA. But, I do want to compare the number of internal vs external visits to pages. Is that possible? I’ve ready a bunch of articles on using filters for excluding internal visits. But haven’t found anything on…

• Online Marketing Secrets: Driving Traffic to Your Website is Only the Beginning

  Mark McLaren

  14 May 2012 | 2:49 pm

  Recently I received a question about driving traffic to a website in order to increase sales. Specifically, the question was, what do the “big boys” use to generate sales and leads on their sites? The big boys (and girls) like to use big advertising budgets of anywhere from $100,000 to $1,000,000 or more per month. Want to learn to play the piano? You'll be more successful with an instructor. Online marketing is the same. Hire a consultant if you want to do it right. They spend this on traditional advertising, of course, like TV, magazines and newspaper ads. Online they spend…

• Five Keys to Generating New Business with Online Marketing

  Mark McLaren

  8 May 2012 | 9:59 am

  On Wednesday, March 9 at 8:00 AM Pacific Time (11:00 AM Eastern), I’m giving an online seminar on Five Keys to Generating New Business with Online Marketing. The seminar is FREE. Here’s an outline of what we will be covering. Call in and ask a question! We’ll be giving away a free one-hour consultation from McBuzz Communications. Click here to attend. 1. Your Value Proposition and Your Business Goals What is Your Value Proposition? You need to be able to say what your business does, why people need it, and how it is different from competitors. Use % and $ to make this clear. This is…

• SEO 101: When Bad Title Tags Happen to Good Websites

  Mark McLaren

  1 Mar 2012 | 2:15 pm

  Some search engine optimization techniques are difficult. Others are not. It’s easy to find otherwise well-built, engaging websites with really bad SEO. By “really bad”, I just mean completely neglected or overlooked. HTML title tags are a frequently neglected aspect of SEO that, when fixed, can have an immediate impact on search rankings. On most sites built with content management systems like WordPress, fixing a bad title tag takes 2 minutes and a little keyword research. Here’s an example. Smashing Ideas is a cutting edge digital media agency that makes smartphone…

• WordPress Developer and Contributing Author Jeremy Green of Endo Creative

  Mark McLaren

  10 Feb 2012 | 2:13 pm

  Jeremy Green WordPress Enthusiast Owner of Endo Creative Custom Website Designs NOTE FROM MCBUZZ: Jeremy Green will be answering WordPress questions on our Free WordPress Help pages. I began hand coding websites in my bedroom back when Geocities and Angelfire were cool. Thankfully the web has come a long way since then. A couple years ago I began diving into the wonderful world of WordPress and now I use it everyday, whether on my own sites or on my client’s sites at Endo Creative. We are a Fort Collins based company specializing in custom web design and development, utilizing WordPress…

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  Studio Notes by Shai Coggins

• A Career in Beta and A Life of Dreams

  Shai Coggins

  25 May 2012 | 6:34 pm

  “We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers. Keeping your career in permanent beta forces you to acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s new development to do on yourself, that you will need to adapt and evolve. But it’s still a mind-set brimming with optimism because it celebrates the fact that you have the power to improve yourself and, as important, improve the world around you.” - Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha (The Start-up of You) When a friend of mine suggested I read this…

• It’s Mother’s Day

  Shai Coggins

  12 May 2012 | 6:28 am

  Tomorrow, a number of people from different countries would celebrate mothers on the same day. Here in Australia, as well as the US, South Africa, and the Philippines (to name a few), mothers get to take centre stage. And, I would like to mark this day to celebrate* my mom and being a mum. Yes, I have a mom and my kids have a mum. For someone like me who was raised with American English spelling conventions, and had to adjust when I started living in countries with British English spelling conventions (especially since I’m married to an Englishman and living in Australia!), this whole…

• On things and people that matter most

  Shai Coggins

  6 May 2012 | 7:44 am

  As I fret over some things that have been bothering me for a while now, my husband gives me a hug and says: “Don’t worry about it. It will be fine. No matter what happens, you’ll find the right way. You always do. It’s not the end of the world.” He’s right, of course. For the most part. (Yes, he will be ecstatic to read those words, I know, but it’s true. ) The thing is, knowing he’s there to support me with my choices like he has often done for the fourteen years that I have known him, does make me feel less anxious. More at peace with whatever…

• Billy Cart Adventure for Charity Water Birthday Campaign {Video Trailer}

  Shai Coggins

  23 Apr 2012 | 7:29 am

  When I asked people to support the 38 for my 38th birthday campaign, I also promised something: All supporters who donated to the campaign get to view a never-before-seen video of me that I prefer not to release in public under normal circumstances. Well, I figure that supporters deserve that kind of thank you at the very least. At least I get to squirm for a good cause. To give all the wonderful birthday campaign supporters a sneak peak of what they’ll see once the campaign is over, here’s a special trailer I created: And, as an update: As of this writing, we now have raised $442…

• #12NTC Highlights from San Francisco

  Shai Coggins

  20 Apr 2012 | 6:05 am

  Just over a couple of weeks ago, I was in San Francisco to attend the Nonprofit Technology Conference 2012. This is my second year attending this amazing conference by NTEN and I think I loved it even more than I did the first time around. Something I didn’t expect, really. As the wonderful, smart and generous Beth Kanter pointed out, it felt more like a reunion. Yes, even though I barely see the people in this community and I live in Australia, attending this year’s NTC felt like a homecoming of some kind. And, Beth was only one of the many that I ended up spending great time…

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  Bare Feet Blog

• Bare Feet Studios on the Web

  Roxanne Darling

  14 May 2012 | 2:54 am

  Our company was started in 1996 by Shane Robinson and a previous partner. In 2000 the partnership dissolved and Roxanne Darling joined Shane to rebrand the entreprise as Bare Feet Studios. At that time we had the hardest time with a new name as – don’t laugh! – all of the good web addresses were taken. So as we sat around the desk of 6 people in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the winter, we noticed that no one was wearing shoes. And that the URL www.barefeetstudios.com was available! So our new name grew of a very simple attribute, yet it represented so many aspects of our core…

• Shane Robinson, Digital Artist

  Roxanne Darling

  14 May 2012 | 2:52 am

  Shane has toggled back and forth between art and technology since high school. He programmed on a Commodore 64 yet was also nick-named “copy machine” for his ability to draw virtually anything he saw – accurately and down to the finest details. He ended up graduating from the University of Iowa with a Bachelors in Fine Arts. And yet one of his first jobs was at Kinko’s where he taught himself how to use Adobe Illustrator over the weekend in order to sail through a job interview the following Monday! H continued bouncing back between database programming and owning an…

• Roxanne Darling, Quantum Coach

  Roxanne Darling

  14 May 2012 | 2:35 am

  Roxanne is a lifelong learner and her favorite topic is consciousness. For all, all roads lead to the big C! Being conscious means having less stress, being a more artful and compassionate communicator, heading off problems before they fester, and finding the humanity in each person regardless of their quirks, their shortcomings, and even their demands. Go explore Divine Openings with Rox. | Like Rox’s page on Facebook. In April 2009, Roxanne was initiated as a facilitator of enlightenment via a week long process. It used to take much longer, but like most everything else these days,…

• Beach Walks with Rox, an Online Video Pioneer

  Roxanne Darling

  14 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  Back in late 2004, Shane was podcaster #32 in the universe. Always one to be on the front lines if seeing what the internet is up to, he had an audio show called “None of This Matters.” Surprisingly, it has a lot of overlap with the business philosophy we have developed over the years, and which is now available (on steroids!) over at my coaching site, Divine Openings with Rox. But I digress – as I often do – as so much of our lives are interconnected now. It has become virtually impossible to discern fixed starting points and pure examples of cause-effect! Visit…

• Giving Back: A Core Part of Our Sharing Nature

  Roxanne Darling

  13 May 2012 | 4:24 pm

  Back in the spring of 2000, while we were still based in Santa Fe, NM, there was a huge forest fire that broke out and endangered the entire community of Los Alamos, home to the birth if the nuclear bomb and one of the largest nuclear research facilities in the world. As a founder of the New Mexico Internet Professionals Association (NMIPA) Shane knew that online would be the best place to coordinate emergency communications. He and his team of fellow employees and other NMIPA members rapidly launched a web site to funnel emergency messages that ranged from fire department updates to…

• 

  Ignite Social Media

• Our Evolving Relationship with Technology and Social Media

  Ryan Sweeney

  21 May 2012 | 6:17 am

  Back in August, I wrote a blog post which alluded to a shift from mobile phones to augmented reality vision. Since then, Google announced they are working on just that with “Project Glass.” This new technology is well on its way to not only change how we interact with each other, but our relationship with technology and how we process data as well. In this post, I’m going to start off with an example of augmented reality, the issues it presents, our relationship with technology, how the combined concepts reflect a need for “Calm Technology,” and the implications…

• Ignite Social Media’s 2012 Mystery Trip to New Orleans, Louisiana

  Ann Marie Taepke

  16 May 2012 | 12:16 pm

  One of the amazing perks of working at Ignite Social Media is our annual Mystery Trip.  Each year our company, along with Brogan & Partners, closes down for a long weekend to unwind and bond as a team on a group vacation. A few months before we depart, the company gets a series of clues as to where we are going and what to pack, but no one truly knows the location until they open their travel packet at the airport. This year, 92 of us traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana for great food, music and even a swamp tour! Below are some of our favorite photos from the trip: At 4AM, both the…

• Will Social Gaming Help or Hurt Your Business?

  Christina Gleason

  15 May 2012 | 8:09 am

  There are a number of social games out there on a variety of platforms – although the most popular seem to be those played on Facebook and smartphones. If you’re reading this, chances are you play at least one of them: Words with Friends, Scramble with Friends, Hanging with Friends, Draw Something, The Sims Social, Gardens of Time, Diamond Dash, Bubble Island…the list goes on. But do you play those games with only friends and family, or have you reached out to business contacts on your quest to challenge new competitors? Do you play only at home or during “free…

• 20 Men Worth Following on Pinterest

  Christina Gleason

  8 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Pinterest has a reputation for being popular with the ladies. I suppose there’s a reason for that; Forbes reported that 97% of Pinterest users are women, and that 47% of women who use social media have made purchases based on Pinterest recommendations. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t men on Pinterest. They may make up only 3% of the population, but men make up a minority worth paying attention to. Many of them are far more popular than most of us women. Is it the novelty of having a man in a “woman’s world?” (That’s tongue in cheek, folks. Not…

• After Timeline, Top 50 Brands See Facebook Comments Dip 11%, Likes Rise 11%

  Jim Tobin

  3 May 2012 | 6:58 am

  On February 29th, Facebook introduced Timeline for Brands, allowing brands to have a nifty cover photo but also eliminating their ability to have a default landing tab (something I would still very much like back). By March 30, all brands had to switch over to Timeline. Since I’ve been tracking the 50 largest branded Facebook fan pages for more than two years, and since I’ve done previous analysis on how they perform relative to which have the most active fans, how often they post, the impressions they generate and their value, even if certain brands attract more outgoing fans…

• 

  Technosailor.com

• 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.4

  Aaron

  23 May 2012 | 1:50 pm

  WordPress 3.4 is around the corner. It’s currently beta4 which means a Release Candidate or three will be needed before it drops officially. If you want to test what’s out there now, the way to do that is through SVN. As usual, however, pre-release WordPress is not supported. As usual, however, I have been running trunk throughout the entire development cycle without any problems. Before I get into the guts of WordPress 3.4, I want to point you to a resource which highlights some of the thinking that is going into the development, now and in the future, of how WordPress is built.

• User Generated Hiring

  Aaron

  22 May 2012 | 6:30 pm

  I was not at the latest incarnation of Social Media Club Austin. I stopped going to SMC back in DC. The reason is… Marketing has usurped social media. Today, when someone mentions a social media job, it’s almost always a marketing job. This is all wrong. Social media pertains to every industry. Not just marketing. And I’m tired of it being bastardized by coat-riders. I was using social media in 2000 on forums. It’s how I learned my art. Or the beginnings of it. I started blogging in 2003 long before Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. When panelists say, “I’d…

• Crazy Christians and Bad Spam and Mailing List Management

  Aaron

  27 Apr 2012 | 2:24 pm

  I somehow got added to a mailing list recently unsolicited. It’s called Christian Report and I refuse to link to them. It is an arrogant, self-serving site that is plagued by guilt. There is therefore now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus. -Romans 8:1 What is seriously tragic about this site (aside from the content) is that I was added to this mailing list unknown. For God knows what reason. I mean, I’m used to getting spam and all, but at least a mailinglist has an unsubscribe, right? I am a user of Other Inbox, which has this neat “Unsubscribe”…

• Tech: We Need to Start Being Feminists. Stat!

  Aaron

  26 Apr 2012 | 12:42 pm

    Used under Creative Commons. Photo by Jay Morrison. This. That extends this I wrote about a few weeks ago. This is pissing me the hell off! All that. It all needs to stop. How are some of the brightest minds on the internet not seeing the harm in how we collectively perceive women, women in tech, women in our industry? How is it funny to send nude photos of women to a prospective boss and get hired as a result? How is it humorous to make jokes about “gangbang interviews” in a professional presentation? How is this okay? In the context of discussion around this…

• David Simon on Debate and Journalism

  Aaron

  26 Apr 2012 | 10:05 am

  It’s why I used to love a healthy newsroom, which I have described as a magical place where everyone disagrees with everything all of the time.  Arguments make the work better; when people stop arguing, or at least arguing intelligently, absent the usual half-assed, rhetorical cheating, the work invariably suffers. (Source: davidsimon.com)

• 

  The Social Customer Manifesto

• Turning fans into advocates

  Christopher Carfi

  9 May 2012 | 1:41 pm

  There are some great conversations happening over at the Advanced Social Media Strategies for PR, Marketing and Corporate Communications event at Cisco today. In particular, wanted to give a shout out to our CEO Sean O’Driscoll, who is presenting today on the topic of Turning Fans into Advocates. Check out Sean’s deck, embedded below. Turn fans into advocates through influencer engagement View more presentations from Ant’s Eye View

• It’s no game…

  Christopher Carfi

  19 Apr 2012 | 11:43 am

    This one should be a lot of fun. Sean O’Driscoll will be presenting with the folks over at Badgeville on the topic of engagement and gameification in a webinar on April 25th at 10:30 PT. (Register here.) The quick agenda: How to use the Journey to the Engaged Enterprise as a benchmark for your external and internal social engagement plans Critical milestones at each stage of the Journey, and common obstacles that can prevent you from reaching them Why the principles of Badgeville’s Behavior Platform are critical to driving the kind of successful, sustainable customer and…

• The Social Engagement Journey event, April 23

  Christopher Carfi

  19 Apr 2012 | 10:29 am

    REGISTER NOW Sean O’Driscoll, our fearless leader at Ant’s Eye View, is keynoting an event next Monday here in the Bay Area. Here’s the description: “Becoming a fully engaged enterprise in today’s social world isn’t about creating a “social media strategy.” It is a journey defined by stages of operational maturity, milestones, and ultimately, a destination. The successful journey requires practitioner experience, pragmatism – and perseverance. But the payoff is immense. The fully engaged enterprise discovers on this journey that customers again trust…

• The Hunger Peeps

  Christopher Carfi

  8 Apr 2012 | 7:30 pm

    Katniss Everpeep volunteers as tribute.   Katniss Everpeep startles the judges.   Katniss Everpeep cuts down a Tracker Jacker nest.   Katniss Everpeep destroys the supply pile.   Katniss Everpeep avenges Rue.   Katniss Everpeep buries Rue in flowers.   Katniss Everpeep and Peepa are crowned victorious.  

• No, you can’t control your own data, says the travel industry

  Christopher Carfi

  7 Apr 2012 | 10:16 am

    A big thanks to Jennifer Cobb for the link to this New York Times article entitled “Swatting Down Startups That Help Consumers.” The gist is that there are a raft of startups that act on the behalf of customers in interacting with big brands (These kinds of services can be thought of as “fourth party” services.) Some examples: Customer-benefitting booking engines for car rentals Airline milage program points aggregators (think Mint.com, but for points) Airline seat watchers that automatically rebook you to a better seat when one opens up A number of brands…

• 

  MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog

• Free Friday: Sharpen Your Set of Social Media Marketing Skills

  Veronica Maria Jarski

  25 May 2012 | 7:28 am

  Leave the lazy, hazy days of summer to the unambitious. On June 8, attend our free Digital Marketing World: Social Media virtual conference and learn what you need to sharpen your social media marketing skills. The virtual conference takes place on June 8, from 11 a.m. Eastern time to 3 p.m. And it features three sessions to keep you up to date with the world of social media—all while your competitors snooze in the summer sun. At 11 a.m., Erik Deckers, co-owner and vice president of Creative Services for Professional Blog Service, will talk about “Using Twitter to Drive Business…

• Five Reasons to Create Online Videos for Your Customers

  Guest Blogger

  24 May 2012 | 7:51 am

  A guest post by Jim Dicso of SundaySky. When consumers shop online, they expect to receive the same personalized attention they get in-store, with engaging experiences throughout their decision-making process. To create those engaging online experiences, innovative marketers are turning to online video. Interested in maximizing your brand’s success with online video? Here are five thoughts to consider. 1. Search engines favor video and structure their results to reward sites that use it Consequently, online marketers are investing more to promote their videos. One investment that goes a…

• Pop Quiz! Are Best Practices Evil?

  Matthew Grant

  23 May 2012 | 10:56 am

  A talented musician friend told me a story that went something like this… When learning a classical piece for guitar, my friend didn’t want to follow Segovia’s fingerings. Being a headstrong youngster, my friend had his own ideas about how to play the piece, but his guitar teacher just wasn’t having it. “Segovia was a genius,” the guitar teacher said. “Are you a genius?” The lesson here is obvious: If you are working on a piece of music that is several hundred years old, and a recognized master figured how to best to perform it, you would be…

• Seven Fundraising Secrets for Nonprofits Revealed!

  Rob Wu

  23 May 2012 | 7:04 am

  How do professional nonprofit fundraisers raise millions of dollars for their nonprofits every year? What are their secrets to fundraising? Though fundraising is our nonprofit’s lifeblood, most of us aren’t professionally trained at fundraising. We know how to make an impact, yet we don’t know how to raise funds most effectively. Let’s uncover the secrets of a nonprofit fundraising professional. As part of the Get Donors series, Ruthellen Rubin, a professor of philanthropy at NYU and CFRE, shares her secrets. She distills 30 years of fundraising experience into seven short…

• Want Your Idea to Be Loved? Keep It Simple

  Guest Blogger

  22 May 2012 | 7:04 am

  A guest post by John Mataraza of Digital Influence Group. We’ve all made the association that bigger is better. That saying more means you have more to say. That the more we pontificate, the more likely we are to eventually say something smart. That the longer our PowerPoint presentations are, the more astute we are going to seem. That a 100-page deck with complex measurement readouts and vague meaningless “results” is better than a distilled and focused one-page dashboard. The truth is: A great idea is only great when others can understand it and easily act on it. The best ideas are…

• 

  Digital Trends

• Asus quotes Bruce Lee as it teases new Transformer hardware, set to be revealed at Computex 2012

  Andy Boxall

  28 May 2012 | 8:17 am

  Asus has released a teaser video for a new Transformer product due to be unveiled at Computex 2012. Could it be one of the first to run Windows 8?

• Facebook phone: Former iPhone engineers hired by Zuckerberg, report says

  Trevor Mogg

  28 May 2012 | 6:55 am

  A new report claims Facebook has hired several former Apple engineers who worked on the iPhone to help with its rumored quest to build a smartphone – a device which the report suggests could be launched "by next year."

• Apple iTV rumor roundup

  Andrew Couts

  28 May 2012 | 6:15 am

  The release of Apple's mythical iTV is just around the corner — or so they say. Here, a brief rundown of everything we (might) know about the much-rumored Apple HDTV.

• Has the Retina Display had its day? LG says yes with a new 1080p, 440ppi, 5-inch screen

  Andy Boxall

  28 May 2012 | 3:21 am

  LG has announced a new 5-inch LCD screen, boasting a 1080p resolution and a pixel density of 440ppi, which will be released later this year.

• BMW 7 Series gets new engines and options for 2013

  Stephen Edelstein

  27 May 2012 | 12:15 pm

  BMW's flagship will focus more on economy and comfort than performance and style.

• 

  Janet Fouts - Social Media Coach

• Going the Extra Mile for Your Customer

  fouts

  21 May 2012 | 11:54 am

  It would seem like a no-brainer that going the extra distance to really listen to what your customer wants and delivering it is good for business, right? Still, really listening to customers is a skill that a lot of businesses seem to have forgotten. Recently I bought a trailer for my horse and my Jeep just didn’t have the horsepower to pull it, so we went looking for a bigger SUV. Something used and in good enough condition I won’t have to worry about it out on the back country roads where I’ll be riding or heading to Tahoe for a family getaway. We visited half a dozen…

• Do It Yourself Social Media Audit

  fouts

  13 May 2012 | 9:04 pm

  We tend to create the social media presence for our businesses in an organic fashion, which is the natural way to grow relationships right? New tools pop up we just HAVE  to try, or our network of connections asks us to join a new network in order to communicate with them. The problem is; as you explore new tools and meet new people who invite you to join them on other networks, your messaging and your social media presence overall can easily get confused. That’s why it’s a good idea to conduct a social media audit every so often to step back and get a 10K foot level. This allows you to…

• Social Media Efficiency for Nonprofits

  fouts

  8 May 2012 | 11:10 pm

  I talk to nonprofits about various aspects of social media just about every day. By and large people get the value of building community around their cause. They get the relatively manageable expense of leveraging social media to raise visibility for their nonprofit, find funders, advocates, and  volunteers when compared to more traditional marketing channels. They WANT to use social media effectively. They know it works and they’ve seen the success cases. So what’s stopping them from diving in? Two things are the biggest issues. 1. The learning curve to get up to speed on the…

• Getting real engagement on your Facebook page

  fouts

  18 Apr 2012 | 2:58 pm

  Many Facebook page owners are disappointed with the results they are getting from their Facebook pages. Why? Sometimes because they think they’ll put up a page and their fan base will flock to the site, dynamically post content on their own and discuss it with their peers, all without much effort from the community manager (if there is one). Hooey. This just doesn’t happen unless you’ve got a vibrant community and are expanding it to Facebook. So what do you do? Quit broadcasting If you tell me everything I need to know through your Facebook page, and it reads like your email…

• What is your Reach on Facebook? (Any why you shouldn’t care)

  fouts

  5 Apr 2012 | 3:29 pm

  A client contacted me this morning, upset because her “reach” seems to be  seriously declining on Facebook. For some reason Facebook chooses Reach to be the metric graphed on the insights page, and it’s little understood, so here’s the long and the short of it.  Here’s how Facebook defines reach “The reach chart shows how many people have seen any content about your Page, and where applicable, whether these people were reached through an organic, paid or viral channel. People might see your content through more than one of these channels. As a result, the sum of your organic,…

• 

  SocialTimes

• Reddit Founder Forms Internet Defense League to Fight for Internet Freedom, Comic Book-Style

  Devon Glenn

  25 May 2012 | 10:11 am

  If we learned anything from the Internet Blackout that united Wikipedia, Google, and other social media luminaries against the anti-piracy measures SOPA and PIPA, it’s that Internet companies can win any battle that’s fought on the Internet. To keep the flame alive, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian has created an Internet Defense League to fire off a bat signal (in the shape of a lolcat) to quickly assemble a force against any new legislation that threatens Internet freedom. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Social Media Jobs: Activision, Design Within Reach, Spooky Cool Labs

  Nadine Cheung

  25 May 2012 | 8:51 am

  This week, Activision is hiring a mobile analytics manager, while Design Within Reach is looking for a social media community advocate. Spooky Cool Labs needs a social community manager, and Time Inc. is seeking a social media marketing manager for AmericanFamily.com. Get the scoop on these openings and more below, and find additional social media jobs on Mediabistro. Mobile Analytics Manager Activision (Santa Monica, CA) Social Community Manager Spooky Cool Labs (Chicago, IL) Social Media Marketing Manager – AmericanFamily.com Time Inc. (Stamford, CT) Social Media News Coordinator…

• How to Use Social Media Like a Rockstar [Podcast]

  Devon Glenn

  25 May 2012 | 8:04 am

  On today’s Morning Media Menu (MP3 link), GalleyCat editor Jason Boog and I talked about the Flaming Lips’ lead singer on Twitter, Syfy’s upcoming series and massively multiplayer online game, and how to share books and eBooks with our troops for Memorial Day. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Announcing Mediabistro’s Social Curation Summit on July 31 in NYC

  Devon Glenn

  25 May 2012 | 6:57 am

  The Internet is starting to look like that drawer full of family photos that we’ve been meaning to put into an album for years. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of our new conference, Social Curation Summit! Join us in New York City on July 31 for the first ever full-day conference exploring the business of social content curation and visual communities like Pinterest and Tumblr. We’re offering a special early bird rate of only $199 when you register by Thursday, June 7. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Flickr Expands its Justified View to Include Groups

  Neil Vidyarthi

  25 May 2012 | 5:57 am

  Flickr has been rolling out what they call the “Justified” view of photos for the last few months, including it in various parts of the site as a nicer way to look at photos.  Well, they announced in a blog post that they’re now bringing it to Groups, and it makes the whole experience a lot more fun and a little more social.  I take a look below. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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  Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg

• How To Use Memes to Promote Your Business

  Guest Author

  22 May 2012 | 6:32 am

  This is a guest post by Anita Brady. A meme, according to Merriam Webster Dictionary, is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Originally coined by evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins in the 1970s, a meme is something with which just about every member of a culture is familiar. For example, the simple act of swinging a hammer to drive in a nail would be considered a meme, or the way Bostonians pronounce the word “car.” Even the “quick fix” method of getting your Nintendo cartridge to…

• The New Model: How Google+ “Gets” Content

  Guest Author

  15 May 2012 | 6:25 am

  This is a guest post by Joel Harrison. The way content is shared today changes online marketing, putting content to the forefront of what users, companies, brands and products are about. Google+ has just won the People’s Choice award for social media at The Webby Awards presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. This may come as a surprise, since Google+ isn’t as popular as was first expected. It’s trying to reverse that situation though and bind everything together into a huge social network, always faithful to its mission ‘to organize the world’s…

• How to Build Better [Business] Habits

  Guest Author

  8 May 2012 | 6:47 am

  This is a guest post from Christopher Wallace. It’s 2 p.m. on a Wednesday and that fully loaded triple-decker sandwich from the nearby deli has you wondering how long you can get away with catching some z’s under your desk, or if that drawing-eyes-on-your-eyelids thing really works. Whether or not you plowed down a big meal or have the mid-week blues, those last few hours of the work day or week can be some of the most unproductive. So how do you pick yourself up and get back into the swing of things? The answer is in creating good habits. While taking a swig of an energy drink…

• How to Make Your Facebook Ads Convert

  Guest Author

  1 May 2012 | 6:45 am

  This is a guest post from Craig Robinson. Getting proper return on investment for Facebook advertising can be tricky. First, you need to create an ad that attracts clicks, which usually is the easy part, and then you need a decent percentage of the people clicking through to be potential customers. The last thing is a bit harder to control but has a huge impact on the end result. When the wrong people click, your conversion goes down and you have to pay Facebook for nothing. There are, however, a few tips you can follow that might increase your performance. If your Facebook-advertising…

• Web Lead Tracking Explained: How to Get High Quality Leads with the Internet

  Guest Author

  24 Apr 2012 | 6:39 am

  This is a guest post from Brad Shorr.  A lot of entrepreneurs and midsize firms say they “get a lot of web leads.” However, when asked if they know the source of the leads, they have only a vague idea – and sometimes, no idea at all. How can you tell where to direct your marketing efforts if you don’t know where your leads are coming from? You can’t. This post will talk about how to set up lead tracking on your site, take the guesswork out of your marketing, and help you get more, high quality leads. Phone Conversions A lot phone inquires are never even identified as web leads!

• 

  Stay N Alive

• Why do I Think Marketers That Don't Embrace Google+ Will be Out of Business in a Year?

  8 May 2012 | 12:23 pm

  (Want to skip all this and get the courses right now? Go to http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/TwitterOffer and sign up now!)As I mentioned earlier on Google+ (where you'll always hear tech news first from me!), I recently just finished a course on Pluralsight all about how you or your friends can embrace Google+ better for your business or clients (you can see what this course covers at http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/Courses/TableOfContents?courseName=googleplus-business). In a new series for businesses provided by the video training site, Pluralsight,…

• Custom Tailoring 2.0 - "Dress Code" is Set to Become the Zappos of Tailoring

  2 May 2012 | 9:00 am

  Back in October I had the opportunity to visit Hong Kong for business. While I was there I decided to get a custom suit made. I'm a sucker for a good suit! While Hong Kong is certainly not as cheap as Thailand when it comes to custom-made suits, it is generally much cheaper than the typical run-of-the-mill tailor in the United States. In the United States it's typically "go cheap (as in poorly designed) or go broke (as in way too expensive for the 99% to afford)". In Hong Kong for about $300 I can get a pretty nice suit that is completely custom-tailored for my body type and size, something…

• You'll Always Hear it First on Google+

  1 May 2012 | 7:38 pm

  I'm starting a new experiment. From now on every post I make to StayNAlive.com will originate on Google+. This goes in line with my earlier post where I suggested that the Blogging landscape is significantly changing, and the blogs that want to survive will need to embrace social means of publishing and discovery. You'll recognize this trend immediately as you visit my blog and see the ability to automatically share the articles you read on StayNAlive.com to Facebook, and today I'm going to continue that trend with the strengths that Google+ provides.The Power of Google+ CirclesOne of…

• Wanna Learn Facebook Development? Check Out My New Video Series

  19 Mar 2012 | 8:38 am

  Facebook application development isn't just a skill, and it's not just for developers either - it's a mindset and a culture that you have to understand to truly understand and implement its value. It's something both marketers, business owners, as well as developers should understand to fully have a grasp against the competition in this increasingly social world. That's why I jumped at the chance to work with the popular online learning site, Pluralsight, to do a new series on Facebook application development. My first video went live yesterday, and I hope will be the first in a line of…

• Still Think Facebook's Not Threatened by Google+? Facebook Now Supports "+" Tagging

  7 Mar 2012 | 10:23 pm

  As a Google+ user (Author of Google+ For Dummies), and also avid Facebook user (Author of Facebook Application Development For Dummies), I often find myself getting my keys mixed up going back and forth from Google+ to Facebook. This is particularly frustrating for tagging friends. When Google+ launched, I found myself constantly putting in the "+" button to tag friends on Facebook, only to realize Facebook's form of tagging was the "@" symbol. It appears some time in the recent past Facebook has now adopted the "+" (plus) sign to allow tagging in status updates. From the start, Google+…

• 

  Colin Walker - Social Thoughts

• Push curation – the next wave of content discovery?

  Colin

  28 May 2012 | 6:38 am

  Curation is more popular than ever but it is increasingly difficult to find a good signal in the noise. Could a notification system, such as on Google+, be used to “push” content to interested people rather than having them “pull” it to them? Against a backdrop of warnings that overall public engagement on Google+ is dropping specific groups with common interests are forming with increasingly regular interaction between the individuals within those groups. Obviously these are not formal groups as this facility does not exist but a collection of like-minded…

• What is Google Plus?

  Colin

  11 May 2012 | 3:27 am

  Numerous conversations have arisen around the direction Google’s social network is heading and how this compares to our expectations of where it should be. Is this current questioning of the status quo simply a healthy debate or is it indicative that key engagers are, perhaps, losing faith in the service? So, what is Google+? To play devil’s advocate let’s consider: There is the possibility that we are all over-analysing the situation and, as is common with a relatively new social service, are attempting to ascribe to it a meaning that fits our notion of what we think it…

• Managing our social connections beyond Dunbar.

  Colin

  9 May 2012 | 3:24 pm

  While aspects of our behaviour on social networks can reflect that of our offline lives we need not be subject to the same constraints. Social networks are often criticised for being little more than online popularity contests where users strive to amass ever higher numbers of followers. The pressures of online influence systems demanding constant interaction with an ever wider reach also contribute to this feeling and we are advised that we should focus on quality and not quantity. The argument most frequently used to “prove” that having a larger number of friends online is that…

• Are we losing out with only +1s?

  Colin

  3 May 2012 | 9:04 am

  As Google continues to integrate the Plus social layer across its ecosystem are we actually gaining from the process? Arguments over Google changing the like & dislike voting buttons on YouTube, as prompted by Wil Wheaton’s outburst, raise a number of issues despite the company currently only testing a range of alternatives. The primary concern is that a move to using a +1 button instead of the traditional “thumbs up” would force users to join Google’s social network. To play devil’s advocate we already have to sign in with a Google account to like or dislike…

• The 3 R’s of Influence – towards a better measurement of social influence.

  Colin

  1 May 2012 | 10:42 pm

  The measurement of social influence is fundamentally flawed due to its reliance on a limited data set. An alternative is therefore required. You can view the proposal here: The 3 R’s of Social Influence (Embedded PDF) Gauging the true influence of an individual is a complex affair and hinges on a host of factors including a stable identity. Current systems such as Klout and Kred do not measure influence, they measure interaction by way of pure numbers: shares, retweets, likes, +1s, comments etc. extrapolated out over your connections and those sharing your content. This is not true…

• 

  Social Media Mom

• A Master’s Degree Program is No Excuse Not to Travel

  socialmediamom

  25 May 2012 | 8:08 am

  Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes There is nothing like travel to expand your mind and world view, and there is no better time in life to travel than as a college student or in between graduation and getting your master’s degree. You’ve heard it more than once, the lecture on how carefree and joie de vivre your life is, free of the obligations of family and career. Of course that Aunt, Uncle or family friend, encouraging you to take advantage of your freedom and “see the world” usually doesn’t whip out a checkbook and offer any assistance. And small bank accounts rarely go well with…

• Elite Universities with Online Programs Level the Playing Field for Students

  socialmediamom

  21 May 2012 | 6:17 am

  Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes Admit it. You think you’re a genius. Though you’ve never taken an IQ or Mensa test, if you did, you’re certain that everyone would be amazed at how intelligent you are. Well, now you can put those untapped smarts to the test. Many Ivy League schools such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford are now opening their virtual doors to those wanting to learn from the best academic minds in the country. As the world of the Internet continues to expand, universities with online programs are becoming the norm across the nation. Once relegated to colleges lacking the…

• Be Wary When Using Social Media to Help You Find the Right Online School

  socialmediamom

  18 May 2012 | 3:16 am

  Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes Because of the rise and proliferation of the online university, people interested in attending college now have countless options from which to choose. Live in Florida but interested in Portland State University? Shouldn’t be a problem if you have Internet access. Want to earn a degree but don’t have the time because of work and family? Distance learning can facilitate a busy schedule. Not all online schools are created equal, though, and it’s essential to choose the best one. So how do you go about doing this? Just as there is an abundance of…

• Top Online Masters Programs for Women’s Studies Explain What Women Want

  socialmediamom

  11 May 2012 | 12:28 pm

  Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes Credit In colleges and universities across the nation, women’s studies programs allow students to investigate issues of gender and sexuality through scholarly research and debate. These programs first began to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the rise of the women’s liberation movement, and many feel this relatively new field of study is well suited toward new types of degrees, like distance learning programs. Women’s studies programs have flourished in American institutions of higher learning, taking root almost everywhere. The…

• A Mother’s Day Infographic

  socialmediamom

  10 May 2012 | 11:05 am

  Reading time: < 1 minute It is that time of year, for those of you who don't know: Mother's Day is Sunday, May 13. In honor of this special day, we are featuring a new infographic from Internet Exposure. Here you will see just how tech savvy moms have become, as well as what they really want for Mother's Day. Not Yo Mama’s Mama – a Digital Mom Infographic by Internet Exposure

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  Quick Online Tips

• How to Disable Power Key / Button on Keyboard

  QuickOnlineTips

  27 May 2012 | 11:46 pm

  Home > Computers > Tutorials How do you disable the power key / button on your keyboard which causes instant shut down? BTW have you ever seen a Keyboard power key! I was blogging from my uncle’s old computer and he had a really old keyboard. I do a lot of Print Screen screenshots for my articles and strangely enough the computer would keep shutting down. I had experienced similar auto-shutdowns with Windows upgrades and some really bad viruses. But there seemed to be no such issue here. The Print Screen key worked well, but I was surprised why when I sometimes tried to take…

• How to Hide PHP Version in Site HTTP Headers

  QuickOnlineTips

  25 May 2012 | 11:50 pm

  Home > Blogging > Domain Hosting > Security You must hide PHP version of your server in site headers for better site security. It is essential that you keep your PHP version updated on your server as newer versions help to fix security bugs, besides getting new features. I found that even after you turn off server signature to hide server details and your Apache version, the X-Powered by PHP version still appears in the site headers. For example, if you simply check site headers of some site, you will get X-powered-By: PHP/5.3.10 While you thought only you could find PHP version…

• Download Facebook Camera: Fastest Way to Share Facebook Photos

  QuickOnlineTips

  24 May 2012 | 9:46 pm

  Home > Downloads > Facebook Download Facebook Camera, a new iOS app which is the fastest way to post and share Facebook photos instantly from your iPhone or other Apple mobile device. As photo sharing gets more popular, and people seek faster ways to post photos, Facebook makes it less cumbersome using Facebook camera app. Download Facebook Camera Try the new Facebook Camera app and share Facebook photos with your Facebook friends faster than ever. When you login, you get to see all the photos shared by your Facebook friends in your news feed. What has caught the media buzz is that…

• Download Yahoo! Axis Browser: New Ways to Browse, Search

  QuickOnlineTips

  24 May 2012 | 5:27 am

  Home > Downloads » Yahoo! Yahoo! has launched Axis web browser and you can download Yahoo! Axis browser apps right now on your iPad, iPhone, and computer desktop. Yahoo! Axis claims to redefine the way we browse and search the web. It is also the first mobile browser that can integrate with any major desktop browser. Yahoo! Axis Browser Yahoo Axis claims to redefine search and makes it evolve from a ‘destination’ to a ‘companion’. Powered by instant visually rich page previews as you type your search terms, you can now keep searching in the same window…

• A Malware Threat Most People Are Unaware Of

  QuickOnlineTips

  21 May 2012 | 9:02 am

  Home > Computers > Guest Posts > Security There is one malware threat that most people are not aware of and sadly, they get trapped by this threat. As we know, the presence of the Internet and personal computer several decades ago enable some irresponsible people to spread malicious programs. And day after day, people are more aware of those threats. Computer security experts also have been teaching people how to prevent their computer from being infected. You probably have known these practices: we shouldn’t open email spam and its attachment, only download software and…

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  PR-Squared - Social Media Marketing and Public Relations

• 4 Reasons Why You Should Fire People Faster

  Todd Defren

  28 May 2012 | 5:59 am

  There have been occasions in my history as an employer in which I’ve tried to be “the nice guy,” and it was a mistake almost every time. To be clear – ask anyone! – I am a pretty nice guy, but, there’s such a thing as being too nice. For example, let’s say you hire somebody who seems awesome, both on paper (resume), online (social channels) and in-person.  You find out over the course of the working relationship, however, that this person is (pick one) incompetent … a bad cultural fit … a weak manager … all-talk-no-action … more interested in tweeting…

• What Do You Mean, Exactly, by Social Media?

  Todd Defren

  22 May 2012 | 1:35 pm

  A colleague cornered me the other day to declaim, “My team needs to do more Social Media.” This puzzled me as we’re pretty well known for being good at this stuff. “Define exactly what you mean by ‘doing Social Media,’” I replied. “Define Social Media?” they asked incredulously. “Yes,” I said. “When you say we need to do more Social Media, exactly what services are you suggesting? Community Management (i.e., manning Twitter and Facebook)? Content creation? Creating social apps? Doing even more sophisticated monitoring and analytics? All of the above? None…

• Seven Principles of Content Marketing

  Todd Defren

  14 May 2012 | 11:20 am

  Now that we’ve all agreed that “Content is King (Again),” and Content Marketing is all the rage, maybe it is time to think about some easy-to-follow tenets.  Let’s keep this simple. Follow a 70/30 Rule – 70% of content curated, 30% branded.  Why? Because the rest-of-the-world is at least 70% more interesting than your brand; and, promoting external content builds social capital, makes grateful fans of influencers. All content should be SHAREWORTHY.  Don’t publish junk.  Better to be quiet than to queer the signal-to-noise ratio. All content should benefit…

• Seriously, This Is Gonna Be Cool: The Corporate Social Media Summit

  Todd Defren

  4 May 2012 | 7:05 am

  Next month I’ll be moderating a panel at the Corporate Social Media Summit, which is being held June 13-14 at the New Yorker Hotel in NYC.  It’s gonna be a great time, with an impressive list of corporate attendees, including SHIFT clients such as McDonalds and H&R Block, among many others (Whole Foods! Dell! Lego! Mercedes!). I’ll be moderating the panel on “Reputation preservation and enhancement: Use social media to maximize the impact of your brand.”  I’ll be joined by McDonald’s Heather Oldani, Director of U.S.

• Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

  Todd Defren

  29 Apr 2012 | 5:22 am

• 

  The Responsible Marketing Blog

• Return of the salesperson from hell

  Patrick Byers

  3 May 2012 | 11:47 am

    I’m the proud owner of a new Chevy Volt, and I’m thinking of ordering a license plate that says Shocked. You see, I thought I’d buy a Nissan Leaf. After multiple visits to the Leaf website, reading reviews and watching videos of the owner experience, their marketing connected with me. I decided the quirky all electric vehicle might be just the car to finally free me from the shackles of the gas pump. So, I went to a local Nissan dealer and took one for a spin. It drove well, and decided I’d find out if they’d honor Nissan’s lease deal. That’s…

• An opportunity missed, and at what cost?

  Patrick Byers

  18 Apr 2012 | 2:34 pm

  I just contacted a company because a coupon code they emailed me didn’t work. As it turns out, it expired in their time zone, not mine, so I missed a discount of about $10 by about 10 minutes. Sure, I could have been an ass about the fact they didn’t state the timezone on their coupon, but it was only $10. But customer delight drives word of mouth, and had they bent the rules by 10 minutes and honored it, this would have been a different post — and I would have surely shared the name of the company with you. I’ve been a non-friction customer for at least eight years…

• God is in the details

  Patrick Byers

  28 Mar 2012 | 5:04 pm

  More evidence that the days of boring church marketing are long gone: Mars Hill Church, based here in the Northwest. We thought we’d peek under the covers of their website to see if we could discover who coded the site, and look at what we found: If you’ve never fiddled with HTML, this won’t mean much to you. But if you have, you might have just said “awesome” under your breath the way we did. “It’s all about Jesus” is one of their key messages, and whether you’re Jesus follower or not, take this away: There’s always room for…

• Do we hate Dollar Shave Club’s viral video?

  Patrick Byers

  7 Mar 2012 | 10:01 am

  This being the Responsible Marketing Blog, you might think a video with an F-Bomb in it might attract our ire, right? Wrong. Watch this: There are plenty of things we don’t like: Racism. Bigotry. Violence. Corporate greed run amok. Comic sans. But boring marketing is irresponsible, and boring Dollar Shave Club is not. This is f**king brilliant.      

• Responsible or not? CIT’s college recruiting video

  Patrick Byers

  20 Feb 2012 | 1:22 pm

  College advertising is usually so, well, meh. Not so with this ad entitled “It’s a Snap” from filmmakers Henry & Aaron, done with full creative license for their alma mater, Western Australia’s Central Institute of Technology. The video has gone viral, leaving some to say it has changed the face of college recruitment advertising. So, do you think they’ve nailed it for their target audience, or have they gone too far? Comment below to weigh in.    

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  new media wise

• How to Market Your Handcrafts Business Online

  newmedia

  11 May 2012 | 7:16 pm

  Crafts business, Australian and Pan-Asian crafts 1 Carrara Market—avlxyz (Flickr.com) You’ve got crafts to sell, and they’re awesome. How come you’re not making money from them? Chances are, you have not taken advantage of online marketing for your business, and all its accompanying tools. Let’s say you have a handcrafted jewelry business, and you want to make people aware that it exists. What do you do? For starters, recognize if there is already an existing market for your kind of business online. If it does, check it out and do a bit of research to see if it is…

• Creating an Online Buzz for Your Biz

  newmedia

  7 May 2012 | 7:14 am

  Twitter Tree—pandemia (Flickr.com) A business that has no online presence may as well pack up and quit being a business. These days, there is no reason for a business owner, even the humblest of start-ups, to NOT use the Internet to raise awareness for a product, service, or idea. Take social networking sites, for instance. Pages, groups, and accounts are devoted to trying to sell new products and services every day. Since these sites take up a sizable chunk of the average Internet user’s time, it’s safe to predict that putting up a page or account for your business will get the…

• The Three V’s of Effective New Media Marketing

  newmedia

  30 Apr 2012 | 11:46 pm

  Any product, idea, or service can become ripe for the picking with the proper use of new media marketing. There are so many ways to get it right…and so many ways to get it wrong, as well. To help you get started, we will discuss the three V’s which can help you on the path to using social media to your advantage, and to get people to notice your product, idea or service. V #1: Go viral. Batman Viral marketing 08—KellBailey (Flickr.com) Memes, viral videos, and other forms of things that get shared to infinity can REALLY help your product, idea, or service get noticed in a major…

• The Cons of Social Media

  newmedia

  26 Apr 2012 | 6:25 pm

  A few days ago, we discussed the pros of social media for your business. Today, we will tackle its cons. This video presents many good points worth thinking about to make the most out of social media. You could have too many followers, but not niche-specific ones. In Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media, many people fall into the trap of thinking that thousands of followers, fans, and Likes mean being able to reach a wide audience to be able to promote your product or service. This is not always the case. Bear in mind that plenty of social media accounts are bot-generated or are…

• Why Investing in a Membership Website Can Do Your Business Good

  newmedia

  20 Apr 2012 | 5:58 pm

  Membership Site Development Digital Markteing—Maria Reyes-McDavis (Flickr.com) If you have a business, you definitely need social media AND a membership website in these fast-paced times. Why? For starters, you can get all the pros of social media as mentioned in the previous post. These include developing your brand, creating a network of contacts, and using automated posts for convenience, just to name a few. Now, add the investment of a membership website, and you are sure to make money for your business. Membership websites contribute a unique set of benefits for any business owner,…

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  Web Strategy by Jeremiah

• People on the Move in the Social Business Industry, May 24, 2012

  jeremiah_owyang

  24 May 2012 | 8:30 am

  Both the submissions on this job announcement board, as well as available social media positions at corporations continue to pour in. In this continued digest of job changes, I like to salute those that continue to join the industry in roles focused on social media, see the archives, which I’ve been tracking since Q4, 2007. People on the Move in the Social Business Industry: Keith Trivitt joins MediaWhiz as Director, Marketing and Communications Keith will direct MediaWhiz’s corporate social media, communications and marketing strategy, helping to build and promote the digital…

• Altimeter Research Theme: The Dynamic Customer Journey

  jeremiah_owyang

  21 May 2012 | 5:36 am

  Connecting to customers is going to get more complicated, and brands (and their partners) must pay attention to the Dynamic Customer Journey. We want to hear your point of view on the Dynamic Customer Journey (either in the comments below, or from your own blog) and we’ll cross-link to thoughtful discussions. Introducing The Dynamic Customer Journey We see this disruptive theme as consumers being able to use many sources, devices, and mediums at any given time, giving them more options and choices. The result? Consumers are enabled to have a unique path each time, making it harder to…

• Facebook: A Brilliant Business Model

  jeremiah_owyang

  19 May 2012 | 3:26 am

  In business school, case studies of successful companies often involve a story of an innovator who created physical products and services, mass media, or services at scale for global consumers.  Yet I’d assert that web-based Facebook is one of the most brilliant business models we’ve ever seen.  If you use the service, Facebook has you to thank for all your hard work. Despite yesterday’s IPO closed at nearly opening price, it’s important to pause and think about how this company’s market cap reached $100 billion (for context, Pepsi is at par at $106b).

• Keynote: Three Future Trends of Social Business (Slides)

  jeremiah_owyang

  16 May 2012 | 8:33 am

  I’m presenting here at Webcom in Montreal, sharing the State and Future of Social Business. In fact, I think the Cluetrain as we know it, while right for many years, needs modification to represent how the social web is changing. I took the first three theses of the mainfesto and translated it to represent how I see advertising integrating with social as well as optimization and Social Performance software. The three trends that I see impacting the social business space include (but are not limited to): Trend 1: Corporate Websites Reborn. I assert that corporate websites as we know them…

• Video: Scaling your Social Business

  jeremiah_owyang

  13 May 2012 | 6:34 pm

  A few days before the hectic 2012 SXSW storm (my analysis here), The Dachis Group hosted the Social Business Summit (catch one in your city) with some of the world’s top brands to discuss social business.   Kicking off the day, I shared Altimeter’s research on how advanced companies are scaling their programs –and avoiding programs that will slow them down.  A few key points we iterated: Being prepared in advanced with: the proper policies, teams, roles, and education programs. These are the foundation needed to build a Center of Excellence. Advanced corporations have…

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  Jon Burg's Future Visions

• Succeeding Through Social Media's Trough Of Disillusionment

  Jonathan Burg

  15 May 2012 | 11:16 pm

  In Gartner's Hype Cycle, the Peak of Inflated Expectations is followed by the Trough of Disillusionment.  While Social Media as a business practice is hitting that crest, I don't believe this spells doom for the industry.  And it's all going to come down to one word: value. How Did We Get Inflated Expectations? Social Media is regularly being misunderstood and misreported.  The digital social dynamic is in it's formative young teen years, and in the interest of growing business and driving investment we as a society may have over-promised.  And as an industry, I cannot say that we have…

• Are Marketers Evil Scumbags?

  Jonathan Burg

  12 May 2012 | 1:29 pm

  Before you read this post, please read The Verge's investigational peice on internet scammers.  It's a great peice and the driver of this post. Dear Popular Culture and The General Public, Marketers are not evil.  Internet marketers are not evil.  TV advertising as an industry is not evil.  Bad people do bad things, and unscrupulous people do unscrupulous things.  But they aren't marketing and they aren’t marketers, they are scammers. If a fraudster poses as a physician and harms an unsuspecting community, we do not blame doctors.  We do not blame the broader practice of medicine.

• What Are We REALLY Looking For In A CEO?

  Jonathan Burg

  9 May 2012 | 6:54 am

  Is the purpose of a CEO to lead a company or to lead investors?  Is the purpose of a CEO to manage public perception or lead internal direction?  Must a high level position like CEO demand a deep technical knowledge of the details of the worker-bee side of the business?  Must the CEO of Kraft Foods be able to bake?  Can the CEO of Brooks Brothers wear Levis jeans on vacation?  Would it ever be acceptable for the CEO of Baskin Robbins to be lactose intolerant?   Over the past week Yahoo! and Facebook have both been called out by the press for their CEO-related dramas.  And both of these…

• Modern Relevancy In Aging Tragedy

  Jonathan Burg

  18 Apr 2012 | 12:21 pm

  How should we, the third generation, commemorate The Holocaust?  Nobody wants to remember or contemplate massive death, atrocity and desperation.  There are few alive who can still personally recall and mourn for the millions of individuals lost to this tragedy.  So how are we to carry the torch? A few short hours ago my newfound homeland began 24 hours of national mourning over the 6 million Jewish souls lost in the Holocaust.  Radio stations stopped blasting their normal music, TV stations halted their regularly scheduled programming, restaurants and health clubs closed up early and…

• Outstanding Kickstarter Success Is A Liability

  Jonathan Burg

  18 Apr 2012 | 4:15 am

  Kickstarter is a brilliant concept.  But a runaway success may be their all-to-soon undoing. What Is Kickstarter? Visionaries post their ideas and the general public gets to contribute towards funding these ideas.  In addition to donating towards what the micro-investor considers to be smart innovation, investors will often receive a nominal return such as early access to the theoretical finished product, recognition as a contributor in the finished video project and occasionally even an actual physical product once it's produced.  Kickstarter is to investing as Kiva is to banking - making…

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  Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

• The Power of the Narrative

  Len Devanna

  10 May 2012 | 5:10 pm

  What do you suppose this small corked bottle filled with sand is worth?It was purchased at a yard sale for 33 cents.It was later sold for $59.50 on eBay.How's this possible? The power of the narrative. We've been telling one another stories since we figured out how to carve pictures into rocks thousands of years ago. Stories can serve as a powerful tool to teach, entertain, or simply activate our imaginations.  But storytelling isn't restricted to the 'once upon a time' variety. Stories can be used to engage your audience on virtually any topic, and can offer a far more interesting means of…

• Crisis preparedness - Are you ready?

  Len Devanna

  31 Mar 2012 | 5:52 pm

  It's always interesting to watch how brands deal with a crisis when they arise. As example, JetBlue had their hands full this week with an unfortunate situation at 36k feet. The good news, the brand reacted swiftly and confidently, suggesting they have a well-established crisis response framework in place. But it seems JetBlue may be in the minority here. There are endless examples of brands seemingly caught completely unprepared for the inevitable. In a study by Burson-Masrsteller, a whopping 79% of business decision makers believe their company will experience a crisis within the next…

• The Business of Saving Lives

  Len Devanna

  10 Mar 2012 | 8:58 am

  I'm honored to be presenting this morning at the Business of Saving Lives Conference at Tony La Russa's Animal Rescue Foundation. Sponsored by VCA Animal Hospitals and PetSmart Charities, the day long event provides attendees practical information and tools for effective animal welfare operations. I'll be sharing some thoughts on the role Social Media can play to help abandoned pets find their new 'forever homes'.  Below are the are that I'll be presenting.   Business of saving lives View more PowerPoint from Len Devanna

• Refining Marketing Tactics for Impact

  Len Devanna

  22 Feb 2012 | 9:38 am

    The buying behavior of the digital consumer is evolving at a frenzied pace. Our digitally-enabled world has given us unlimited access to product research, while Social Media has put peer sentiment a mere click away. Now consider the pace in which major corporations change. Keeping pace with these rapidly evolving trends is challenging at best. With budgets remaining largely flat, Marketers find themselves spreading finite resources across an increasing number of engagement tactics. Dollars once spent on traditional channels such as print and television advertising have been stretched…

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  Des Walsh dot Com

• Professional Services Practitioners the Lost Tribes of Social Media

  Des Walsh

  16 May 2012 | 8:30 pm

  It’s taken longer than I had planned, but I’m finally about to launch my membership program for professional services practitioners wanting help with social media. The program is called Get the Social Edge Kickstart. In a free webinar early next week I’ll be explaining how it will all work, with a commencement date of May 28. It’s not going to be your quick fix, master- social-media- in- 24-hours type of program. It’s a sixteen week membership program, delivered online, for professionals who’ve decided it’s time to get serious about social media and…

• Testing the Social Media Engagement Management Tool Sprout Social – Part 2

  Des Walsh

  24 Apr 2012 | 11:59 pm

  In March I posted about my exercise of evaluating the social media engagement tool Sprout Social. In this second post on the topic, I’m focusing on some of the reports generated by Sprout Social. By the way, these posts are not intended as a comprehensive review: more by way of sharing my exploration of the tool. Also, the information and comments are still based on using the basic Pro version. I’m hoping to make the time in the next couple of days to check out the other offerings – Small Biz, Deluxe and Premium. Group Trends The first graphic on the dashboard home page…

• Not Everyone Likes LinkedIn but with 120 Million Users Can You Afford to Ignore It?

  Des Walsh

  11 Apr 2012 | 3:36 am

  Getting the Point About LinkedIn Whenever I get up to speak to a group about LinkedIn, I’m conscious that there will almost certainly be some people in the group who have decided they don’t like the platform and others who may not feel strongly for or against it, but just don’t see the point. Because let’s face it, for many people, the word “LinkedIn” just conjures up the image of messages, including from people they may not even recall having met, declaring they would like to add the recipient to their “professional network”. Those people…

• Six Key Social Platforms for Busy Professionals

  Des Walsh

  2 Apr 2012 | 1:30 am

  Too many platforms, too little time Long ago I lost count of all the possible social media platforms and tools a business might reasonably use. And in my email and on various newsfeeds I see more new ones being announced or talked about every day. That proliferation of possibilities probably helps explain why for many professionals the topic of social media brings on an immediate sense of overwhelm. There’s just too much going on, with too many different social platforms. The temptation is to just put off or ignore the whole topic and maybe hope things will settle down enough one day to…

• Interview About Wacky Gift Site Helps Me Explain Media Curation

  Des Walsh

  27 Mar 2012 | 1:30 am

  Sometimes it’s the quirky projects that can best help us explain serious business concepts and processes. I watched a very entertaining interview yesterday on the Sunrise breakfast TV show with David Mancherje, founder of a quirky new online site, Me Wanty! Spending as much time as I do in earnest examination of and discussion about such topics as the ROI of social media and the measurement of online influence, the interview was for me enlightening and even inspirational. I felt that I could be watching the beginning of a significant, maybe highly successful online business, within a…

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  Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

• Create Residual Income and Growth with an Autoresponder Series

  Zac Johnson

  25 May 2012 | 11:18 am

  You hear people talking about creating sales funnels and autoresponder series all the time, but the amount of people that actually take the time to set one of them up is few. Why is this? Most likely because it takes time and work to put together a quality autoresponder series, and many blogs and web sites don’t wan to put up the investment cost for the hosting of their list. Let’s crush the thought that mailing list hosting is too expensive, and also get you started on the path to creating your first autoresponder series! First of all, mailing list hosting may seem like it can…

• Increase Profits and Affiliate Training with NDemandAffiliates

  Zac Johnson

  23 May 2012 | 10:30 am

  With so much news about the FTC coming after affiliates for their landing pages and ad campaigns, and the same thing happening with ad networks… we continually seeing bad news left and right. With that said, it’s always important to make sure you know who you are working with online. We all know there are plenty of ad networks out there, but knowing which can stand the test of time or actually care about their affiliates is another issue. One of the networks that has been able to stand out from the crowd over the past several years, is NDemandAffiliates. The NDemandAffiliates…

• 10 Surefire Ways to Promote Your Blog Using Twitter

  Zac Johnson

  20 May 2012 | 3:57 pm

  Twitter is awesome! You can meet new people, keep up to date with old friends, join in Twitter Chats, create your own hashtag, follow celebrities, network, share stories and promote your blog. To top it off, all of this is done in only 140 characters. You may be thinking “What has Twitter got to do with my blog?” The answer is Twitter is one of your best promotional tools! Here are 10 surefire ways to promote your blog using Twitter: 1. Make an Announcement – Announce your new blog post is live. It’s exciting your hard work is finally available for viewing. Let people know about…

• Staree – Make Money Sharing Photos and Videos

  Zac Johnson

  17 May 2012 | 11:35 am

  In the world of social networking, posting pictures and videos online, and anything to do with celebrities… you simply can’t go wrong. So what happens when you combine the power of all three of these mega attractions? Then you get Staree! Staree is the latest project behind the team at Izea, and their goal is to make a one stop resource for everyone who is already using Twitter, Facebook and Klout, but also enjoy having their own profile pages and getting paid to share their updates and photos/videos with friends. One of the main attractions at Staree is their connections with the…

• How Hotel Gyms are Very Much Like Landing Pages

  Zac Johnson

  16 May 2012 | 5:12 pm

  Over the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to stay at a few different hotel locations. Many of them had their gyms, pools and spas. While at the Marriott Newport in Rhode Island this past weekend, I started to think about how the way hotels present and advertise their gyms and spa areas are a lot like how marketers promote and generate leads through online landing pages. Hotel Gyms and Landing Pages Sell Dreams When was the last time you went looking for a hotel online. There is a very good chance that you went through picture galleries of their hotel and the various areas they…

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  Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)

• What makes Sequoia Capital successful? “Target big markets”

  Andrew Chen

  24 May 2012 | 9:00 am

  Don Valentine, who founded Sequoia Capital, talks about what makes Sequoia Capital effective. It’s one of my favorite talks, and I find myself watching and re-watching it from time to time, and I’d encourage everyone to hear the wisdom themselves. Markets, not team In the beginning of the video, Don Valentine asks, why is Sequoia successful? He says that most VCs talk about how they finance the best and the brightest, but Sequoia focuses instead on the size of the market, the dynamics of the market, and the nature of the competition. This is, of course, super interesting because…

• How to use Twitter to predict popular blog posts you should write

  Andrew Chen

  16 May 2012 | 12:50 pm

  Using retweets to assess content virality Recently I’ve been running an experiment: Tweet an insight, idea, or quote See how many people retweet it If it catches, then write a blog post elaborating on the topic My recent Growth Hacker post was the result of one such tweet, which you can see above in my Crowdbooster dashboard. I wrote it on a whim, but after the retweets, I developed it into a longer and more comprehensive blog post. (Note that sometimes a tweet is not suitable to developed into a blog post, but most of the time this technique works) Why this works This works because…

• Quora: Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been ~50%?

  Andrew Chen

  16 May 2012 | 10:44 am

  I recently asked, and then answered my own question on Quora and wanted to share here as well. Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been ~50%? According to public info, Facebook’s DAU/MAU is 58% these days. Here’s a link. It states: 901 million monthly active users at the end of March 2012 526 million daily active users on average in March 2012 Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been this good, as a consequence of its product category (communication/photo-sharing/etc.)? Or was it once a lot worse and was improved over time? (UPDATE: Here’s a followup question I have about…

• How do I learn to be a growth hacker? Work for one of these guys :)

  Andrew Chen

  11 May 2012 | 11:52 am

  After writing my recent article on Growth Hackers, I’ve been asked by quite a few folks on how to learn the discipline. The best answer is, learn from someone who’s already good at it – if you’re technical and creative, it’s well worth the time. I would encourage everyone to also read Andy Johns’s Quora answers on What is Facebook’s User Growth team responsible for and what have they launched? and What are some decisions taken by the “Growth team” at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users?- it lays out a lot of the key…

• Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing

  Andrew Chen

  27 Apr 2012 | 8:30 am

  The rise of the Growth Hacker The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario…

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  Social Gears

• New Follr Features – Improved Contact Finder and Networking!

  Stephen Fells

  9 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  We are pleased to announce a significant change that will allow you to connect with with people far more easily! Simply log into your Follr account and click the ‘Tags & Contacts’ link: You’ll see lot’s of suggested contacts: Click any ‘Connect’ button and your invitation is sent! Alternatively you can click the ‘Contact Finder’ link: and then search by member tags or last name. Every connection improves your Follr score. Is that important? YES! Search results on Follr list people with the highest Follr score first. So if you want to…

• Will You Take The Blue Pill or The Red Pill?

  Stephen Fells

  26 Apr 2012 | 7:00 am

  Whether you love or loath science fiction you have to give it credit for preempting technological advances. So here’s a quick quiz using a sci-fi stalwart; Star Trek. Can you name the modern day equivalent for these four Star Trek gadgets? If you said mobile phone (‘Handheld communicator’), GPS (‘Transporter Console’), Bluetooth (‘Communications Earpiece’) and iPad (‘PADD’ or ‘Personal Access Display Device’) you get full marks! You have to love the app that makes your iPad look like a PADD. Now that’s backward…

• You Have 6 Seconds To Get a Job. Are Your Ready? Go!

  Stephen Fells

  18 Apr 2012 | 7:00 am

  This month we’ve been told that the unemployment rate is going up. Change that, it’s going down. Sorry, I meant it’s going up and down! No matter where you get your news the most important job related information, the information about you, is in your resume. But according to job-matching service TheLadders you have six, yes six, seconds to make an impact with your resume. If you think about it that’s less time than it took to read this paragraph… Are recruiters suffering from ADD? Are CEO’s and brokers sick of the normal “I’m the perfect…

• Follr Releases New Digital Identity Management Platform

  Stephen Fells

  15 Mar 2012 | 4:00 am

  Completely redesigned software product replaces Follr Digital Identity Websites administration system and rolls out significant feature enhancements. Emeryville, CA (March 14th, 2012) Follr, Inc., today announced the release of a new version of their digital identity management product, a free Web based SaaS (Software as a Service) platform. The announcement follows a record increase in registrations, up 78% in February versus January and initial first quarter registrations up 51% versus the fourth quarter 2011. The enhanced platform is available across all three company products; Follr Solo,…

• Follr Releases Free Digital Identity Management Community Platform

  Stephen Fells

  14 Feb 2012 | 6:00 am

  Software product extends use of Follr Digital Identity Websites to communities, associations, professional bodies, membership groups and societies. Emeryville, CA (February 13th, 2012) Follr, Inc., today announced the release of “Follr Community”, a free Web based SaaS (Software as a Service) product aimed at helping communities, associations, professional bodies, membership groups and societies to help them better serve participants, grow member base and generate revenue. The announcement follows the recent release of Follr Business, which alongside Follr Solo, makes this the company’s…

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  brandflakesforbreakfast

• shopping overload

  Kirative

  25 May 2012 | 5:15 am

  Simplify online shopping, is that possible? Yup. Shoppers can now try on clothes from their own computers through Fits.me, a virtual fitting room. Retailers map out how an item would look on people of different measurements and a robotic mannequin adjusts in shape and size to display a realistic fit. There’s just one issue… everything looks good on a mannequin! Um, yea- I’ll take that too!

• listen up...

  Kirative

  25 May 2012 | 5:12 am

  Possibly a little unpleasant, but brilliant!This billboard transforms people headphones into stethoscopes so they can listen to a heart in distress. LG2 created this engaging campaign as a way to raise interest in public health careers. Go ahead and listen, it just might give you a change of heart.

• bike rack bench

  Kirative

  25 May 2012 | 5:10 am

  Talk about 2 for 1. This newly designed bicycle rack, doubles as a park bench....or is it the other way around!?! Designed by student Eugene Duclos, this brings a clever new look and feel to the city planners who increasingly rely on new ways to maximize usable space. Potential for a bike-sitting business? 

• little kids having sex

  Kristien Del Ferraro

  24 May 2012 | 5:10 am

  Um, what? Ew. Yeah, it's not quite as creepy and gross as it sounds, but it's kind of close at first. A parenting advice hotline in Brussels wanted to drive awareness for themselves, so they pulled this stunt in a public restroom to dramatize that parenting isn't easy and your kids might be doing some messed up shit you don't know about. Yeah, just watch it and decide what you think. The intent was good, the concept strong, but think the execution came off as kind of funny and clearly a joke, But maybe that's what they wanted because otherwise it's just plain creepy.

• life according to Getty

  Kristien Del Ferraro

  24 May 2012 | 5:09 am

  If you've ever spent hours (and hours) looking for just the perfect frickin' stock image for a client, you know Getty has a ton of images to cover just about any life happening you could possibly imagine. To showcase the power of those images, they created this one minute stop-motion video, From Love to Bingo, using a succession of 873 images from their collection. It's actually kind of cute, then sexy, then beautiful, then sad, then kind of creepy, then happy. Enjoy.

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  ComMetrics | measure for impact

• Social media recruitment: What you need to know

  Urs E. Gattiker

  26 May 2012 | 5:01 pm

  Why headhunters will still have a job tomorrow Surveying people in 30 countries, the 2011 Kelly Global Workforce Index shows that 1 percent have secured a job through a social media site. Is social media recruitment a flop or stillbirth? Join our poll. ==> Please read the comments (click on link). Ron Gosdeck from Unisys stated in the company blog that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are “transforming how companies find, source and recruit promising job candidates.” As a reminder, the dictionary states, “transform: to alter or be altered radically in form,…

• Social media: Lost in translation?

  Urs E. Gattiker

  12 May 2012 | 5:01 pm

  Translation and culture – make it work Good social CRM (customer relationship management) requires that we consider cross-cultural differences, but challenges remain. How do you ensure quality control when it comes to translating text? Does the translated text convey the image AND style you want for your brand? This is the third post in a series of sure-fire tips for making your corporate blog successful while communicating more effectively. The first one addressed, Blogging: The death of trust? and was followed by, Is your blog a failure?. Today we address translation. In the…

• Is YOUR blog a failure?

  Urs E. Gattiker

  29 Apr 2012 | 12:24 am

  Get the right data and metrics to create a successful blog By the end of 2011 we had 181 million blogs around the world, over five times the 36 million found online in 2006. Is your blog reaching the right target audience? Do clients read the content you send their way? No Virginia, it is not all about pageviews! This is the second post in a series with sure-fire tips for making your corporate blog successful. The first one addressed, Blogging: The death of trust? Companies may blog on WordPress or Tumblr, and/or have a presence somewhere else, such as Facebook and Google Plus. But how…

• Blogging: The death of trust?

  Urs E. Gattiker

  14 Apr 2012 | 5:01 pm

  Update 2012-04-29 – next in the series: Is YOUR blog a failure? 4 rules to live by A culture of suspicion could have dire consequences for bloggers and advertisers. Once a reader or client’s trust is lost, restoring it is difficult, expensive and definitely not fun. This is the first post in a series of blog posts that address some surefire tips for making your blog successful. Let me start with last year’s back to back earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown disasters in Japan. It shattered Japanese faith in most of the country’s government agencies. But the death…

• Twitter metrics: The ultimate tools

  Urs E. Gattiker

  31 Mar 2012 | 5:01 pm

  Anaytics and sCRM We published a post about the 101 best Twitter tools, saving time with Twitter but how can we best measure our impact and resonance on Twitter? We tested the best and the worst and present our four winners, guaranteed to help you achieve a bigger bang for your buck. Since I began blogging in late 1999, I am continually discovering amazing things. In the process, I have also given a lot of thought to how social media works. This makes me wonder whether Twitter and other microblogging tools matter, and if so, do they help you scale your efforts and generate improved resonance…

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  Six Pixels of Separation - Marketing and Communications Insights - By Mitch Joel at Twist Image

• Digging Deeper Into Social Business

  Mitch Joel

  27 May 2012 | 11:31 am

  Episode #307 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to. Welcome to episode #307 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. Matt Ridings has been deeply involved in the Digital Marketing sphere for a very long time. Most recently, he partnered up with Amber Naslund (Brass Tack Thinking and co-author of The Now Revolution) to launch SideraWorks, a social business consultancy. Matt is a business strategist, speaker and writer who has played both sides of the fence (both client-side and agency-side) working with such illustrious…

• Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #101

  Mitch Joel

  26 May 2012 | 7:11 am

  93Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see? My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see". Check out these six links that we're…

• Why Facebook Camera Matters

  Mitch Joel

  25 May 2012 | 1:05 pm

  Facebook launched a mobile camera app. You may be wondering why Facebook launched a mobile camera app (quaintly called, Camera) just a short while after purchasing Instagram in a heart-stopping billion dollar acquisition. Everywhere you turn online, there is discourse about this app. Most of the discourse is a quizzical wonder as to why Facebook would even bother (especially because many people think that it is inferior to Instagram's capabilities). Facebook Camera is not for you. If you have Instagram, odds are that Facebook Camera is not for you. If you read this blog, odds are that…

• The Blog Of Awesome

  Mitch Joel

  25 May 2012 | 11:55 am

  In a sea of content, how do you make your stuff stand out? This was one of the questions I was asked during the Burning Questions Panel at this morning's C2 MTL conference. In short, my answer was: Be awesome because mediocrity is very obvious in a world where everybody can publish. On June 28th, 2008 (nearly four years ago), I penned a blog post titled, Mass Media Or Mass Content - What's Worse? In this blog post, I stated: "I don't comment and share as much as I would like to. I skim, graze and peruse everything. Because there is so much Mass Content, I'm beginning to feel like I'm not…

• Every Little Detail

  Mitch Joel

  25 May 2012 | 11:51 am

  "I'm not a very detail-oriented person." I find myself saying this to many people all too often. The funny thing is, that I have been lying. Yesterday, at the C2 MTL event being held in Montreal, Ian Schrager (world famous for Studio 54 and the boutique hotel movement) said this (and I'm paraphrasing here): "You never know which little detail is going to be important, so they all have to be great." It's beautiful and true... isn't it? I typically think of myself as not being detail-oriented when it comes to things like project management and human resources (both of which…

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  Chris Pirillo

• Green Monster Pantry Raid

  Chris Pirillo

  25 May 2012 | 7:47 pm

  Green Monster Pantry Raid Vanilla scone! Vanilla scone! Friendly neighborhood vanilla scone! In the bag, for my wife, I promised I’d feed you for life! Look out! And I don’t even know what a scone is… But that’s okay. Diana doesn’t know what her favorite monster is... Read the full article on http://chris.pirillo.com/

• What’s Not to Like About Windows 8?

  Chris Pirillo

  25 May 2012 | 12:09 am

  What’s Not to Like About Windows 8? Sure, people like to talk about all of the things that they don’t like about Windows 8. But has anyone bothered to chalk up the things about Windows 8 that actually seem like some pretty strong steps in the right direction? On another front, can you... Read the full article on http://chris.pirillo.com/

• Does This Mustache Make Me Look Fat?

  Chris Pirillo

  24 May 2012 | 3:19 pm

  Does This Mustache Make Me Look Fat? I’ve written about the history of shaving before, but with Diana’s encouragement, I’ve decided to go a different way. Because she agreed with YouTube viewer h4lk7, who said that I should grow a mustache, I’ve decided to give it a whirl.... Read the full article on http://chris.pirillo.com/

• Text and Punishment

  Chris Pirillo

  24 May 2012 | 11:55 am

  Text and Punishment Should the punishment for texting and driving be more severe in places where it’s illegal? Should people who knowingly text people who are driving be held at least partially responsible for resulting accidents, or is this an overstretch of justice? Do you know how to get... Read the full article on http://chris.pirillo.com/

• Lord of the Yogurt

  Chris Pirillo

  23 May 2012 | 5:20 pm

  Lord of the Yogurt Some people don’t like rain, but I don’t see much of a downside. Aside from the occasional thunderstorm or tornado that might accompany it like an unwelcome guest, rain is good. It’s water that falls from the sky and makes everything clean! What’s not to... Read the full article on http://chris.pirillo.com/

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  Common Craft - Common Craft - Our Product is Explanation

• The Common Craft Story - A Presentation at Big Ideas Fest

  leelefever

  22 May 2012 | 12:07 pm

  Late last year I was invited to present at an event called Big Ideas Fest, which focuses on change and inspiration related to K-20 education.  My presentation, entitled "Viral to Valuable" was about 15 minutes long and appeared during a track of the conference called "Scale and Spread", which related to scaling and spreading an idea.  If you're interested in the Common Craft story and how we came to focus our business on video as a digital product, etc., I tell the story in this video: To find more videos of presenters from the event, check out the Big Ideas Fest YouTube channel. To learn…

• New Video: Apps Explained by Common Craft

  leelefever

  16 May 2012 | 10:01 am

  Today we’re announcing a new video: Apps - Explained by Common Craft   We hear so much about apps today that it’s easy to think about them being a fundamentally new phenomenon, but the truth is that we used apps or “software applications” long before mobile phones.  This video explains what caused apps to evolve and what new systems are in place that are making them so popular and useful today.   It teaches:   The big idea behind applications and how they work with computers The role of “platforms” and how they have changed thanks to mobile devices The evolution to smaller,…

• In Honor of Richard Feynman - The Great Explainer

  leelefever

  11 May 2012 | 12:15 pm

  Today I was reminded by Brain Pickings that it's Richard Feynman's birthday.  He passed away in 1988, and would have been 94 today.  I recently became fascinated with Feynman while doing research on the Art of Explanation book.  Feynman was a brilliant and colorful American Phycisist who played a major role in the Manhattan Project and later won a Nobel Prize.  He was known as "The Great Explainer" due to his ability to help people understand and more importantly, be inspired by science and the world around them.   From reading about Feynman, his ability as an explainer was based on a…

• The Art of Explanation Cover

  leelefever

  9 May 2012 | 11:38 am

  Well, The Art of Explanation book is getting a lot more real.  A few days ago we finalized the cover for the book: What do you think? If you'd like to track our progress, check out the Art of Explanation website.  Categories: bookcoverExplanationpublishing

• Art of Explanation Book Update

  leelefever

  25 Apr 2012 | 9:59 am

  Over the past month, Sachi and I have been neck-deep in ideas surrounding explanation, and it has been one of the most creative times in our lives.  As you may remember, I'm writing a book called The Art of Explanation that will be out in October of 2012.  To make our deadlines with the publisher, we took time this month to focus almost solely on the book - and that we did.  I've written and Sachi has edited almost 60,000 words in the last month or so, which is much more than will appear in the book.  In a lot of ways we've been writing this book for years, so this was our time to bring…

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  Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

• 5 Hidden Skills for Big Data Scientists

  Matthew Hurst

  26 May 2012 | 6:24 pm

  1. Be Clear:  Is Your Problem Really A Big Data Problem? There are many big data problems out there requiring huge compute scale, innovations in computation paradigms, vast storage space and so on. But just because your data takes up lots of disc space does not mean that you have a big data problem. Firstly, your data may be encoded in an inefficient format. XML, for example, can be incredible verbose (all those close tags and human readable text). Secondly, if your data changes over time it may change very slowly indicating that monitoring the difference between data sets is more…

• Zero Tolerance Search : 24 year old neuroscientist

  Matthew Hurst

  12 May 2012 | 2:44 pm

  [The idea behind 'zero tolerance search' posts is to illustrate real life search interactions that show how far we have to go in leveraging the explicit and implicit data in the web and elsewhere.] Yesterday, I heard part of an interview on NPR. The interview was around a new book on determinism and neuroscience. The only thing I remember about the author was his young age. I wanted to recover the name of the author and the title of his new book so that I could comment on his argument against determinism (which was, essentially, 'I'm afraid of determinism therefore it…

• Excellent Visualization of Network Effect

  Matthew Hurst

  12 May 2012 | 2:28 pm

   

• Graphing Twitter Attention

  Matthew Hurst

  30 Apr 2012 | 7:39 am

  track // microsoft (and games and movies) now includes a simple graph indicating the attention being given to each cluster of posts. This graph shows the total of tweets per hour for all posts in the cluster. Below is an example from the cluster around Steve Wozniak's positive comments for his Windows Phone.

• Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 Problem - A Solution

  Matthew Hurst

  22 Apr 2012 | 8:08 am

  Briefly - there is plenty of chatter (see track // microsoft) about the possibility that Microsoft won't be upgrading existing handsets to Windows Phone 8. However, Hal makes a very interesting point in his post on the topic. The problem is not the upgrade, it is the users. Simply give them all a new Windows Phone 8 hand set for free - problem solved.

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  Drew's Marketing Minute

• 50 top entrepreneurial blogs for your reader

  Drew McLellan

  27 May 2012 | 1:02 pm

  Every year the team at Evan Carmichael round up some of the best blogs out there and put together a top 50 list.  This year’s list for the 50 best blogs for entrepreneurs is a doozy. Here in the States, we have a long weekend for Memorial Day…so why not use a little of that extra time and load up your RSS feed reader with some of this great content?  I’m excited to be on the list again this year and discovered several new blogs that are now on my radar. It’s quite a wide array of blog topics — from gift cards to marketing with some strategy and law stuff to…

• The worst sales email ever

  Drew McLellan

  24 May 2012 | 4:42 am

  Maybe I’m wrong and you can top this…but check this out: Hi folks, Name Name here from InvestorGuide.com. Our network of sites reaches a business savvy audience of over 5 million people every month. We also have a million opt-in subscribers and 125,000 financial advisors ready to receive dedicated email blasts. We’ve been in this business for over 10 years so we know what works. I’m trying to find out who handles media buys for your clients, and I’d really appreciate it if we could get an updated copy of your client roster. I think we can really make something…

• What can content marketing do for your business?

  Drew McLellan

  22 May 2012 | 5:14 am

  Content marketing.  It seems like everyone’s talking about it. But what exactly is it and what can it do for your business? Odds are, if you’re doing any marketing at all — you’re at least accidentally dabbling in content marketing. First — it goes by many names.  Some people call it custom publishing or branded content.  Other people slap the label of social or digital marketing on.  And all of those names are accurate. Content marketing is a broad term for any marketing technique that creates and distributes valuable, helpful and relevant information that…

• Content marketing is important but not free!

  Drew McLellan

  21 May 2012 | 5:42 am

  One of the things that irks me is when I hear a marketing “expert” extoll the virtues of content (or social or digital) marketing and to close the sale — they remind their audience — “and best of all, it’s free.” Poppycock. (I know…such language!) At MMG, we believe there’s not really an organization in existence that can’t benefit from a content marketing program. But like most good things — it’s not free.  Access to some of the social networks might be free — but creating compelling content that demonstrates…

• Are you falling behind when it comes to mobile?

  Drew McLellan

  13 May 2012 | 12:04 pm

  I think it is fascinating in a “I don’t get it” sort of way.  We all know that mobile is where digital is headed.  We’ve all repeated the “by 2015, the #1 way we will access the internet is through our smart phones” and yet… it seems like most people are lollygagging along when it comes to getting onto the mobile train. Is your website mobile optimized?  Are you learning more about mobile ads?  Are you thinking about how you’re going to accept mobile payments? Or do you look like this infographic? Browse more infographics.   You might…

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  Social Media Clubhouse

• The New Black in Social Media?

  sporring

  24 May 2012 | 5:30 am

  A growing tendency right now, that I've seen several times is to reduce your personal networks and pull it down to around 100-200 people, a clear social trend which goes back to the small 1800 century villages that rarely contained more than 150 people and where all knew everyone, and perhaps even a relative to one another.  read more

• June Professional Member-Only Webinar Featuring Becky Carroll

  SMCReporter

  23 May 2012 | 7:15 am

  Earlier this month we introduced our Professional members-only monthly webinars which will be featuring Professional members of the Social Media Club community.   Our goal for these members-only webinars is to provide excellent content and extend visibility to Professionals in our community that have advanced knowledge to share.   Join us on Thursday, June 7th at 2pm EST for "Using Social Media to Generate More Opportunities from Existing Customers" with Becky Carroll.   read more

• Kansas City International Airport Combines Midwestern Hospitality & Social Media

  SMCReporter

  22 May 2012 | 8:20 am

  This is a guest post from Justin Meyer, former Social Media Manager for Kansas City International Airport. As a result of fifteen years in the air travel industry, Justin Meyer feels more at home in an economy class middle seat than behind his desk. Justin was responsible for recruiting airlines to Kansas City since 2006 and jumpstarted the airport’s social efforts in 2009. He now represents Tampa International Airport and you can connect with him on Twitter: @JustinTPA read more

• What Did You Mean by Clicking “Like”? Judge Rules Facebook “Like” Button Isn’t Protected Speech

  vickiebates

  21 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  Facebook is all over the headlines this month, but in the shadows of the social network’s IPO, there was a darker story: A federal judge has determined that clicking Facebook’s Like button does not constitute protected speech.  “It is the Court’s conclusion that merely ‘liking’ a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection,” writes Judge Raymond A. Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.   read more

• The Role Social Media in Sales (Part 1)

  mireillem10

  18 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Landy Chase and Kevin Knebl begin their book “The Social Media Sales Revolution:  The New Rules for Finding Customers, Building Relationships, and Closing More Sales Through Online Networking" with a story about a successful sales person who increasingly found it difficult to achieve the same high level of sales with the strategies he was using.   In the past the phone was the primary tool for sales development.  The number of ‘cold calls’ determined the number of sales you achieved.  In their book, the sales person at his sales peak could make  twenty-five calls per week to get…

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  Webinar Marketing & Marketing Success With Webinars for Business

• I Have the Creative Fever… Can You Cure Me?

  contact@deanhunt.com (Dean Hunt)

  24 May 2012 | 1:22 pm

  Hi, my name is Dean Hunt, and I have a disease that almost nobody knows about… I call it the “creative fever” or “ideaitis” and it’s taking a hold of me and gripping me by it’s juicy fingers. It is likely at this point you will think to yourself: “Dean, you crazy cat, what on [...]

• Relationship Building Advice from an Introvert

  contact@deanhunt.com (Dean Hunt)

  21 May 2012 | 12:16 pm

  The following is a true story that I have never revealed before… it has a few confessions, but my hope is that through this story I can inspire others and share what is possible… They say “it is not who you are, it’s who you know“, I couldn’t agree more. Not many people admit it, [...]

• Help My Testis Grow? (testimonials)

  contact@deanhunt.com (Dean Hunt)

  14 May 2012 | 10:45 am

    I need your help… If I have provided any value, info, entertainment etc at all over the past 6 years or so, could you please help me out by sharing your thoughts with me? I put together this video to explain more, and a short summary below the vid. Thankyou. Summary: Could you provide [...]

• The Most Difficult Path My Actually Be The Easiest Path

  contact@deanhunt.com (Dean Hunt)

  5 Apr 2012 | 3:11 pm

  Imagine this… you are looking for success, and you look at your options, there are two clear paths in front of you: Path A is the difficult path, it requires bravery, stepping outside of your comfort zone, and seems more likely to end in failure. Just the prospect of following this path terrifies you. Path [...]

• Comfort Zones are like Coffee

  contact@deanhunt.com (Dean Hunt)

  22 Mar 2012 | 11:16 am

  Have you ever wished you could do something that you are scared of doing? Ever wondered what you are capable of achieving if only that voice in your head didn’t keep talking you out of it? Today I had coffee for the first time in a few months… it hit me hard, my head feels [...]

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  The Buzz Bin

• Brands That Are Great by Choice

  Lisa Kersey

  24 May 2012 | 6:58 am

  Measured Innovation, Productive Paranoia and the Twenty Mile March by Lisa Kersey At the recent Forum for Healthcare Strategists conference in Orlando, I had the opportunity to hear from Morten Hansen, co-author of Great by Choice. He described the key attributes of leaders who were able to lead companies in some of our country’s most volatile industries to succeed when others failed. It’s no surprise that healthcare was one of those industries. However, most of the company examples he shared came from outside the health sector –including Southwest Airlines, Microsoft and Progressive.

• Schmoozin and Boozin: Summer Food Festivals

  Cassandra Bianco

  23 May 2012 | 9:43 am

  By Cassandra Bianco (@cnbianco)   Last weekend I noshed my way through The Great Googa Mooga. I was looking forward to it all week. I was mostly giddy about seeing Hall & Oates perform (for free)… and knew the weather was going to be glorious. There has been much discussion of how Googa’s great vision was poorly executed. But as Lauren Bloomberg from The Village Voice points out, if everyone just expected this going in, because it was a first effort, then there wouldn’t be a letdown. Being an event producer, I have a few words to say. The wine pavilion was pretty dandy.

• What can we learn from General Motors pulling $10M ad spend from Facebook?

  Priya Ramesh

  21 May 2012 | 10:36 am

  By Priya Ramesh (@newpr) A week before the big Facebook IPO, General Motors (GM) announced that the company was going to pull off its $10M display ad budget from Facebook. GM marketing chief Joel Ewanick told the Wall Street Journal that GM “is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.” GM will continue marketing on Facebook, but its display ads will go away. Of course this announcement threw all big to small brands in a quandary in terms of re-assessing their Facebook marketing strategy, especially Facebook ads. So I started…

• Why Number One Rankings in Google are Essential

  Jason Poulos

  17 May 2012 | 3:18 pm

  By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki) Answer: Sites Ranked 1-4 in Google have the highest probability of getting clicked The top 4 organic rankings in Google garner almost 2/3’s of all clicks. #1 Result in Google = 36.4% Click through Rate #2 Result in Google = 12.5% Click through Rate #3 Result in Google = 9.5% Click through Rate #4 Result in Google = 7.9% Click through Rate Why do the top 4 spots get all the clicks? Users look towards the top of the page. This eye tracking study performed on a Google search results page shows that most eye movement is concentrated towards the top of the page.

• The Truth about the Cost of Eating Healthy

  Jason Stemm

  17 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  By Jason Stemm @NYCubsFan Two studies released this week examining the cost of healthy foods show the gap between perception and reality. ShopSmart magazine conducted a national poll of women about eating healthy. What they found is that 88% make excuses for not eating healthful foods, with cost (57%) topping the list. Then just yesterday, the USDA released a study that “found that most fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods cost less than foods high in fat, sugar and salt.” I’ve discussed the importance of nutrition and health cost to the U.S. economy before, but what struck me…

• 

  Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog

• Five For Friday: May 18, 2012

  Greg Verdino

  18 May 2012 | 8:47 am

  Happy Facebook Friday! This week we take a long, hard look at where the industry is headed and what you can do about it. Reconsider what it means to be an ad man (or woman). Why advertising needs to become (almost) human. How your brand should really be using Facebook. Our stories this week aim to inspire, inform, and move you to make change happen now. Here are our 5 top reads for Friday, May 18th, 2012. The future of advertising: Many, lightweight interactions over time A refreshingly logical and forward-thinking examination of how the advertising industry is changing, and what you can do…

• The Road to the Future is Paved with Gold (AmEx Cards)

  Greg Verdino

  16 May 2012 | 8:28 am

  For at least a few years, American Express has been leading its category in marketing innovation. OPEN Forum turned the card you carry into a robust social system membership. Members Project was social before social was hot. By putting the reigns in cardmembers' hands this program redefined corporate giving and, I'd argue, provided the blueprint for later entrants like Chase Community Giving. While many other issuers still rely on tactical promotions to bump-up fan counts, AmEx is forging deep partnerships with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and inventing new ways to…

• Five For Friday: May 11, 2012

  Greg Verdino

  11 May 2012 | 6:47 am

  What’s keeping you from moving forward? According to Forrester, it might be confusion, politics and the shock of the new. Get past that and you’re faced with a world of opportunity — to reinvent pieces of your business that haven’t traditionally been considered “marketing”, to rethink your approach to audiences and new markets, and to get creative in involving your customers in all sorts of innovation. This week’s Five For Friday is all about making change happen. Here are The Five for the week ending May 11th: How to Cure Social Media Paralysis CMOs and Marketing VPs agree that…

• Five For Friday: May 4, 2012

  Greg Verdino

  4 May 2012 | 5:53 am

  This year, April showers aren't just bringing us May flowers. They've also brought us our first May edition of Five for Friday -- or Cinco para Viernes if I remember any of our high school Spanish. This week, we're talking about social, social and more social. What it means for entertainment and media companies. Why you may not want to get too attached to Facebook. How Google might be botching it (again). And some practical advice and provocative questions for marketers still struggling to get social right. Enjoy this week's Five for Friday. And then get out there and enjoy Cinco de Mayo.

• Five For Friday: April 27, 2012

  Greg Verdino

  27 Apr 2012 | 4:50 am

  In this week's Five for Friday, let's take a look at social media from the perspectives of a member of traditional media's old guard, a B2B marketer, a media futurist, and a media buyer. Plus we'll look at an interesting take on why companies should focus less on what's next and do a better job of handling what's now. Put it all together, and you've got "marketing through the looking glass" -- everything looks kinda familiar but nothing is quite what it seems. Here are some of my favorite reads and interesting ideas for the week ending April 27th, 2012. Inside the AP’s Social Strategy Great…

• 

  Serial Oversharer

• It's probably a good sign that this feels totally normal and natural.

  14 May 2012 | 3:01 pm

  It's probably a good sign that this feels totally normal and natural.: A live sports show produced by the Boston Globe, on the Internet at noon a few days a week? File under: The New Normal.

• Spring/Summer Reading List Progress Report: Rainbows End

  24 Apr 2012 | 3:56 am

  Late last night, I finished reading Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, the first book on my reading list.That list, a few of you might remember, was put together from your tweeted suggestions  based on my remarkably idiosyncratic and subjective criteria, including “not too depressing” and published after 1999 or so.Rainbows End fit all my requirements, and thanks to Brian Boyer for the recommendation.Not going to author a full book report here, but please accept this short list of keywords and clauses as a sort of reduction sauce: singularity heavily augmented reality ubiquitous…

• Levon Helm in Santa Cruz, 1976.

  18 Apr 2012 | 6:30 pm

  Levon Helm in Santa Cruz, 1976.

• Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology

  6 Apr 2012 | 6:45 am

  Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology: Follow me around the Internet long enough, and you’ll notice I love to pass along links like this. I suppose I did so before I had a daughter, but that nearly 5-year-old fact certainly changes things a bit. So, check this out. All you really need to know is “Etsy Hacker Grants” are scholarships for women to go to a sort of programmer summer camp in New York this year. If that sounds like something you, or one of your favorite women, would be interested in, pass it along.

• Because you need a motion control system for your iPhone’s...

  4 Apr 2012 | 3:59 pm

  Because you need a motion control system for your iPhone’s camera, using your iPad as a remote control. Sort of. Maybe you don’t think you do, but you do. (via Kickstarter and Raw File)

• 

  SocialFish

• Gamification: Much Less Scary Than What’s Under the Bed

  Christina Smith

  28 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Here’s the latest post in our “INDUSTRY INSIDERS” column.  Every Monday, we’ll be bringing you the inside scoop from several awesome association technology vendors and consultants who will share the insights they have gleaned from years of working in our association industry.  Our columnists include Ann Yoders of Terpsys, Chris Bonney and Ray Van Hilst of Vanguard Technology, Midori Connelly of Pulse Staging, Patrick Dorsey, Carlos Restrepo and Ben Martin of Avectra, Bryan Kelly and Amith Nagarajan of Aptify, Garry Polmateer of Red Argyle, Christina Smith…

• If We Humanize Business, Can We Escape the Matrix?

  Maddie Grant

  27 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Just wanted to point you guys to my podcast I recently recorded with Matthew Grant for Marketing Profs. I think you will enjoy it.  Here’s a little excerpt from Matt’s accompanying blog post: Becoming Human Social media, Maddie told me, is “powered by human attributes: the desire to be social, to connect with other people; the desire to solve problems; the desire to create and to share what we’re doing.” By enabling the fulfillment of these very human impulses, the social media have brought about a “paradigm shift in how we communicate as a society.”…

• Red Cross – Updated Social Engagement Handbook [Resource]

  Maddie Grant

  25 May 2012 | 1:05 pm

  This is the handbook that the National office of the Red Cross share with their local units (like chapters). Pretty self-explanatory and definitely awesome. View this document on Scribd ———— (photo credit)

• Your Board of Directors: “Good Enough” Really Is OK

  Jacob Smith

  25 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  This post is by Jacob Smith, co-author of the The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit.  The book is so awesome that I asked Jacob to post excerpts from it here for you, every Friday for ten weeks. ——————– Maybe you have an amazing board of directors that has perfect chemistry and does five times more than you could imagine asking of them. They support you and the organization, they hold you accountable, they challenge your thinking and broaden your horizons, and they raise more money than you budgeted.

• How Human is Your Organization?

  Maddie Grant

  24 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Click on the image below to take a test assessing your organization based on the four human elements we describe in Humanize as defining (for us) a human organization. The test will take about 15 minutes, and we’ll send you individual results. See how deep the rabbit hole goes. (photo credit)

• 

  Global Neighbourhoods

• Remembering Charlie O’Brien–10 Years Later

  shelisrael

  28 May 2012 | 7:55 am

  My best friend Charlie O’Brien died ten years ago today. The sense of loss is still there. The pain is less frequent and a lot duller than it once was, I imagine like someone who has healed from the loss of a limb. Sometimes I go two-or-three days without thinking of him–but not often. I have managed to purge him from all my mail lists and speed dials–but there are still scores of paper photos in garage-hosted boxes  that I cannot yet remove. And there is a certain pain when the Celtics are battling in the playoffs, because that was what I was paying attention to when I…

• Help Me With a Forbes Column on Google+

  shelisrael

  3 May 2012 | 8:02 am

  Ever since I started writing The Social Beat for Forbes, I’ve been wondering what to do with this, my beloved home blog. I have an idea. I currently crowd source my column ideas on Twitter and Facebook to get content, quotes and ideas that often find their way into the my columns. But people send me lots of content that just doesn’t fit. It is not their fault. My descriptions are space limited at Forbes and my requests are often too open ended.  So I thought I would try expanding descriptions here. We’ll see how this works out. Right now, I’m writing a story about…

• Special Offer: Stellar Presentations for only $4.99!

  shelisrael

  3 Apr 2012 | 7:38 am

  I launched my new book, Stellar Presentations: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks six weeks ago. It is the most critically acclaimed of my three books. On Amazon, 10 people have given it five stars, two people gave it four stars and no one has rated it lower. Other blog reviews have also been highly favorable. People who read it say the book is not just for entrepreneurs but for anyone who has to present in any kind or size of organization. I’ll let the market decide. Some people think that because the book is so brief–just 76 pages, a two-hour read–that…

• Come Visit me at Forbes.com

  shelisrael

  31 Mar 2012 | 8:53 am

  I am writing a column for Forbes.com called The Social Beat. Everything I write related to Social media, the web, startups and the tech sector will appear there. It will be the primary venue for my online writing. Please come and visit me there. Occasionally, I will have something to say on other topics, particularly related to my book and speaking projects. I will use Global Neighbourhoods when that occurs. Until then, I hope you will come and visit me in my new home.        

• A Stellar Presentations Excerpt: The Three Questions

  shelisrael

  29 Feb 2012 | 7:32 am

  The following is excerpted from Chapter One of my new book: Stellar Presentations: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Giving Great Talks. The Three Questions I was raised as the youngest son in a Jewish family.  That meant that each Passover I recited the ritual Four Questions that launched the story-telling part of our Passover dinner. These days, I am rarely the youngest one at the table. But as a speaker and a coach, I begin the story that my clients or I will tell by reciting three questions: Who are the people in the audience? What do I have that they want? What do I want to accomplish…

• 

  Christopher S. Penn : Awaken Your Superhero

• The power of information and the threads in your life

  Christopher S Penn

  25 May 2012 | 4:53 am

  One of my earliest memories of the power of information and the hold it can have over people dates all the way back to fourth grade. That was the year for me that two things happened. First, we were required in English class to read Louise Fitzhugh’s book Harriet the Spy, in which a young girl spends most of her time gathering information on her classmates and writing it down in a journal. Our teacher, as part of an assignment to help us encourage writing, asked everyone in the class to do the same. It turned out that I was particularly good at that assignment, so much so that when we…

• How to calculate digital marketing ROI for B2B2C companies

  Christopher S Penn

  24 May 2012 | 4:17 am

  Here’s a common question among certain businesses that very rarely gets a decent answer: how do you calculate the digital marketing ROI for a B2B2C company? For those unfamiliar, B2B2C companies are any kind of company that sells a product to an end user through a reseller or distribution channel. For example, Energizer batteries are marketed by the Energizer company, but you buy them through big box stores like Walmart and Target. In cases like this, how do you measure ROI? The answer is simple (but not easy). First, analyze what mechanisms, digital marketing channels, and methods you…

• Are you serving the usual?

  Christopher S Penn

  23 May 2012 | 5:10 am

  I was sitting in a diner recently, ordering some breakfast, when the waitress asked the patron next to me the very short question, “The usual?”. He responded with a nod and a mumble, followed by his breakfast far faster than mine. At the local Vietnamese restaurant, I have a particular dish I enjoy and get all the time, regardless of whatever else I order. As soon as I walk in, I note that the staff has already started putting it together without my having to ask, and I’m always delighted to get it. There’s a very good chance that the usual does exist at your company,…

• How to turn mind maps into eBooks and presentations instantly

  Christopher S Penn

  22 May 2012 | 5:27 am

  Geoff Livingston was blogging this morning about building out strategy using mind maps and storyboarding, and I mentioned that mind maps are an incredible way to get any project up and running. Let’s look at two examples of how to transform this into real, useful stuff. First, let’s start with a mind map. Take your pick of software – I use Mindnode on the Mac, but there are literally dozens of different packages. The key is this: whatever software you use must be able to export industry-standard export formats of outlines. The two key formats you’re looking for are…

• The best teachers answer you with better questions

  Christopher S Penn

  21 May 2012 | 5:06 am

  Over the weekend I had the privilege of attending a seminar with Stephen K. Hayes, my teacher’s teacher, at the Boston Martial Arts Center. The weekend’s topics were many and varied, but I took my own advice (as I always do with Mr. Hayes) and brought my list of burning questions. Here’s the sign of a master teacher: when you ask your burning questions, you get answers that either are or spawn a whole new line of better questions, even if the question seems relatively basic. You walk away with refined questions and a better direction of where you need to go in order to…

• 

  Socialmedia.biz

• Catalyzing action for Internet freedom

  JD Lasica

  22 May 2012 | 7:07 am

    Reps from 40 countries descend on D.C. for Google conference Ijust arrived in Washington, D.C., for a conference with the goal of protecting freedom of expression on the Internet. Organized by Google, Internet at Liberty (they could have done better on the name) will “explore the most pressing dilemmas and exciting opportunities around free [...]

• The Ultimate Mobile Web Infographic

  deltinahay

  17 May 2012 | 6:01 am

  This is the second of a two-part series on the mobile Web. Also see: • 3 steps to a successful mobile website Target audience: Mid-size and small businesses, online marketers, Web publishers, mobile developers, entrepreneurs, educators, journalists, general public. We sometime don’t appreciate how fast things are moving, but the mobile Web is exploding. In [...]

• 3 steps to a successful mobile website

  deltinahay

  16 May 2012 | 6:01 am

  Image by rzymu on BigStockPhoto.com Plan for a mobile site that meets your strategic needs This is the first of a two-part series on the mobile Web. Tomorrow: • The Ultimate Mobile Web Infographic Target audience: Mid-size and small businesses, Web publishers, mobile developers, entrepreneurs, educators, journalists, general public. As we’ve been saying, the time [...]

• UppSite: Turn your website into an app in minutes

  JD Lasica

  10 May 2012 | 6:01 am

  Afew days ago I sat down with Gal Brill, the founder and CEO of UppSite, an Israel-based start-up that can turn your website into an app in just minutes. At top is a video UppSite produced about their service, and at bottom is my interview with Gal. As the Web turns increasingly mobile — with [...]

• Big Data in the visual age

  ayeletnoff

  7 May 2012 | 10:19 am

  How Mobli can take virtual experiences to a new level As we all know, there’s a huge amount of data on the internet– the biggest challenge is sorting it all and finding what’s relevant for you. This is such a big challenge that there’s a whole branch of the tech industry, called Big Data, that [...]

• 

  Gauravonomics

• The Future of Branding

  gauravonomics@gmail.com (Gaurav Mishra)

  27 May 2012 | 3:11 am

  Imagining the Future of Branding In previous essays, I wrote about possible futures of social networking and media, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself. I used a 2×2 matrix with likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis, leading to four scenarios. I said that the likely/ negative quadrant is the default, as our world seems to devolve into chaos, when left to its own devices; if we reach out for our better selves, we might create a better world, in the likely/ positive quadrant; if we are lucky, we might even exceed…

• The Future of Media

  gauravonomics@gmail.com (Gaurav Mishra)

  12 May 2012 | 7:02 am

  Imagining the Future of Media Last week, I wrote about possible futures of social networking, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself. I used a 2×2 matrix with likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis, leading to four scenarios. I said that the likely/ negative quadrant is the default, as our world seems to devolve into chaos, when left to its own devices; if we reach out for our better selves, we might create a better world, in the likely/ positive quadrant; if we are lucky, we might even exceed our expectations and…

• The Future of Social Networking

  gauravonomics@gmail.com (Gaurav Mishra)

  6 May 2012 | 5:42 am

  Imagining the Future of Social Networking Now that we have a social network for one billion people in the world (Facebook), a social network for 150 of your most intimate friends (Path), and a social network just for your significant other (Pair); a social network for videos (YouTube), a social network for photos (Instagram) and a social network for status updates (Twitter); a social network for professionals (LinkedIn), a social network for curators (Pinterest), and a social network from Google (Google+); not to mention a parallel universe of social networks in China (Renren, Weibo, Youku);…

• People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine

  gauravonomics@gmail.com (Gaurav Mishra)

  17 Apr 2012 | 11:36 pm

  Pascal Beucler, SVP & Chief Strategy Officer, MSLGROUP Gaurav Mishra, Asia Director of Social Media, MSLGROUP The Power of Crowdsourcing Insights and Innovation According to the recent PwC CEO Survey of 1200+ business leaders across 69 countries, business leaders believe that crowdsourcing people’s insights are one of the main drivers for leading innovation and change. We have a significant body of knowledge on crowdsourcing now, including business rationale, application areas, best practices and case studies. We have seen dedicated third-party crowdsourcing platforms in action for…

• Social Technologies and Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework

  gauravonomics@gmail.com (Gaurav Mishra)

  4 Apr 2012 | 4:03 am

  (Here’s a book chapter I wrote for Empodera.org almost two years back.) Social Technologies and Power Structures The debate on whether internet and mobile technologies are transforming traditional power structures is dominated by three divergent narratives. According to the first, utopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies enable individuals to publish and distribute content, self-organize into communities of interest and participate in collective action. As a result, they can create new types of media outlets, build new types of civil society organizations, and monitor,…

• 

  GigaOM

• The API-ificiation of software – and LEGOs

  Robin Vasan, Mayfield Fund

  28 May 2012 | 6:08 am

  Today everything has an API. Facebook has hundreds of APIs across such social areas as friends, photos, likes and events. Google has thousands of APIs across search/AdWords, Web analytics, YouTube, maps, email and many more. Amazon has APIs that cover the spectrum from Alexa Web traffic rankings to e-commerce product and pricing information and even the ability to start and stop individual machines. I spent a decade architecting and building component and services based software, and another decade after that evaluating and investing in infrastructure software, I believe this mobile and cloud…

• How big data predicted Eurovision — and offended Malta

  Bobbie Johnson

  28 May 2012 | 4:02 am

  On Saturday night millions of people all over Europe — all over the world, in fact — tuned in to the annual Eurovision Song Contest, a cheesy televisual explosion that many worship as a festival of camp, cross-border craziness. In a three-and-a-half hour live broadcast from Azerbaijan (yes, really), viewers from 42 countries listened to 26 songs and voted for which one they liked the most. Amid all that, you might think that guessing the winner would be hard. But one man predicted the result… sort of. Meet Martin O’Leary, a glaciologist and data nerd who works at the…

• Battery startup Prieto charges up with funds

  Katie Fehrenbacher

  27 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

  A lithium ion battery that can charge in five minutes and last for five times longer than the standard — that’s the goal for startup Prieto Battery, which just raised $5.5 million of a planned $6.8 million round, according to a filing. The company is the brainchild of Colorado State chemistry professor Amy Prieto, and was the first startup launched out of the business arm of the university’s Cenergy program for commercializing clean energy research. Prieto Battery is leveraging nanotechnology to develop tiny copper nanowires that make up the anode of the battery. A battery is…

• Wists-ful thinking: lessons from a prelude to Pinterest

  David Galbraith, Curations

  27 May 2012 | 12:35 pm

  Back in 2006, Wists, a visual bookmarking site I had launched a year earlier was gaining traction with women who were into crafts. I showed the website to two whip-smart friends, Shana Fisher and her husband, Jonathan Glick. Like many people, they didn’t buy my argument that collecting thumbnail image links would be a big deal, but they were less skeptical than most. Last year, I got a cryptic Tweet from Jonathan saying, “You Were Right.” Shana was an early investor in a visual bookmarking site called Pinterest, and it was growing like a weed. I get too much credit for RSS and for…

• 5 handy iPhoto for iOS tips

  Mark Crump

  27 May 2012 | 10:30 am

  I’m starting to use iPhoto for iOS more often in my photography workflow. While it’s unlikely it will ever fully replace a true post-processing program like Aperture or Lightroom, for shots that don’t require that high degree of editing I find iPhoto for iOS to be quite suitable. For instance, an afternoon at the ballpark yielded about 180 photos that were culled and edited solely on the iPad.  While I’m faster sorting on my Mac in Lightroom or Aperture, not having to drag my laptop around when sorting out shots is a big advantage. I’ve found this to work best…

• 

  Brent Csutoras

• Introducing Kairay Media

  Brent Csutoras

  18 May 2012 | 8:05 am

  I mentioned in a post earlier this year that I was going back to being a boutique social media consultancy, and this week I launched the site for Kairay Media, our new company. Over the 6 months, I have spent a large majority of my time improving our content marketing system, creating our infographic creation [...]

• Reddit Gets a CEO, Kills Site Search, and Adds ‘All’ View

  Brent Csutoras

  23 Apr 2012 | 6:59 am

  Reddit, one of the largest social aggregation sites on the web, has been making a few changes as of late. JD Rucker wrote an interesting post early 2011 questioning whether Conde Nast even knew what they had in Reddit and if they were in effect holding Reddit back from really growing. Later in September of 2011, Reddit [...]

• LinkedIn Boot Camp (Infographic)

  Brent Csutoras

  29 Mar 2012 | 7:00 am

  Although I have found LinkedIn’s ad system a bit of a disappointment, I am still a fan of the site in general. So when I saw this infographic that Mindflash put out, I had to share it with you all too. Click on the graphic below to see a larger version if you are unable [...]

• 12+ Million Views and Counting.. How Content Marketing Goes Viral

  Brent Csutoras

  26 Mar 2012 | 6:25 am

  I have spoken for years about the merits of using content marketing to help quality content get a lot of visibility, social signals, and possibly go viral. Recently I wrote an article about the success that content marketing can have, explaining that even with the decline of Digg, which was one of the largest social [...]

• Google’s Love / Hate Relationship With Affiliates

  Brent Csutoras

  6 Mar 2012 | 11:24 am

  It is clear that Google has a strong Love / Hate relationship with Affiliates, which typically boils down to whether you are using their services and how large a volume you are generating in sales. Here is a really interesting Infographic that Aaron Wall put out, which details some of the love, and of course [...]

• 

  Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips

• Yahoo Shutters Livestand iPad “Living Magazine”

  Greg Sterling

  25 May 2012 | 1:44 pm

  It was probably inevitable that Yahoo’s Livestand app would be discontinued — as was announced earlier today. Though a noble attempt, it was always a weaker product than some of its competitors, including Flipboard and Zite. Livestand was announced in November, just six months ago.... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

• Marketing Day: May 25, 2012

  Matt McGee

  25 May 2012 | 1:44 pm

  Here’s our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: Marketing Biz: Tracking Google’s Dune Strategy This week Google took substantial steps to ensure that it remains the dominant way in... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

• Marketing Biz: Tracking Google’s Dune Strategy

  AJ Kohn

  25 May 2012 | 11:40 am

  This week Google took substantial steps to ensure that it remains the dominant way in which users access the Internet both on mobile platforms and desktops. These major news items may not have gotten as much notice with the Facebook IPO and iAcquire link buying scandals. And maybe you missed... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

• How Performance Marketing Is Influencing The Next Generation Of Internet Startups

  Rick Gardiner

  25 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  There have been several interesting announcements in the last week for the next wave of internet startups. While Facebook’s IPO and subsequent lawsuit has been at the forefront, social sharing site Pinterest made a splash last week when they announced raising $100 million from Japanese e-commerce... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

• New Google+ Android App Adds Vivid Imagery & Additional Functionality

  Greg Finn

  25 May 2012 | 5:26 am

  Earlier this month, Google+ was re-tuned for the iPhone.  Now it’s Android’s turn.  The newest version of Google+ for Android features a bigger, richer style and new highly requested features from users.  Version 2.6 can be downloaded from Google Play and comes equipped with the... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

• 

  Posts about Social Media from the Econsultancy blog

• Facebook working on its own smartphone: report

  Patricio Robles

  28 May 2012 | 8:42 am

  Mobile represents one of Facebook's biggest challenges, but the company that just went public in what is sure to be remembered as one of the most infamous IPOs ever, that challenge is also a huge opportunity. In an effort to exploit that opportunity, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was willing to pay $1bn for a revenue-less startup (Instagram) and the company's own engineers have been working on their own mobile apps (Facebook Camera). But are mobile apps enough, or does Facebook need something more?A report by the New York Times' Nick Bilton this past weekend indicates that Facebook may be…

• 20 simple ways to get more retweets on Twitter

  Chris Lake

  28 May 2012 | 3:44 am

  I’ve touched upon this subject before but thought I’d compile a post specifically aimed at bloggers / writers / content creators. Many brands are investing in content like never before. They use blogs and social networks to attract traffic, and to encourage people to share their posts. So what do they need to think about to try to increase the amount of sharing on Twitter?TIMING The art of timing your tweets is one of the most important factors in driving retweets. Tweet at the right times This is probably the most important point. There’s no point pushing out tweets when your followers…

• Promoting your brand through personal networks

  Matt Owen

  28 May 2012 | 3:04 am

  One of my regular tasks is to run through the comments on the Econsultancy blog and sweep up any spam comments. We currently use a learning filter, so while it does let through the odd comment shilling pneumatic lubrication while simultaneously blacklisting reasoned, in-depth comments about SEO, by manually updating it, it gets better (at least, that’s the theory).  Checking out all the comments is also extremely useful for me, as it gives me a daily digest of what users are talking about, what their consensus is and which issues are of importance to them in general. We all benefit from…

• Tackling the social media challenge [infographic]

  Maria Wasing

  28 May 2012 | 1:30 am

  If Facebook’s recent IPO tells us one thing, it is that social media is now big business and is here to stay. And yet we seem to be at a crossroad when it comes to the management of social media. It’s hardly surprising that, with more and more channels out there, any business looking to capitalise on the social media opportunity faces an increasingly steep challenge. The infographic below, that we produced recently, makes this point very clearly. While 52% of UK brands now have dedicated time set aside for managing social channels, 40% don’t have anyone dedicated to social media…

• This week's top six infographics

  Graham Charlton

  25 May 2012 | 5:58 am

  Here's a round up of some of the best infographics we've seen this week.  Topics include cookies, Facebook and LinkedIn for B2B marketing, social sharing buttons, and mobile.  If you can't quite read the text, click on the images to see a larger version..The EU cookie law conundrum in numbers  LinkedIn Vs Facebook: Who’s The Best At B2B (SimplyZesty) Social sharing buttons (TheSearchAgent) TRUSTe Privacy Index (TRUSTe) Making Sense of the SoLoMo Landscape (Rocket Fuel) Three ways businesses struggle with mobile (via zdnet)

• 

  Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

• Don’t Be Scared Be Prepared – How to Manage a Social Media Crisis

  Jay Baer

  28 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  This is probably the most important blog post you’ll never need. Drawn from a section of my book The NOW Revolution, I gave this presentation about social media crisis recovery recently as part of the Social Media Success Summit 2012. 8 Steps to Manage a Social Media Crisis View more presentations from Jay Baer One of the keys to successful social media crisis mitigation is pre-crisis planning. This is lifeguard mode, and there are four elements of it. Buy Some Binoculars It’s hard to deal with a crisis you can’t find. You need some sort of social media listening software in…

• Social Pros 17 – Maria Ogneva, Yammer

  Jay Baer

  24 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  This is Episode 17 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Maria Ogneva of Yammer. Read on for insights from Maria, and our Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: are Facebook and Twitter like the Tortoise and the Hare?). Listen Now Click the play button to listen here: Download the audio file: http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/qtjd5x/SocialProsEpisode17.mp3 The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469 Please Support…

• Abandonment Issues – What To Do with Content Archipelagos

  Chris Sietsema

  23 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  If you viewed your content marketing operations from a 35,000 foot level, what would they look like? Would your organization’s content assets, social media networks and web/mobile properties all be aligned and grouped in a cohesive, self-supporting structure? Would they appear to feed audience traffic to one another? Would you have any assets that stand alone, away from the others in isolation? If your answer to that last question is “yes,” you are not alone. With the best intentions, many brands concept, create and eventually forget about assets once utilized for content…

• Google Analytics Social Reports Provide Huge Metrics Edge

  Lisa Barone

  22 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been known to spend a few too many minutes trolling Twitter and Facebook on personal time. You have, too. But when it comes to business, I’m not playing around. I’m not on social media to kill time; I’m there to build a business and find my customers. And the ability to make data-based decisions and assign ROI to social actions is what enables me to do that. I recently waved Goodbye PostRank, Hello Google Social Reports at SmallBizTrends, breaking out five new reports designed to help you keep track of valuable social media insights. Today I want to hone…

• Clearing Clouds of Confusion – the 5 Categories of Social Media Software

  Jay Baer

  20 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  The social media software industry offers some amazing functionality, but it suffers mightily from murky messaging and customer confusion. The truth is, many marketing professionals do not know what this software can do, much less what specific companies’ versions can do. And the software companies themselves make it worse by not being specific about their capabilities and areas of focus. There are five specific categories of social media software, and lumping them all under “social media management” does us all a disservice. I’ll clarify the categories below……

• 

  Elevator View

• “The single greatest improvement to urban real estate ever undertaken”

  Stewart Mader

  26 May 2012 | 7:51 am

  Taras Grescoe, in Straphanger (P. 36): While the subway reduced population density in Manhattan, it also intensified downtown commercial development. “The most spectacular consequence of the subway,” observed William Parsons, its chief engineer, “has been the skyscraper.” Without it, neither the Chrysler Building nor Rockefeller Center would exist: the horizontal technology of transit, combined with a nineteenth-century breakthrough in vertical transportation—the safety elevator, first installed in a five-story building on Broadway in 1857—made closely…

• Melting Pot

  Stewart Mader

  25 May 2012 | 7:43 am

  Where you from? by Pat Johnson, a Columbia grad and cab driver who writes a great blog called Gotham Chronicles: Cities, by nature, must be dynamic places in order to survive. When they stagnate, as was the case in the 1960′s, and 1970′s, the spiral of urban decay and decreasing property values takes hold and with it, the loss of the tax base. What New York is going through now is the opposite, as huge areas have become renewed in the last 20 years both by newcomers from areas not traditionally represented in the city’s ethnic composition and from those looking to move away from the…

• “No one does it better than New York”

  Stewart Mader

  24 May 2012 | 12:40 pm

  Neil Patrick Harris, on preparing to host the Tony Awards for the third time: “I’ve always been passionate about letting many people know that live events are awesome. Whether that’s circuses or magic shows or immersive theater like “Sleep No More,” or proper Broadway old-time musicals, I think it’s important to not just TiVo everything that you want to watch—to really make an effort to get dressed up and to go see a show and watch it happen right in front of you. It’s good to get off your butt sometimes and support creativity, and no one does it…

• View the Skyline From the Skyline

  Stewart Mader

  23 May 2012 | 1:05 pm

  Dave Hogarty profiles Elevator View in Curbed NY: The vertical city is the subject and celebration of Stewart Mader’s photo-blog Elevator View. The site features dozens of images of New York’s skyline taken amidst the skyline. The resulting perspective is simultaneously grand and intimate.

• 1095 Avenue of the Americas, Grace Building, and 33 West 42nd Street, 1:00PM

  Stewart Mader

  23 May 2012 | 6:43 am

  Photographed from the 24th floor of 1065 Avenue of the Americas (Bryant Park Corporation).

• 

  The Online Community Guide

• The Shame Effect

  Richard Millington

  27 May 2012 | 11:30 pm

  Patrick writes about a member pretenting to commit suicide.  What should the community manager do? The problem isn't what to do for this situation (it was well handled), but where you're going to draw the line. Do you get involved when a member lies about having cancer? Do you get involved when a member lies about a member of their family dying/getting really ill?  What about when a member lies about losing their job (either for sympathy or to save face). What do you do when a member lies about his wife leaving him? What do you do when any member lies about anything? Are…

• What's New To Me- vs- What's New In The Community

  Richard Millington

  26 May 2012 | 11:30 pm

  There is a big difference between members that visit to see what's new in the community and members that visit to see the response to their contributions (or because they've been prompted to visit). For newcomers, the latter is usually true. They visit to see the responses to their contributions. If they don't get a response to those initial contributions, they stop coming back. Regulars visit to see what's new in the community. It doesn't have to be about them. This is a group they belong to. They're embued with the sense of community spirit. They want to see…

• The Value of Community Managers

  Richard Millington

  25 May 2012 | 2:40 am

  Kevin writes a terrific post about employee value. In the same department, you have a social media manager.  You're paying this guy $70,000 per year, less than the email manager.  This person is able to quantify the following contribution to the company. Facebook Likes increased from 11,439 to 14,903 in the past year. Twitter Followers increased from 9,493 to 13,771 in the past year. 401 F-Commerce orders and 345 Twitter click-through orders, at $100 AOV (neither program existed in the year prior). $74,600 annual demand. Profit Flow-Through Rate of 40%. Total Profit (not…

• Knowing The Worst Members, Not The Best

  Richard Millington

  23 May 2012 | 11:30 pm

  There is a worrying trend to spend disproportionate amount of time on the worst members of the community, usually at the expense of the best.  What makes more sense? To focus on your unhappy members or your happy members? Does it make sense to spend hours resolving one unhappy member. It's perfectly ok to boot out the members that aren't happy (or disruptive). They're not your target audience.  The happy members are the ones that refer others. They generate a disproportionate amount of activity. They are the rocks that the sense of community is based on. If they're…

• Tactics That Make Activity Go Up

  Richard Millington

  22 May 2012 | 11:30 pm

  There are thousands of tactics that will make the level of activity in the community go up.  Initiate a poll on a topical issue and e-mail all your members about it. Host an exciting event and invite members to join (their friends too!). Turn the most controversial discussions into sticky-threads.  But there is a difference between tactics that make the level of activity go up, and the strategies which make the level of activity stay up. The problem with the above is two-fold. First, these tactics always take time. You will always have to spend your time hosting/initiating these.

• 

  Daily Blog Tips

• Easy Five Step Plan for Editing Your Blog Posts

  Ali Luke

  28 May 2012 | 4:41 am

  Have you ever published a post with an embarrassing typo? Have you written what you thought was a great piece … only to re-read it three months later and realize that it had no real point? Some bloggers think that editing doesn’t really matter. After all, you’re giving your hard work away for free: readers can hardly complain if there are a few sub-par posts, or some full of typos. This is a short-sighted attitude. Sure, one typo isn’t going to kill your chances of success … but poor-quality writing makes you look sloppy or even stupid. Even those readers who do stick around…

• Google Will Start Notifying Users with Malware

  Daniel Scocco

  24 May 2012 | 5:59 am

  A couple of days ago Google announced that it will start notifying users of its search engines about possible infections of malware or trojans on their machines. Initially the effort will be focused on the DNSChanger trojan, but hopefully it will be extended to other malware. DNSChanger is a Windows-based trojan which changes the registry containing the nameservers your computer uses to find websites. As a result you’ll type something on the browser and will be redirect to another website, possibly containing further malware. In order to be notified about a possible infection all you…

• A Platform to Test Your Affiliate Marketing Offers

  Daniel Scocco

  23 May 2012 | 5:23 am

  I am always looking for new websites to use as marketing platforms for my projects and products, and an interesting one I found recently is called UKritic.com. Think about it as a Squidoo for product reviews. Basically users sign-up and write reviews about the product they have used or bought. Unlike other websites with user-generated content, however, UKritic will give you a piece of the action if people reading your reviews end up purchasing the product. In other words, they are totally fine to have affiliate marketers aboard. If you are just getting started with affiliate marketing this…

• How To Keep Your Brand Consistency As A Blogger

  Guest Author

  22 May 2012 | 7:32 am

  A brand is way more than your logo and slogan. The overall style that defines you as a blogger can tell people to expect this and that from you. People tend to like what they recognize. We give trust to things that all to something familiar. If you make it easy for anybody to perceive who you are and you stick to that persona you’ll surely make a good impression in the long haul. To state it upfront: diversity is undeniably good when you are a blogger. You can settle upon a wide range of topics to write about, you get to revamp the site from time to time and explore new ways to express…

• How to Upgrade WordPress via SSH

  Daniel Scocco

  21 May 2012 | 5:40 am

  For most WordPress users updating to a newer version is pretty straight forward: log into the WordPress dashboard, click on “Updates” and then select the option to update WordPress. Within 10 seconds or so you are set. Depending on the settings of your server, though, the automatic update option will not work. In this case you’ll need to perform the update manually, which means deleting and uploading the files via FTP, which takes a lot of time (around 15 minutes for all WordPress files with an average Internet connection). Is there a better way? Yep, and it’s called…

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  Poetslife

• Memorial Day WWII Reenactment

  Poetslife

  27 May 2012 | 7:31 pm

  Among the great things about living in Carroll County MD is the 145th Consecutive Memorial Day Observance (possibly the oldest in the Good Ol' U, S, of A) in May 26, 27, and 28 of 2012.Click any photo to enlarge it.It is a spectacular three-day patriotic celebration of the wonder of men who have given their lives for this great nation. One event among many held is the WWII reenactors display. There, I had the honor of meeting Jack Wormer who just released his book (co-author Stephen C. DeVito) called, "Fighting with the Filthy Thirteen: The World War II Story of Jack Womer - Ranger and…

• Social Media Lessons from the Joplin Tornado

  Poetslife

  16 May 2012 | 8:26 am

  There were many lessons about how to use social media to save lives and reduce the damage to property before, during and after a huge tornado hit Joplin, Missouri on May 11, 2011. Here are some of mine.(Photo: A destroyed helicopter lies on its side in the parking lot of the Joplin Regional Medical Center. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)Have Facebook page up and running BEFORE the disaster so:People can use it to locate relatives, find friends, confirm who is alive and who has perishedFirst responders, police, mayor and other authorities can communicate with the public using social media tools…

• Emergency Management - National Disaster Medical System

  Poetslife

  14 May 2012 | 5:26 pm

  Note: All photos enlarge if you click them.I write this in hopes those in areas without the resources to run a mock medical exercise can learn a few lessons from my experience at this one.I was a volunteer mock victim at a Baltimore Federal Coordination Center (FCC) under the National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) sponsored a full-scale exercise at BWI Airport on 12 May 2012.This exercise was different because it was focused on medical evacuation and treatment.The full exercise plan is at the bottom of this blog entry, but here is a synopsis:"Purpose: The purpose of this exercise is to…

• Mike Smith Enterprises Blog Prepper Tip

  Poetslife

  22 Apr 2012 | 11:46 am

  Mike Smith Enterprises Blog: Late Season Snow Storm Threaten Power Failures: This weather cam photo from WTAE TV, Pittsburgh, shows the trees leafed out. Why is that important? Because heavy, wet snow will bring...Mike recommends a simple $45 inverter for your car lighter to power an appliance (like a refrigerator to keep your insulin fresh) during a power outage. Great prepping.

• Best Wines in the World

  Poetslife

  8 Apr 2012 | 7:03 pm

  Black Ankle Vineyards in Mount Airy, MD, produce the best wines in the world.That is my opinion based on decades of tasting wine from when I was a student in Paris at 19 to today, some 30 years and many bottles of wine later.I'm no sommelier. But I know a great, great wine when I taste it, and all of Black Ankle's wines are great. I especially like the Crumbling Rock and the Slate, but they are all out of this world. How out of this world? I'm very careful about what I store in my emergency supplies.The owner, Sarah O'Herron (she's the one pouring), says the unique taste is due to it's…

• 

   louisgray.com

• Web Data Caps Not Prepared for Pervasive Connectedness

  18 May 2012 | 5:41 pm

  Comcast (Xfinity) made headlines yesterday with its discontinuation of a standard 250 gigabytes a month cap for its residential users, in favor of a new format, which starts at 300 gigabytes a month, with the option to buy more. As a residential customer, I had noticed they stopped tracking our net usage in April, as after continuous growth in our home's Web traffic, the number shockingly (and incorrectly) displayed it was stalled at 56 Gigabytes, following a 162 GB month in March, up about 20 percent from February, and in turn up nearly 40 percent from January.The main rise in our home for…

• The "Archive" Button Can be Your In Box's Best Friend

  30 Apr 2012 | 2:39 pm

  You practically can't open your RSS reader or spend a day on a social network of your choice without running into complaints about email. Nobody likes it. Everybody says they have too much of it. People gloat over mass deletions of unread items, or sporting a full in box four or five figures deep. Some people take vacations from it or swear they'll pound through their to-read list in what could be an eventually futile journey toward the improbable in box zero. But for many of those people, it's likely the impenetrable in box is symptomatic of something else - the inability to make a decision…

• Private Companies, Stock Splits and Taxes

  14 Apr 2012 | 11:33 pm

  From 2001 to 2009, I worked at a private company in various roles, from marketing manager to director. Over my eight years there, I gained stock options from my hire date in January of 2001, to my last option grant in the fall of 2008. In addition, I purchased stock as an individual in 2005 and 2006. While we filed to go public in 2007, we eventually had to withdraw this plan, and the company never did see those options become public. Last fall, after I joined Google, the company was finally acquired, for cash. I was given some payout from my time there, and separate investing, but due to…

• Measuring Up at Life's Checkpoints

  8 Apr 2012 | 11:36 pm

  According to my blog history, I turned 30 years old five years ago. So that correspondingly means that today marked my hitting 35. When I got the somewhat congratulatory call from a high school best friend this morning, I asked what in the world could possibly be different at 35 than 34, aside from being qualified to run for president. He quickly said that when you hit 35, your back goes out... you become incontinent... so yeah, not great stuff.Any time life passes an arbitrary number, it becomes second nature to do a self-evaluation and compare where you are against life goals, or where…

• Writing for Social, Defending for Court

  30 Mar 2012 | 10:39 am

  Earlier this month, I had an interesting experience, being asked to participate in a deposition, taking questions from a legal team as part of an ongoing case. While I’ll skip the details out of deference for confidentiality, there were aspects of the morning that serve as a reminder for those of us who participate online that often, content we post is permanent, and it can be discovered and used for means far beyond those we originally intended.For those unfamiliar with the process of a deposition, it’s essentially when an individual is called as part of a fact-finding mission, to bring…

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  SheGeeksSheGeeks | SheGeeks

• Nokia Enlightens Windows Phone With The Lumia 900

  Corvida Raven

  22 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  “What is that?” my aunt asked with eyes as wide as her smile. That’s the usual reaction I’ve received when using the Nokia Lumia 900. Sleek, bold, and beautiful, the Lumia 900 is eye-catching. Just looking at it makes you want to pick it up and find out what it can do. Its impressive design packs quite the punch, but with all that beauty you’re left wishing its brains worked just a little bit better. Sweet Spots: Beautiful design Loud speaker Fast & responsive Great display Visual Voicemail Needs Work: Phone won’t stay off when charging No contact management solution for…

• 4 Tips to Cut Useless Tweets Out of Your Twitter Timeline

  Corvida Raven

  9 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Just like the Facebook Newsfeed, keeping your Twitter timeline full of relevant information. As we increase the number of people we follow on Twitter, we also increase the number of distracting, useless information, otherwise known as noise, that flows into our Twitter timelines. Constantly pruning for fresh information is a tedious and time-consuming job that I only do once a month. In the meantime and in between time, I use the following tips to keep the noise level down in my Twitter timeline.   Turn Off ReTweets for Individual Accounts I have quite a few people I follow that love to…

• Google+ Receives A Fresh Redesign That You Might Like

  Corvida Raven

  12 Apr 2012 | 12:30 am

  I have to be honest. I haven’t been the biggest fan Google+. I’ve been Circled over 11k times , but I don’t see much activity from users beyond sharing the same things they share on Twitter and Facebook. Most of the people I’ve circled seem to be more active elsewhere. Though Google+ original design was well received, I found the layout too cluttered with text. Overall, Google+ reminded me of a message board stuck with an old school design while flaunting new school features. So, I’m more than excited about the new redesign for Google+ because it finally feels…

• Facebook Buys Instagram: Thoughts On Why And What To Expect

  Corvida Raven

  9 Apr 2012 | 2:18 pm

  Facebook is buying Instagram for $1 billion. After the $500 million valuation Instagram received, it makes you wonder why Facebook will pay twice the price for Instagram. It’s just a mobile app that lets you share pics with friends and has less than 50 million total users compared to Facebook’s 800+ million active monthly users. You can do the same thing on your phone or desktop from the Facebook site. This may be true, but when it comes to designing an addictive mobile app and photo-sharing experience, Instagram is a winner, and threat-turned-opportunity for Facebook’s…

• Khoya: An Interactive Adventure Made For Your New iPad

  Corvida Raven

  21 Mar 2012 | 7:00 am

  When the iPad was first announced, I expected to it to magically transform the world of ebooks. I expected a new world of e-reading experiences to flood my screen from authors all over the world. I mean, can you imagine what Harry Potter would look like had J.K. Rowling written it for the iPad? If you’re having a hard time imagining it, let a new iPad app called Khoya open your eyes to an interactive storytelling experience far beyond anything you or your iPad has ever seen. Price: $4.99Download: AppStore (iPad Only) Khoya is a city under the control of the evil Nasha, and…

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  THINKing

• Creativity 2012 – Week #22

  Harry Hoover

  28 May 2012 | 4:47 am

  Photo credit: jkt_de from morguefile.com How To Boost Your Brain - Scientists have been linking the benefits of physical exercise to brain health for many years, but new research is making it clear that the two aren’t just simply related; rather, it is THE relationship. 61 Online & Social Media Resources For Motivating People To Create –  The headline says it all. Reverse Brainstorming - Reverse brainstorming helps you solve problems by combiningbrainstorming and reversal techniques. 50 Logos With Human Shapes & Symbols - These logos provide a familiar, friendly…

• Get Your Company LinkedIn

  Harry Hoover

  23 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Editor’s Note: this piece was written originally for and appeared on SocialFresh LinkedIn’s Company Pages seem to be an afterthought among the other high profile social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. But there are some good reasons that your company should set up – and keep current – your own free Company Page. LinkedIn calls the Company Page, …a company’s profile of record on LinkedIn and a powerful way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials. It’s like a LinkedIn profile for a company. Why Does…

• Does Your Personal Brand Need Brand Aid?

  Harry Hoover

  22 May 2012 | 4:55 am

  Photo credit: alvimann from morguefile.com We’ve written extensively about personal branding over the years we have been publishing THINKing. So, we thought it was about time to pull together a personal branding compendium of those previous posts. Your Personal Brand - In today’s working world, each of us must build and maintain our own brand. It’s not much different than branding a product or service. The Brand Called You - The best brands always try to do the right thing, so that their reputations will remain unsullied. It’s true for your brand, too. Building Your Personal…

• Creativity 2012 – Week #21

  Harry Hoover

  21 May 2012 | 5:59 am

  Photo credit: nasirkhan from morguefile.com Just Focus -  Your creative life is a lot like that photograph: if there’s nothing clearly in focus, you’re creating unnecessary work that could have been prevented. How To Pick The Right Idea - Imagine you have just finished a successful brainstorming session and you’re sitting in front of a long list of great ideas. Now what? Does Insecurity Drive Creativity? -  The doubt we carry within us can, at times, drive us to improve our craft. But it can also paralyze us. 7 Powerful Ways To Gain Confidence In Your Creative Work - One of the…

• The New Brand You

  Harry Hoover

  17 May 2012 | 10:06 am

  “Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called ‘You,’” said business guru Tom Peters in a 1997 essay that kick-started the personal branding movement. Personal branding is becoming even more important because your brand now has more permanence and it is easier for others to find out about it thanks to the Internet. If you have a blog, or…

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  Firebelly Marketing

• Infographic: Pinterest Best Practices

  Kelly Rynard

  24 May 2012 | 7:03 am

  Edelman, a global PR firm, recently released an infographic highlighting the best practices of social media marketing on Pinterest. This is an excellent supplement to an earlier post on our blog, Pinterest: Early Best Practices From Firebelly. Are there any additional best practices that you would include?

• If Linkedin Had Been Invented In The 80s

  Chad Richards

  23 May 2012 | 6:35 am

  Last week, we reimagined Pinterest had it been invented in the 90s. This week let’s take a look at… …if Linkedin had been invented in the 80s. It’s about as exciting as it is now (zing!) [Video URL: http://youtu.be/csuHU8B6Gg0]

• Facebook’s IPO: 5 Must-Reads

  Chad Richards

  21 May 2012 | 6:55 am

  Here are your 5 must-reads on Facebook’s IPO that we don’t want you to miss. Facebook IPO? Flat. Facebook future? Bright. By Charles Arthur Facebook IPO generated no big stock gains on its first day of trading. But Facebook has many of the traits that made Apple, Microsoft, and Google great in the long run. The Failure of Facebook’s IPO By Tim Worstall It might sound a little strange claiming that a company which has just launched a huge IPO has in some way failed. Yet looking around at the the weekend’s details of Facebook‘s float on Friday it’s difficult not to come…

• From Living in a Van to IBJ’s “Forty Under 40″: The Daniel Herndon Interview

  Duncan Alney

  17 May 2012 | 5:42 am

  “I believe that creativity and philanthropy are two things that belong together.” — Daniel Herndon Daniel Herndon is a bad ass. There I’ve said it.  He’s a brilliant word-of-mouth practitioners, and he exudes energy. He’s just a pleasure to be around. And, I love people, especially people with an unstoppable burning passion for life. Here’s a bit of background on my man… Daniel exemplified his good-hearted nature in 2009 with his guerilla marketing efforts for a not-for-profit called Community First Initiative. He and the not-for-profit…

• If Pinterest Had Been Invented In The 90s

  Chad Richards

  16 May 2012 | 6:35 am

  We’ve look at Facebook as if it were invented in the 90s. We’ve looked at Twitter as if it would have been invented in the 80s. The creative folks at Squirrel-Monkey are back at this again. This week let’s take a look at their video that imagines… …if Pinterest had been invented in the 90s. [Video URL: http://youtu.be/D9ghJZuatSk]

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  ConverStations

• Rethinking Resource Sharing

  Mike Sansone

  26 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  While recently explaining Why and How I use Twitter, an idea struck me that I haven’t been able to get rid of: How can I Be the Resource and still maintain some ownership while also having quick access to the links I share. Then two recent posts from Seth Godin stayed at me. Ranking for signal to noise ratio, specifically this bit: The clickthrough rates on tweets is getting closer and closer to zero. Not because there aren’t links worth clicking on, but because there’s so much junk you don’t have the attention or time to sort it all out. This past week, I share a few…

• The Positive and Negative Sides of Social Networking [Guest Post]

  Mike Sansone

  25 May 2012 | 4:06 am

  by Jessica Thompson of Directly.me Social networking has become an integral part of our lives and we cannot resist staying away from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn etc. As the social networking sites grew enormously in popularity a huge number of small and big businesses, celebrities, nonprofit organizations and government departments have got engaged into activities on these portals.  The internet storm that originated as fun now plays vital role in influencing behaviors and decisions. According to a recent survey, American people spend more than 22% of their time in using social networking…

• Write with Your Reader in Mind: Earn Their Attention

  Mike Sansone

  22 May 2012 | 3:42 am

  “Content may rule, but your online content must be the right sort of content: Customer-focused. Authentic. Compelling. Entertaining. Surprising. Valuable. Interesting. In other words, you must earn the attention of people.” Content Rules by Ann Handley & C.C. Chapman (emphasis mine) You know that person who never ever stops talking about themselves? Or the one who always has something nice to say – right before they tell what their agenda really is? That’s probably not you. When you and I are engaged in a conversation, there’s plenty of give-and-take.

• How to Increase Your Tweet Appeal

  Mike Sansone

  18 May 2012 | 11:13 am

  HOW TO INCREASE YOUR TWEET APPEAL Evan Bailyn’s Top Five Tips to Increase Twitter Followers Instantly Internet Entrepreneur and bestselling author Evan Bailyn keeps celebritiesTweettastic, making literally hundreds of thousands of people follow his celebrity clients – from soap opera queens to rock stars – with very simple tricks he uses every day. Drive traffic to your website, increase visibility and revenue with Evan’s top five tweet tips! 1.       Make a move – Tweets are 140 characters for a reason – provide information that is direct and to the point. Your…

• Should Your Lists be Bullets or Numbered?

  Mike Sansone

  16 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  originally posted on Dialing8 Using lists in your content is a great way to gift readers by providing “eye rests” and making your content easier to read and share. Is there a difference between using bullets or numbers? Yes. Think of a numbered list as a step-by-step order and a bulleted list as unordered. In fact, these two types of lists are called “Ordered Lists” and “Unordered Lists”. An unordered list might include things you would pick up at the grocery store: Eggs Green Onions Bread Bell Pepper Orange Juice An ordered list might be the instructions…

• 

  RyanSpoon.com

• Twitter iOS Integration, Contacts

  Ryan Spoon

  24 May 2012 | 6:52 am

  I love that Twitter is baked directly into iOS…. but could be so much more – and I’ve written about that from the launch (example here). My primary frustration is that the integration doesn’t do enough with my contact list – which remains the most accurate, important social network. Furthermore, Twitter uses aliases – and I rarely remember people’s Twitter usernames. This problem exists even within the Twitter app or popular readers like Tweetbot. Apple has a Twitter Contact tool – but it doesn’t do enough: I should be able to connect with…

• Announcing Spindle.

  Ryan Spoon

  22 May 2012 | 1:58 pm

  It’s a bold vision: “build the discovery engine for hte social web”… and that’s precisely what excites us about Spindle. Based in Cambridge, MA and started in Dogpatch Labs, Spindle aims to deliver actionable information and news that you wouldn’t have found otherwise… using location, real-time data and your social and interest graphs. Today, Pat, Simon, Alex and Alex announce Spindle as the discovery engine for the social web and open to beta registrations: “We believe that we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible via the…

• Call Elmo Facetime iPhone App is Simply Genius

  Ryan Spoon

  22 May 2012 | 9:07 am

  A very quick post to highlight the Call Elmo iPhone app because it is absolutely terrific and genius. The application essentially mocks the Facetime experience – but instead of a friend calling, Elmo calls. And once you pick up the call, your face appears in a mini-screen – just like Facetime. It’s brilliant in its simplicity… and in the model. The app is $0.99 and comes with a couple Elmo calls and voicemails. But there are dozens of other videos that can purchased within themed packs. It’s terrific and you can tell by the smile in the app – kids love it.

• Next Generation NikeID Goes Beyond Colors: Patterns & Logos

  Ryan Spoon

  21 May 2012 | 6:50 am

  I spend a lot of time writing about next generation commerce… and we invest in compelling companies and models like ShoeDazzle and Wantful (as examples). For years, people have pointed towards NikeID as an example of true product customization atop a great web interface. I believe I bought my first pair of custom Nike’s in 2003 (Nike Air Max 95′s). You can even create, buy and share your sneakers from their iPhone app. It continues to evolve and the newest iteration is interesting for two reasons: 1. It goes beyond 5-10 color choices. You can now choose different patterns…

• Amazon Local Deals, Now Promoted Within Amazon Deals

  Ryan Spoon

  17 May 2012 | 8:17 am

  It’s old news that big players like Google, Facebook and Amazon have (and continue to…) tried their hand at the local / deals space. To be successful, each has to figure out how to make the crowded space and somewhat commoditized consumer experience work within their brand. Facebook, for instance, has turned Facebook Deals into their new Facebook Offers product…. which is effectively an extension of their Sponsored Story ad products. It’s a smart play by Facebook because it distinguishes the platform and the ad product to both consumers and advertisers. What’s…

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  New Marketing and Interactive

• The 5 core principles of revenue performance management

  dean@deanwhitney.com (Dean Whitney)

  22 May 2012 | 8:32 pm

  Marketers. They’ve always added value to companies, but it hasn’t always been clear as to how much value. And on what scale? Its never been easy to trace and measure their influence.... An early pioneer in interactive media, sought after speaker and leading expert on search and social media marketing, Dean Whitney is the Founder of Dean Whitney Interactive.

• 5 tips to grow your mobile app business

  dean@deanwhitney.com (Dean Whitney)

  15 May 2012 | 2:15 pm

  If you build it, they will…probably not come. Even if you design and code an amazingly engaging, fun, and useful mobile application, there is no guarantee that it’ll gain traction, users,... An early pioneer in interactive media, sought after speaker and leading expert on search and social media marketing, Dean Whitney is the Founder of Dean Whitney Interactive.

• How usability testing can increase your sales…by the millions

  dean@deanwhitney.com (Dean Whitney)

  7 May 2012 | 6:36 pm

  This isn’t my story. But, it does a much better job at making a case for usability testing than anything I could possibly make up. Ready? Once upon a time there existed an e-commerce website.... An early pioneer in interactive media, sought after speaker and leading expert on search and social media marketing, Dean Whitney is the Founder of Dean Whitney Interactive.

• How the world’s largest global start-up and accelerator competition, MassChallenge, is killing off the business plan

  dean@deanwhitney.com (Dean Whitney)

  3 May 2012 | 1:12 pm

  At first, it exists as just an idea. At a coffee shop, after a couple cafe lattés, you and few friends flesh it out. Over a long weekend it gets invested in by VC’s. And after a month,... An early pioneer in interactive media, sought after speaker and leading expert on search and social media marketing, Dean Whitney is the Founder of Dean Whitney Interactive.

• How inbound marketing and HubSpot will change the way you think about marketing (2 of 2)

  dean@deanwhitney.com (Dean Whitney)

  27 Apr 2012 | 8:30 am

  Instead of forcing consumers to interact with brands, marketers figured out how to make consumers WANT to spend time interacting with your brand: by GIVING. This is what Massachusetts Institute of... An early pioneer in interactive media, sought after speaker and leading expert on search and social media marketing, Dean Whitney is the Founder of Dean Whitney Interactive.

• 

  Direct Marketing Observations

• When Does Social Media Really Work?

  marc meyer

  22 May 2012 | 7:53 am

  The beauty of social media isn’t in the online connections.  It’s not about the numbers, never has been.  OK,  maybe it is to marketers, but that’s because they operate from a different perspective.  No the beauty of social media is in it’s potential.  It’s potential to connect people from divergent backgrounds or in the same city or that have the same common interests.  It can really connect people in infinite ways.   That may seem somewhat preachy or full of green meadows, unicorns and rainbows but it’s true. Recently in the Wall Street Journal,…

• How Do We Get Duped By SEO [Infographic]

  marc meyer

  14 May 2012 | 8:54 am

  It all starts with a title. The better the title, the stickier the title, the more likely you’ll suck us in.

• How Digital is Changing the Consumer Experience

  marc meyer

  2 May 2012 | 2:02 pm

  Let me give you a few real world examples that happen every day.  You’re at a stop light for all of 30 seconds and you start to get antsy because the light hasn’t changed.  You are going to make a right on red and there is someone in front of you who does not turn right away, and you lay on the horn.  You’re in line at the store waiting to check out and it’s taking forever.  Forever being about 3-4 minutes. Why are we so impatient? Maybe these examples will help. You’re surfing the web and a page doesn’t load quick enough so you try another website.  You want to buy a product…

• Social Media and The Olympics

  marc meyer

  20 Apr 2012 | 1:44 pm

  Two things for you to check out. First check out the infographic below and second, check out this link: http://hub.olympic.org/

• A Need to Redefine Brand Lift

  marc meyer

  13 Apr 2012 | 6:22 am

  According to a recent survey published by eMarketer, four in five North American brand marketers considered brand lift to be the most important metric for evaluating the success of their online branding efforts.  But is brand lift the right metric at all?  Vizu which partnered with DIGIDAY on the survey defines brand lift as the following: Brand Lift is defined as the percentage increase in the primary marketing objective of a brand advertising campaign But does that definition correlate to digital correctly?  Should it?  Marketers consider it to be the one worthy metric.  Given its pure…

• 

  The Engaging Brand

• Podcast 386 - How To Double Your Profit!

  Anna Farmery

  28 May 2012 | 2:22 am

  This week's The Engaging Brand podcast covering social media, business ideas and brand marketing tips, is ready to download. Cameron Herold, the founder of Backpocket CEO and former Chief Operating Officer of 1-800-GOT-JUNK  joins Anna Farmery to discuss how to double your profit - tips from his latest business book  Double Double How doubling profits in three years is not hocus pocus magic.....but hocus focus! How to paint a picture of your business idea and growth strategy Tips on painting a picture in Chapter 1 which you can download for free. How sharing the goal with EVERYONE is a…

• At the end of the week, bring on the strong!

  Anna Farmery

  25 May 2012 | 2:18 pm

  Just a thought.... So for many of you it is the end of the week.....could we change that to end of the weak? So that on Monday morning it is the strong who return...with strong meaning Being strong enough to Accept feedback that takes you forward Listening to others to widen your view Share that "I suppose this is a stupid idea but...." Think long term not short term To focus your time on the things that matter rather than the things that are easy Be brave enough to understand that a happy, balanced life makes for a much stronger leader. So here's to the end of the weak...and the start of the…

• Why Tomorrow...is so Yesterday

  Anna Farmery

  24 May 2012 | 10:31 am

  We live in a world where tomorrow is...well, it's so, well... yesterday in terms of the world of business and  social marketing! The business world is dynamic....except for businesses themselves...let me explain. We live in a real time world, our consumers, our employees all live in a world of real time data feeding through their laptops, their smartphones...their tablet PC's.  They want a complex combination of quality (a given!) , specificity (another given!), no risk (they read the reviews) and instant (or next day delivery). Wow...phew...impossible right? Yes, of course it is if we go…

• 8 Reasons Why Customers Are More Than Just Buyers

  Anna Farmery

  23 May 2012 | 7:06 am

  Step change innovation seems so much easier when you are outside the industry. Think Nike with fitness technology, think Apple with music, think Gore and environment. Outsiders can see through the "Why we can't", the "We've tried that before"...and they ask we need to, so how do we?  Socialising business has one huge benefit for creativity and innovation. Each business has at their fingertips...true outsiders...they are called Customers or Consumers! The new customer relationship management is not about creating reasons to buy, but seeing the customer as a resource bank of value. If you…

• What is Social Business Trying to Do?

  Anna Farmery

  22 May 2012 | 7:05 am

  Social business is a theme I keep exploring because I think it is going to be so critical in the future, so much so I am doing my PhD on it! People work for businesses? Wrong, in my humble opinion.... business is the vehicle by which people deliver experience to other people Over the last few decades the problem has been that the business has been less of a vehicle and more of the driver of the vision. Social business is about moving people from being the passengers in the vehicle and letting them drive again.... Profit should become the outcome of delivering great products and great…

• 

  Going Social Now

• Add Organ Donor Status to FB Profile. Brilliant.

  Shiv Singh

  1 May 2012 | 4:00 am

  Today Facebook is urging its US members (roughly 161 million of them) to add their donor status to their Facebook profiles according to the NY Times. There are around 7,000 patients waiting organ transplants. In addition to encouraging Facebook members to add their donor status, the company is also encouraging everyone to list their birth dates and schools to further create peer pressure to further push people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.I couldn't be more impressed with the initiative. It's been done on a smaller scale by other companies on the…

• Sosolimited via The Creators Project

  Shiv Singh

  6 Apr 2012 | 9:55 pm

  An inspiring perspective and worth watching. This isn't about digital marketing or about social media but how Sosolimited thinks about bits and bytes is how brands need to think too.

• Breaking down the Paid, Owned & Social Media Chinese Walls

  Shiv Singh

  25 Mar 2012 | 8:54 pm

  It is easy to forget that social media marketing has one critical challenge. You cannot scale it consistently. If your plan goes really well, it'll scale on its own. Similarly, if things go really badly your marketing efforts (much to your irritation) will probably scale too. However, there's never any guarantee as to why and when your social media marketing efforts will scale. If you're trying to reach a certain number of consumers in a certain way in a certain time period, you simply can't depend on organic social media to do so. Even the most perfect marketer cannot depend on that.Hence…

• Interview with MediaPost on how Facebook is growing up in the eyes of marketers

  Shiv Singh

  24 Mar 2012 | 5:10 am

  Pepsi is among brands that have recently updated its Facebook presence, when the social net redesigned company pages. Online Media Daily spoke to me,  to discuss the upgraded brand pages, the new ad offerings and analytics tools Facebook introduced in February. Interview below.OMD: What's your take on the new Facebook brand pages incorporating Timeline?Singh: The first version of brand pages did not always engage consumers around a brand. This version does a few different things. One is putting the Wall front and center even more strongly -- that's a big step forward. With Timeline…

• Super Bowl Digital Advertising Madness

  Shiv Singh

  31 Jan 2012 | 8:11 pm

  Super Bowl is upon us as is the advertising madness around. There are a few key themes that will hold true this year for sure and are already surfacing:1. Releasing ads online early is becoming table-stakes. Nearly everyone seems to be doing this and with good reason. It's about building momentum into the Super Bowl typically done with a mixture of paid and organic promotions of the TV ads online.2. The smarter advertisers are constructing narratives around teasers, the TV commercial and what should happen after the ad airs. Some are even focusing on second screen social TV experiences (we…

• 

  Polygraph Media Blog

• The Origins of Polygraph Facebook Data Mining Analytics

  Chris Treadaway

  23 May 2012 | 10:18 am

  First a quick thanks to all of you who visited the blog yesterday.  Our blog traffic exploded yesterday, which means I'll be writing here frequently. :-) Today, I thought I'd talk about where we got the idea for Polygraph and the feedback we heard from the marketplace in the 9 months preceding our launch. As some of you may know, our company's origins came from the couponing world.  Our first product was a couponing system that businesses could use to publish coupons on the Web, Facebook, Twitter, and to e-mail lists.  We built this as a DIY system for local businesses and…

• Polygraph Facebook Data Mining, Analytics Launch!!

  Chris Treadaway

  22 May 2012 | 11:15 am

  Howdy everyone.  Today is an exciting day for us at Polygraph -- we've released our first product into the marketplace! First of all, congratulations to our team.  We ran hard to the deadline, and released something that I'm very proud of, especially for a v1.  Now everyone is pretty much exhausted, but I suppose that's par for the course. We're excited about our mission to democratize access to social data -- and make it easy for marketers to truly understand the competitive landscape on Facebook.  There are a lot of companies doing deep analytics on Twitter, but not…

• On the Facebook IPO

  Chris Treadaway

  15 May 2012 | 2:10 pm

  Lots of thoughts on this... let me try to be brief.  And my opinions on this should not be considered as investment advice, but rather my observations following up on my interview with WebProNews earlier this year.  I am a marketer and practitioner, not an investment professional.  The Facebook IPO is the apex of this cycle.  Finally, we can all buy & sell shares of the world's dominant social property.  Woohoo! The Facebook price range was increased today, which will value the company at roughly $100b when it begins trading.  Unreal -- although this was inline with where the…

• Big Social Data & the Peak of Rick Santorum

  Chris Treadaway

  2 Apr 2012 | 8:04 am

  February 8th was a watershed day in the US Presidential campaign of Rick Santorum.  The Pennsylvania conservative picked up a sweep of somewhat unexpected wins in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri.  Pundits and news sources called the outcome "devastating" for the Mitt Romney campaign and a "shot in the arm" for Rick Santorum.  Romney went on the offensive, launching attacks against his Republican rival weeks after the event. All of this would be great, with the exception that February 8th was actually the statistical peak of the Rick Santorum campaign.  We can prove…

• SXSW Interactive 2012 Observations

  Chris Treadaway

  14 Mar 2012 | 12:21 pm

  Some thoughts following the blur that was SXSW Interactive 2012: I very much agree with the sentiment that "nobody won SXSW" this year, but I also don't think you can expect that every year.  Twitter "won" the conference in 2007.  4sq arguably stole the show in 2009.  GroupMe "won" in 2011.  In my mind, the latter won it only because the tech press had to give the title to *someone*.  But also look at the years... in the even years nobody "won" at all per se.  You don't have a  "press-designated" winner every year and this…

• 

  Brass Tack Thinking

• When I Won’t Give Away What I Know

  Amber Naslund

  25 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  It absolutely invigorates me that this is really and truly the age of the entrepreneur, the era when anyone can be nearly anything they want and that businesses can be started with a few hundred bucks, an idea, and a blog. I think it’s disrupting business as we know it for the better, and I have personally benefited greatly from an era that doesn’t care whether or not I have a degree, and allows me to work in exciting positions and take my own crack at being an entrepreneur. Much like other people in my position, I’ve worked really hard, made big sacrifices, and put a lot on…

• 9 Yardsticks for Evaluating Your Career Success

  Amber Naslund

  23 May 2012 | 8:05 am

  Everyone who has a professional career at some point wonders how they’re doing. How they measure up. Whether or not they’re on the right track. That includes me, who has had the most meandering and untraditional career path one could imagine: music school > non profit work > corporate communications > independent consulting > working for a startup > building a business. Often, I’m asked what constitutes “success” for me. In other words, what factors do I look at and consider when I’m determining whether I’m doing what I want to be doing…

• As For Auto Posts…I Take It Back. Almost.

  Amber Naslund

  17 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  I popped off the other day a little bit of a snarky comment in the midst of my annoyance at automated online presence. Here’s me, enjoying the sunshine and warmth of a beautiful Mother’s Day, lingering in bed with my kiddo and flipping through a magazine and the internet. Then my peace is broken by a bunch of obviously auto-posted links to yet more articles about social media stuff and getting more clicks or money or something. So I tweeted: “It’s okay to take a day off from trying to get clicks, for crying out loud. The stream of auto posts just makes me nuts…

• 

  NTEN

• Into the Cloud: Park Pride

  Brett

  24 May 2012 | 1:51 pm

  After a rollercoaster ride through a number of less-than-successful services, a small nonprofit gains independence with Cloud-based email. Park Pride is a nonprofit that works to create and improve parks in the greater Atlanta metro area by engaging communities, advocating, and volunteering in parks and community gardens. Chris Bernard Editorial and Communications Director Idealware read more

• Into the Cloud: Great Books Foundation

  Brett

  24 May 2012 | 1:38 pm

  A technologically conservative organization takes a risk with the Cloud, saving staff time and opening the door to other technology. For more than six decades, the Great Books Foundation has worked to promote discussion and empower readers of all ages to become more reflective and responsible thinkers. Chris Bernard Editorial and Communications Director Idealware read more

• 5 Cloud Based Apps For Teams to Organize Events Better (and for FREE)

  Brett

  24 May 2012 | 10:50 am

  Jeff Ramos Community and Content Manager Games for Change To help you keep track of files while keeping your sanity, here are 5 of the tools that will make organizing your conference a breeze. Many of us in the nonprofit space know how much effort goes into organizing large, annual events. Even though many of us are entrenched in the intersection between our work and technology, we often struggle with finding ways to make our lives simpler. In today's world, cloud technology can allow most nonprofits with an Internet connection to access hundreds of files, manage multiple teams, and keep…

• Have Your Feet On The Ground When Looking At The Cloud

  Brett

  24 May 2012 | 10:32 am

  Geri Stengel President Ventureneer As your hardware grows old or you want more from your software, look into the cloud. It may save a lot of money and give your organization room to grow. As I said in The Cloud: Not As Airy As You Thought, cloud computing is a boon to startup nonprofits and businesses as well as those that are growing. Here's a case study, from Jason Hutchins, president of Nonprofit Solutions Network. A small nonprofit, with a staff of seven. Server is maxed out, ready to be replaced. Question: New in-house server or move into the cloud? Answer:The cloud.

• The Cloud: Not As Airy As You Thought

  Brett

  23 May 2012 | 3:49 pm

  Geri Stengel President Ventureneer Cloud computing is really a boon to nonprofits because it significantly reduces upfront costs and allows for quick expansion of both capacity and applications. Let's start with the basics. “Cloud computing” isn't really a cloud. It's a bunch of servers in a far-off, climate-controlled locked room, watched over by some serious techies. It's just not your own server in your own room with your own techie. And the server holds your information right next to information from a whole lot of other people. The cloud is often described as a “utility based”…

• 

  PsyBlog

• The Ultimatum Game

  Jeremy Dean

  25 May 2012 | 9:29 am

  What can The Ultimatum Game tell us about how people cooperate? Sometimes games have a lot to teach us about human nature, other times they're just games. One game that some economists and psychologists claim has much to teach us is called The Ultimatum Game. The game is very simple. It's played between two people who have to decide how to split an amount of money. Let's say it's $100. One of the two people is randomly chosen to make an offer to the other about how to split the money between them. If the other person accepts this offer then they split it on that basis. But, if the other…

• How to Overcome the Egocentric Bias

  Jeremy Dean

  18 May 2012 | 7:40 am

  What would this guy do? Perspective-taking offers a way around the egocentric bias. Most people are pretty bad at taking advice from others. People don't mind hearing the advice, they just hate to take it.  This is one facet of what psychologists call the 'egocentric bias': the general rule that we think we know better. The egocentric bias strikes in the boardroom, in schools, in hospitals and everywhere where two or more people are gathered together and one turns to the other and says: "What do you think?" It's the reason why every person and every generation has to make its own mistakes.

• How To Encourage People To Change Their Own Minds

  Jeremy Dean

  9 May 2012 | 8:08 am

  Self-persuasion: let people talk themselves around to your point of view. Changing people's minds is hard. We resist having our attitudes adjusted by others, especially when the message isn't directly relevant to us and we aren't paying that much attention. But what if you could get people to change their own minds? People will listen to themselves and will automatically generate arguments that have personal relevance for them. It's not as crazy as it sounds. Actually people are being encouraged to persuade themselves all the time. Here are a few examples: When a parent wants to change a…

• Five Effortless Postures that Foster Creative Thinking

  Jeremy Dean

  27 Apr 2012 | 2:28 am

  Literally sitting outside a box, rather than in it, makes you more creative, according to new psychological research. There are lots of metaphors floating around in creativity. We talk about 'thinking outside the box', 'putting two and two together' and 'seeing both sides of the problem'. But are these only metaphors or can we boost our creativity by taking them literally? We know our minds interact in all sorts of interesting ways with our bodies, so what if we enacted these metaphors physically? That's the question Leung et al. (2012) examine in a new study published in the journal…

• What “The Love Bridge” Tells Us About How Thoughts and Emotions Interact

  Jeremy Dean

  17 Apr 2012 | 10:11 am

  How much control do you have over your emotions? Have you ever wondered why one person can speak in public without apparent nerves while another crumples under pressure? Or why one elite athlete can shake off their nerves to win Olympic gold while another chokes? Even with ample experience some people never seem to learn to cope with their emotions. A key insight comes from a controversial psychology study carried out on a rickety bridge by Dutton and Aron (1973). The love bridge Men crossing the bridge were approached by an attractive woman who asked them to fill out a survey. The men were…

• 

  Usability Counts

• The 4,000th Twitter Follower: Nicholas Huttema!

  Patrick Neeman

  26 May 2012 | 7:09 am

  He wins a George Foreman Grill. Your grill is on its way! Who’s going to be number 4,500? ShareStuff to check out UX Drinking Game | UX Resume and Career Guide

• David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks: Rocking Bulldog

  Patrick Neeman

  25 May 2012 | 9:50 am

  I’m going on vacation. Watch this video while I’m gone. ShareStuff to check out UX Drinking Game | UX Resume and Career Guide

• Onward Search: How To Shape Your UX Job

  Patrick Neeman

  21 May 2012 | 5:56 pm

  I wrote this originally for Onward Search, a blog I’m going to be writing for occasionally. It seemed fairly popular, so I’m reposting it here. As a User Experience designer, you can help employers shape the jobs they advertise. Educate them, and you pay it forward for the designers of the future. Most hiring managers don’t understand the skills needed for great websites and web applications because the field is still relatively new. They understand that skilled designers can lead to amazing successes (read: they want to be like Apple), but they don’t grasp what the process…

• iO9: Neil Gaiman’s Inspiring Commencement Speech About Succeeding in the Arts

  Patrick Neeman

  19 May 2012 | 6:43 pm

  Commencement speeches are wasted on the young — everyone should watch them. I love his bit about his life goals as a “mountain,” and his mission to do only work that would bring him closer to the mountain. Of course, we should all be so lucky to work only when jobs are adventurous and stop when they become work, but there are some wonderful nuggets of artistic wisdom throughout Gaiman’s speech. ShareStuff to check out UX Drinking Game | UX Resume and Career Guide

• Need a Better Job? Attend The Jobvite UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp

  Patrick Neeman

  18 May 2012 | 4:20 pm

  Jobvite UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp Burlingame, CA – June 19, 2012 (Map) Sign Up Now The process of getting a great user experience job that you love isn’t as hard as you would think — you just have to tell your story. The Jobvite UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp on June 19, 2012 in Burlingame, California covers all aspects of getting that UX job you love: Using social media to connect with great companies Presenting a great resume Crafting a portfolio that tells your story What to expect during an in person interview Also covered are questions to ask and what to look…

• 

  Blonde 2.0's Blog

• Are Skills No Longer Required?

  Shahar Goldfinger

  27 May 2012 | 6:42 am

  This week, I saw a truly amazing product. This product was a platform for creating Facebook applications and the only thing you need to use it is some working knowledge of power point. The product’s tagline was “Programmers are Overrated”. I was thinking about that line when I got an e-mail from WIX saying I should upgrade the Flash website I built using their platform to HTML5 in order to make it more compatible with more devices. So, are programmers overrated? Are we coming up to a point in technology where all you need a programmer for is to create a platform that will make it easier…

• Get Ready for the First Ever LeWeb London! 50% Discount For Blonde 2.0 Peeps!

  Ayelet Noff

  14 May 2012 | 8:57 am

  I go to tech conferences all over the world. One conference that I never miss is LeWeb Paris. Why? Because this conference has all that one could ask for – amazing lineup of speakers and panels, great networking crowd, the coolest parties, incredible food and the most wonderful ambiance. This year Geraldine and Loic have really outdone themselves and have added LeWeb London to the mix as well. I am excited for the first ever LeWeb London and am certain that the Le Meurs will bring all the best elements of the Parisian conference to the UK while in addition giving it extra British spice.

• Why I Can’t Unplug

  Mark Lerner

  9 May 2012 | 8:45 am

  I remember my first computer, 75 Megahertz processor and 250 megabyte hard drive; I now have a disk on key that has 30 times that amount of space. I remember that horrible sound of AOL trying to connect to the internet through a 24.4 k modem. We thought we were so technologically advanced back then; I don’t think anyone could have imagined what it would be like in a few years. Today, we have iPhones, iPads, iPods, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and god knows what other new chachki that will come out in the near future. The point is, you can never be anywhere and not be reachable. I was having…

• It’s as if Google doesn’t have product managers.

  Shahar Goldfinger

  1 May 2012 | 9:06 am

  Get it together Google. Get it together Samsung, HTC, Sony, LG and everyone else! I am sick and tired of phones that don’t work. How hard can it be? Simply said, I’m a loyal Android user and fanboy of the OS for about two years now. I stood by the OS through thick and thin for one reason specifically – I believe in openness. I like the fact you can put Android on whichever device you like. I like that if you’re an app creator your apps do not need to be approved. I like how everyone can be a part of it. But seriously though, philosophy and belief can only take you so far. How…

• New Journalism is Decadent and not Deprived

  Brian Blondy

  24 Apr 2012 | 9:23 am

  Tom Wolfe, the esteemed writer of the groundbreaking and seminal work of non-fiction of the 1970’s, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, decided in 1973 to put together a book, or better said, an anthology, which curated the changing face of non-fiction journalism. He aptly titled the book, The New Journalism, in order to define what he saw as the best, new journalism that was being printed at the time. Wolfe self-described this endeavor as aiming to gather the most “absorbing and gripping” long-form writing into one volume so as to identify (for university students in particular) new…

• 

  Media Culpa

• The social media guide to Eurovision Song Contest 2012 – semi-final 2

  kullin

  24 May 2012 | 3:06 am

  Tonight is the second semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan. To follow the different entries and their updates in social networks, see the list below. It is an extensive list of official Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace accounts and more. This list is even more complete than the links on the official Eurovison site. Have fun and may the best songs win. Social media guide to Eurovision Song Contest 2012 Semi-Final (1) Official Eurovision social media channels: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EurovisionSongContest Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/Eurovision…

• Predicting Eurovision based on Facebook likes – the results

  kullin

  23 May 2012 | 7:40 am

  I made a little experiment yesterday by trying to predict the outcome of the first Eurovision Song Contest semi-final. I used the number of Facebook likes to the country pages at Eurovision.tv and the number of views of the official videos. I was aware that it might not be the most accurate of predictions, since people can like and view a video but not vote for it due to the fact that you can’t vote for your own country and only countries competing in the semi-final could vote for the others. Nevertheless, the overall rank I got was accurate to some degree. The countries I ranked 1-7…

• Predicting the Eurovision Song Contest with Facebook likes

  kullin

  22 May 2012 | 7:11 am

  On the Eurovision.tv page, each of the participants in the Eurovision Song Contest is presented with videos, images and more. Readers can share each participant’s page on social networks such as Facebook. In an attempt to predict the outcome of the first semi-final I have looked at how many times each country page has been shared on Facebook and how many times each official video has been viewed. The overall score shows that Russia and Cyprus are huge favourites, while Switzerland and Belgium may not make it to the final. Late tonight, we will see how accurate these predictions are (I…

• The ultimate social media guide to the Eurovision Song Contest 2012

  kullin

  22 May 2012 | 5:42 am

  Tonight is the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan. The contest is sure to spark an enormous amount of acitivity in social media and below you can find an extensive list of official Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace accounts and more. This list is even more complete than the links on the official Eurovison site. Have fun and may the best songs win. Official Eurovision social media channels: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EurovisionSongContest Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/Eurovision and https://twitter.com/#!/eurovisionpress Twitter…

• Luis Suarez in McDStories-like gaffe on Twitter

  kullin

  16 May 2012 | 2:12 pm

  If there are a lot of negative opinions about your brand, social media may become your worst enemy. We often hear that brands should engage in meaningful conversations with fans through social media. But when there is a lot of controversy or negative opinion around a brand, asking people on social networks to speak up might not turn out the way you expect. McDonald’s experienced this when they initiated the hashtag #McDStories, in an attempt to get people to share nice stories about the fast food giant. Instead, people who disliked the brand, hijacked the hashtag on Twitter and started…

• 

  Regular Geek

• Geek Reading May 26, 2012

  Rob Diana

  26 May 2012 | 9:00 am

  I have talked about human filters and my plan for digital curation. These items are the fruits of those ideas, the items I deemed worthy from my Google Reader feeds. Berkeley DB at Yammer: Application Specific NoSQL Data Stores for Everyone Tornado tracks Three Laws of Good Software Architecture App-UI – a New HTML5 Application Framework So You Want to be a Programmer 10 questions for navigating a jungle of data New medical spectrum will untether patients from their monitors PayPal Rolls Out To 15 More National Retailers, Announces Deals With 6 Top POS Software & Terminal Makers…

• Geek Reading May 25, 2012

  Rob Diana

  25 May 2012 | 9:05 am

  It has been a long time, but Geek Reading is back! Here are a few items for today. I have talked about human filters and my plan for digital curation. These items are the fruits of those ideas, the items I deemed worthy from my Google Reader feeds. Introducing the V-Pole, a connectivity, electricity, utility pole mashup Mint-Like Healthcare Expense Tracker Simplee Partners With The HSA Solution, Grabs 800K Accounts Visualization of the Week: 30 years of tech IPOs Facebook to acquire browser maker Opera? Maybe. Here’s what we know. Notifications, Refreshed I hope you enjoy today’s…

• The Art Of The Email Nag

  Rob Diana

  24 May 2012 | 9:59 am

  In my quest to learn the spanish language, I have tried several online learning options. As with any learning experience, if you do not practice enough you will not progress in your learning. The problem most people have with online learning is remembering to practice. For some people, they just forget to do it and others just do not make the time. This is a problem for any startup, not just language learning. How do you keep your users engaged if you are not the next Facebook or Twitter? In most cases, applications have email notifications built into their processing. So, in the case of…

• HTML5’s Value For Mobile Event Apps

  Rob Diana

  11 May 2012 | 5:56 am

  This is a guest post from Krister Ungerboeck, the CEO of Ungerboeck Software International. The most successful event planners have started using mobile technology to more quickly connect with customers and meet their needs. New mobile applications can drive business to their websites and help them provide better service. Yet, current mobile technology has several deficiencies that make it not only expensive to implement, but it also limits the types of devices that can access a particular app. HTML5 coding aims to change all of that. By developing websites and applications using HTML5,…

• A Q&A With Opa Creator Henri Binsztok

  Rob Diana

  30 Apr 2012 | 9:30 am

  I recently attended the PhillyETE conference and there were a number of interesting talks. In particualar, I was a big fan of the talk from Alex Payne regarding Emerging Programming Languages. One of the languages that I found interesting, Opa, seemed more than just a language, and conveniently someone emailed me about it. That someone is Henri Binsztok, the CEO of mlstate.com and creator of Opa. Given that Opa is probably unknown to many readers, I figured I would get some basic questions answered by Henri. Henri described Opa in one line, “It puts together the actors of Erlang,…

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  Metrica

• Can high-readership Saturday papers save the newspaper industry?

  Nuria

  23 May 2012 | 8:44 am

  Last week the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) released readership figures for national newspapers which for the first time counted Saturday editions separately from weekday ones (usually Monday-Saturday figures are averaged into a daily readership). The data revealed that Saturday papers are overwhelmingly out-selling their Sunday counterparts; as Roy Greenslade put it in his Evening Standard column, “the secret which we in the business have known for quite a while is now out”. He cited a key ABC statistic: in the month of April, 10 national titles collectively sold an average of 10m…

• The PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet #037

  Adam Layton

  18 May 2012 | 3:44 am

  If you work in PR and are interested in the latest thinking on media monitoring, PR planning, media analysis and social media measurement, these are the must read stories from the last week. This week’s top PR and social media picks: Obviously big news today, Facebook hits the stock market. According to Time magazine, “Facebook’s IPO represents the triumph of hype and hope over financial analysis.” …and how Twitter will make money. The company now has 10 million users in the UK. I thought we’d stopped talking about this but it’s reappeared again on…

• In social media we trust

  Catherine Cooke

  16 May 2012 | 7:56 am

  Recent findings have shown that public confidence in both paid-for and traditional media is declining, but our trust in social media is on the up. Why are consumers choosing to trust social media sites over traditional press, and what can be done by companies to use social media to increase trust in their brand? Why has trust in traditional owned and paid media declined? The uncovering of the phone-hacking scandal last year has been a key factor in the public’s decline in trust in traditional media. A YouGov survey at the time the story broke found that 58% of UK adults said that the…

• Humans are driving the social media machine

  Amy Samson

  15 May 2012 | 2:06 am

  The more I look at social media, the more I believe that it is a reflection, albeit a little distorted at times, of our own humanity. It shows what inspires and motivates as well as what outrages us – and as we use it more and more to express our emotions, we see the impacts of this expression in the real world. As I was reading through the April Gorkana Charity Barometer, it really hit me how much of this month’s social media coverage was driven by the outpouring of human emotion in response to events both big and small. The death of Claire Squires was a prime example of how a small…

• The PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet #036

  Adam Layton

  11 May 2012 | 3:44 am

  If you work in PR and are interested in the latest thinking on media monitoring, PR planning, media analysis and social media measurement, these are the must read stories from the last week. This week’s top PR and social media picks:  Firstly, RIP Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. Darling of all twenty to thirtysomething, arrested development, media manboys. Like me. …and much in the same vein, Goldie Lookin Chain rapper Rhys Hutchings was voted in as Labour councillor in Newport. Can social media make journalism better? Top tweeters revealed their favourite follows to The Guardian.

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  Mizz Information

• Who "Owns" Content?

  Maggie

  17 May 2012 | 4:13 am

  Seems like every other thing I've read this past week has been about curation and/or content marketing. Call me a snob, but something about the word "content" makes the writer in me cringe just a lil' bit. Is that what writing has come down to--a delivery mode for marketing messages? Granted, in the context of marketing, obviously this moniker makes sense--but in the context of associations, "content" is a murkier notion. Associations produce great publications of many types: journals, books, guidelines, industry standards, magazines...the list goes on and on. Obviously all those things count…

• Why I Doubt Associations Will Become Filters for Digital Overload

  Maggie

  9 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  I admit, I was surprised but happy to see the headline "Will Associations Become Filters for Digital Overload?" in the Huffington Post. Happy because I'm always glad to read things pertaining to associations outside the association bubble--or maybe I just don't read the Huffington Post regularly and they always post about associations. Regardless, if you read this blog you probably know what my first thought was when I read the headline: of course I do not think associations will become filters for digital overload! Why not? Here are but a handful of the reasons: Associations care about their…

• Facebook Fails are Mounting

  Maggie

  8 May 2012 | 6:27 am

  Despite the media frenzy over Facebook's impending IPO, all isn't 100% rosy for Facebook. Two things I've recently read  highlight what I consider to be pretty big fails on Facebook's part, and, were I considering investing in Facebook (which I never in a million years would do), would give me pause: Social Readers are collapsing. Wow, "frictionless sharing" is annoying people and backfiring? Who could have called that one? To me, the bigger story here is that people do not have infinite patience for just accepting whatever Facebook throws at them. Facebook is notorious for…

• 31% of Associations Have Online Communities. Where are the Association Community Managers?

  Maggie

  30 Apr 2012 | 7:08 am

  I just read a post about an upcoming membership marketing benchmarking report, specifically detailing the part of the report that addresses social media use by associations. The report surveyed 700 associations and, according to the summary of the upcoming  report, among associations with over 20,000 members, 31% reported having a private social network. Hm, I thought--that's a lot of private social networks....yet, as far as I know, there are still very, very few community managers in the association world. I've blogged about this before--this is an aspect of associations that I simply…

• Why Facebook Timeline Will Continue to be Bad For Brands

  Maggie

  24 Apr 2012 | 9:19 am

  What--Facebook Timeline hasn't performed as well for brands as Facebook led them to believe it would? Say it isn't so! I am not at all surprised--here's why: Timeline is a UI nightmare. Where the hell are you supposed to look? With so much emphasis on images, pages take forever to load. There are two columns--except when there aren't when an image spans both columns. And don't even get me started on the way the admin panel takes up an entire screen. My eyes don't even know where to look when a page finally loads; apparently I'm not the only one who is confused.Timeline totally discourages…

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  THE BLOGGER'S BULLETIN

• How to Become a Person Who Takes Action

  Deb Lamb

  8 May 2012 | 12:11 pm

  Are you someone who spends more time thinking than doing? You’re not the only one. There are a lot of people who are more thought-oriented than action-oriented. This is not a personality trait that is set in stone. With some work, you can become a person who takes action instead of one who sits on the sidelines. When you find the methods that work best for you, stick with them. You might dwell in chaos and disorganization while more action-oriented people have it together and maintain their organization for anything-work, school, life, kids. Action people typically have more energy at the…

• How to Stay Positive When You’re Surrounded by Negativity

  Deb Lamb

  11 Apr 2012 | 12:28 pm

  If someone were to ask you, you would probably say that you were a pretty happy person. You try to keep a positive frame of mind and stay upbeat. It can be difficult, though, to maintain a positive mindset when you find yourself surrounded by negativity. Here are a few ways you can help keep your positive attitude whenever you look around and find that everyone else is being negative. It’s nothing personal. People can often get into the bad habit of talking negatively. It can be aimed directly at you or simply be about a myriad of other things that are going on in that person’s life.

• Submitting Your Articles Successfully

  Deb Lamb

  11 Apr 2012 | 7:20 am

  After you have written a few articles that you are proud to attach your name to, it is time for you to start submitting them to a few different article directories. There are hundreds of different online article directories that you can choose from. These can be either paid sites or free. Find article directories that are highly ranked in order to build traffic and enhance your notoriety. Selecting a few well-respected directories will allow you to reach the widest possible audience. Here are just a few of the best article directories to consider when you get ready to submit your articles:…

• Structuring Your Articles for Article Marketing Campaigns

  Deb Lamb

  30 Mar 2012 | 4:04 pm

  As soon as you figure out exactly what it is that article directories expect from your content, it is much simpler for you to structure your articles to meet those expectations. You will be able to get into a routine and follow a pattern for your articles, which will make it faster and easier for you to complete for submission. For the most part, article directories have very similar requirements in their submission guidelines. Each will require you to use proper grammar and spelling. Your content has to be unique and informative. The article lengths must typically be at least 400 words…

• 10 Quick Tips for Life Rejuvenation

  Deb Lamb

  30 Mar 2012 | 3:18 pm

  You’re in a rut. We’ve all been there. The only way to get out of it is to shake things up! Add some of that zest and exhilaration to your life that you’ve heard other people talking about. It doesn’t have to be anything drastic. Just find a few ways to bring some simple changes to your life and you will be amazed at how great you feel! Even one small change to your typical routine can make a world of difference in your attitude and your outlook on life. Here are ten ways that you can spice up your life right now: 1. Plan a special “renew and restore” day! Find a date on your…

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  Weber Media Partners | Impressions Through Media

• Sex, Lies and Tweets. Arrogance or Ignorance?

  Catherine Weber

  15 May 2012 | 6:43 am

  Today’s Wall Street Journal was riddled with examples of “smart” people in high places making age-old mistakes.  And it’s the oldest stuff in the book. Yahoo’s CEO misstated his college degree on his online biography. This would have been no big deal until Mr. Thompson decided to lie about how it got there by blaming a search firm. That is when the cover up got him fired. Does this remind anyone of the Martha Stewart lie that put her in jail? Best Buy’s new CEO was caught having an affair with a subordinate and resigned, but the Founder and Chairman…

• Facebook Brand Pages: Making Brands Human

  Catherine Weber

  30 Mar 2012 | 2:10 pm

  Today, a big change came to Facebook brand pages, and will require your attention to fully harness the new opportunities for your page.  Brand pages are a highly visible part of your interaction with customers, and Facebook has made changes that will help you improve your ability to interact. Cover Photo First and foremost, you will need to bring your attention to the cover photo on your page, which will replace the current 5 thumbnails. This image is a great opportunity to draw in users from the moment they arrive. Timelines Like personal profile pages, brand pages will now have timelines.

• Financial Industry Is Slow To Get Social, Restrained by Regulation

  Catherine Weber

  21 Mar 2012 | 12:15 pm

  Series 1 on Social Media in Highly Regulated Industries Some in the financial industry think it simpler to abandon social media, but for most, they are stuck in a difficult juxtaposition as they are expected to grow their book of business, but then told they cannot use all the tools available to do so. My Edwards Jones money manager is forbidden to use Facebook for business, and the company won’t allow her to have access to the site from her office.  Merrill Lynch just recently began allowing their employees to use LinkedIn, but under strict guidelines. With social media in full swing…

• Pinterest: The Power of Images

  Catherine Weber

  27 Jan 2012 | 9:47 am

  Over the past few years, there have been a mind-boggling number of technology innovations. So many, that it has our heads spinning. As for social networks this past year, the launch of Google+ was big. But, by all reports, the next big thing is Pinterest. Pinterest has over 4 million registered users as of this week and is growing rapidly. 1.5 million of the predominately female audience visit Pinterest every day – spending 14 minutes on the site on average. Alexa.com reports “Pinterest.com is ranked #133 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings… The…

• The SOPA Debate

  Catherine Weber

  13 Jan 2012 | 8:59 am

  On the surface, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP (PIPA) sounds like a good idea – to punish those who pirate intellectual property. As an writer and artist, I am all too aware of the dangers of posting your work and then finding it elsewhere, without your permission. Imagine the cost implications for movie studios, record labels, and of course the individual who has few resources to go after the culprit. The idea behind this bill, according to those who have followed the debate, was sound. The result, however, has been described as a threat to free speech, web-related…

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  Community Building

• Don’t fear the cliques in your online community!

  Martin Reed

  22 May 2012 | 4:16 pm

  Too many community managers see cliques as a bad thing (Tommy tried to stamp them out completely). Doing this can bring a community to its knees and strip it of its personality. Cliques are a good thing for an online community. When members form smaller groups, it makes a community stronger. By trying to stamp them out and making all your members ‘equal’, you’re crushing your community’s spirit. Cliques make online communities exciting and vibrant. Arguments, debates and rivalry are the fuel that keep communities alive and keep them interesting. Yes, cliques can make a…

• When a community manager doesn’t know the answer

  Martin Reed

  16 Mar 2012 | 12:38 pm

  Questions are vital. Asking questions keeps community discussions alive. Asking questions keeps a community manager in touch with the community. You should never stop asking questions – especially when you don’t know the answer. Recently, a member of Female Forum complained about some of the jokes that were being posted in the ‘Just for Fun’ section of the forums. The jokes in particular were ones that poked fun of specific nationalities and political systems. As jokes go, I didn’t find them offensive – but I could see how they may be to some. The problem…

• How independent is your online community?

  Martin Reed

  19 Jan 2012 | 1:37 pm

  A great community manager can build a great online community. That being said, a community shouldn’t be reliant on one person for its success. Yes, it needs a leader – but it shouldn’t depend on that leader for its daily survival. Here’s a quick and easy way you can determine just how independent your community is – find your community’s total post count, and figure out how many of those posts were made by you. When you’re building a new community from scratch, it will be largely reliant on its manager – you need to encourage the development of…

• Don’t draw attention to your community’s weaknesses

  Martin Reed

  11 Jan 2012 | 4:40 pm

  Movie-Vault does a great job at highlighting its weaknesses. Take a look at the homepage; as of Wednesday January 11th, in the left column we see 67 RSS readers and 55 Twitter followers. In the articles section, we are repeatedly reminded that nobody is commenting on the articles -there are four articles all with a large button proclaiming ’0 Comments’ (apart from one article lucky enough to attract the attention of a spammer). Furthermore, on every article we have the opportunity to be the first to ‘Like’ the content on Facebook. Not all online communities have the…

• Online communities should highlight quality, not quantity

  Martin Reed

  22 Nov 2011 | 1:33 pm

  Woot does a great job with its online community. Not only does the community content appear prominently on the homepage, the site highlights what it considers ‘quality posts’ – only posts it deems to be useful, interesting or otherwise valuable to the community make it to the homepage. Click to enlarge Furthermore, when you delve into a product discussion thread, things look a little different. Before you even see the discussion thread, you see the quality posts. Click to enlarge If you scroll down further, you get to the actual discussion thread. In a typical forum…

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  Social News Watch

• Digg Slows to Half Speed, Serving 3 Front Page Stories Per Hour

  Joe Kent

  23 May 2012 | 11:39 am

  Update 2: The site is back up and back to 20-minute update intervals. Update: Digg sped back up to its normal pace for a little while, then went down completely. API calls and everything are currently down. For over 12 hours, the Digg front page has moved at half speed. Instead of the normal 10-minute interval between updates, stories have remained at the top of the front page for 20 minutes. Speculation amongst Digg “power users” in one of the Skype chat rooms they frequent is that it could be a test to see if they get more traffic with a more stagnant front page. The recent…

• The 2,700 Year Old Art and Science of Encryption

  JD Rucker

  12 May 2012 | 2:05 am

  When most think of encryption, they think of computers using complex algorithms to hide data in ways that require a password or key. This is a very modern and simplistic view of a long and stories history behind encryption. Since the dawn of human communication we’ve had a need to be able to send messages without the risk of them being seen by the wrong people. Thus, encryption is as old as the written word in some cultures. This graphic depicts some of the amazing forms of encryption that have been scattered through our history. Without computers, one needs to have a very creative mind…

• Will StumbleUpon Slide Under FTC Advertising Disclosure Changes?

  JD Rucker

  5 May 2012 | 3:54 am

  One of the least expensive forms of pay-per-click advertising on the internet is StumbleUpon. With prices as low as 5 cents per click, they are able to drive more traffic for the buck than sites like Google or Facebook. What’s more, ads have a chance of picking up “natural” stumbles that are free. In some cases, a good campaign with strong content can get more natural clicks than paid ones. The challenge is with disclosure. On mobile apps, it declares when a stumbled piece of content is sponsored. On the browser toolbar version, it does not. As pages are served to users who…

• The Most Accurate Business Listings come from… Foursquare?

  JD Rucker

  29 Apr 2012 | 1:53 pm

  There will always be business listing errors online. People sometimes do not pay attention. Businesses move or shut down. Some businesses are asleep at the wheel and unscrupulous competitors sabotage their listings. It happens. It’s not surprising that around 20% of the listings on popular sites like CitySearch and Mapquest are inaccurate. What was surprising is that the most accurate data apparently comes from Foursquare. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley speaks during the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) The location-based social network that lets…

• Layering Social Media Channels to Pump Up Campaigns

  JD Rucker

  27 Apr 2012 | 12:06 am

  This is the easiest part to of a consolidated social media brand messaging campaign, but it’s also one that is not well understood and rarely implemented properly. The standard practice is to have a message, send it out on Twitter and Facebook, and move on to the next piece of news. It’s a futile effort. What’s better is to layer it. Depending on the timing of the posts and necessity of speed with the news itself, one should plan it out to hit the rest of the world over time and across as many channels as possible. The example in the link above has these assets with which to…

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  Danny Brown

• The Commoditization of Expertise and Why You Should Never Trust a Guru

  Danny

  28 May 2012 | 6:30 am

  This is a guest post by Ryan Hanley. The Internet is a canvas for Creativity… Using the Online tools of today’s age, thought-leaders the World may never have otherwise known are given the opportunity to paint their picture of success. It’s amazing really… But for as much as I love the Internet and the possibility for greatness it presents, there is a dark pattern forming that troubles me deeply.  This may not be news for those of you that’ve been in the blogging game longer than myself… But its systemic and horrifying none the less… A true Internet…

• The TRUE Power of Influence and Emotional Impact

  Danny

  25 May 2012 | 6:12 pm

  People talk about influence – what it is, how to get it, how influence is guided by numbers and how to attract the attention of influencers for promotional needs. There’s no doubt that influence is a constant hot potato. But sometimes, influence comes from the strangest of places. Sometimes influence comes from folks we might never look twice at. Sometimes influence comes from nothing but emotion. Look at this video from Australian Juan Mann. One guy, who started a campaign offering free hugs to try and bring a touch of humanity back to the city of Sydney in his native Australia. He…

• Be Where YOU Need to Be, Not Where “They” Say You Should

  Danny

  22 May 2012 | 10:01 am

  A friend of mine went to a Social Media for Small Business conference recently. He’s a small business owner, and has been thinking about using social media for a while. He enjoyed the conference and made some great connections while there. Yet something he said worries me, and that’s the need to be everywhere. According to the social media expert that was speaking at the conference, businesses need to be on as many social media channels as they can. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ning, blogging, Facebook Places, Tumblr, etc – the list goes on. The reasoning?

• Is Seek or Shout the Holy Grail for PR, Bloggers and the Disconnected Media?

  Danny

  21 May 2012 | 6:30 am

  This is a guest post from Yvette Pistorio of Cision. Two shifts have dramatically changed the way media and public relations professionals interact over the past few years: the move away from email in favor of online social channels, and the emergence of versatile, freelance content creators who are as comfortable writing magazine articles as they are blogging for brands. For PR pros, that means media outreach will soon be more likely to take the form of a Twitter conversation with a freelance writer than an email exchange with a full-time reporter. With these shifts in mind, Cision has…

• A Very Short Message to the Shitdiots at @Klout

  Danny

  20 May 2012 | 8:04 pm

  Dear Klout – I have uninstalled your shitty service and blocked your access to my info, period. And yet you’re still trying to get friends to invite me to your crud, never mind invading my sidebar with your stupid app. Be a grown-up business with adult management – stop this outdated shit now. Note: I’m posting this out of frustration, but truth be told, I don’t expect anything to change. After all, why change something when you have so many suckers buying into it, no matter how invasive your approach..? A Very Short Message to the Shitdiots at @Klout originally…

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  Twitterrati

• Frrole: What’s Happening on Twitter in Your City?

  Mark Evans

  6 May 2012 | 4:21 am

  Idea: Looking to see what’s happening on Twitter in your city? Frrole delivers a “social newspaper” of 20 cities. My take: An interesting and easy way to get a snapshot of the local TwitterSphere. Utility Grade: 6/10

• A Whois for Twitter Users

  Mark Evans

  27 Dec 2011 | 7:00 am

  One of Twitter’s shortcoming is how little information it provides about users, other than a short bio and a URL. So how do you quickly get more insight about particular users? The answer could be Twho is This, which offers up an extensive list of a person’s social/digital presence, along with their Twitter bio and a link to follow them. It’s not the prettiest service and it could benefit from offering more information but it’s better than what Twitter offers. An example below is Mathew Ingram (aka @mathewi). By doing a query on his username, it shows 14 different…

• $300 Million of Twitter, Please

  Mark Evans

  19 Dec 2011 | 12:40 pm

  Twitter may not have a vibrant business model but it sure has no problem attracting heavyweight investors. The latest person to step up in a major way is Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who bought a $300 million stake from an early Twitter investor as part a strategy “to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact.” (More details on the New York Times) You figure with so much interest, Twitter could do an IPO. Of course, an IPO means you have to disclose your financials, which Twitter may not want to do given it’s probably spend a lot more money than its…

• Postpost Streamlines Twitter

  Mark Evans

  15 Dec 2011 | 9:00 pm

  A fact of life about Twitter is the more people you follow, the noisier your live stream becomes. As much as the live stream is a parade in which a new “float” comes along on a regular basis, there can be times when you want a way to have a more focused or narrow slice of what’s happening with our live stream. An interesting tool to take control of your live stream is Postpost, which drills down into it so that people can do searches for particular keywords. For example, if I was interested in tweets about “startups”, Postpost would generate the following results…

• So How is Twitter Making Money?

  Mark Evans

  14 Dec 2011 | 10:05 am

  Curious about how Twitter makes money? Henry Blodget did an interview recently at the Insight conference with Adam Bain, Twitter’s chief revenue officer, which I suppose is the guy responsible for helping turn Twitter into a business big enough to support its sky-high valuation and growing workforce (800 and counting!)

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  WebGuild

• HP Layoffs: 27K Heads To Roll

  Daya Baran

  23 May 2012 | 1:58 pm

  Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), missed its Q3 analysts’ estimates on slumping demand for printers, data-center equipment and services. The company also announced that it will cut 27,000 jobs, or about 8 percent of its staff. Hewlett-Packard, said the job cuts will last through October 2014, and the company also plans to eliminate jobs through firings and early retirement offers. The job cuts are expected to produce annual savings of as much as $3.5 billion. Many of the cuts will come from the ailing enterprise services group, which manages data centers and provides technology consulting. Services…

• HP Layoffs: Fear Spreads. Expect 30K Cut

  Daya Baran

  23 May 2012 | 10:53 am

  Just as President Obama comes to the bay area to tout the success of his job creation plan, Meg Whitman, will be announcing one of HP’s biggest layoff. Whitman is expected to announce the cutting between 25,000 and 30,000 jobs. It will be the first of many layoffs, as she tries to turn HP around. HP has 360,000 employees today up from 60,000 in 2001. The company has already laid off 120,000 in the last few years.

• Dell The Next RIMM? Struggling To Survive In Apple World

  Daya Baran

  23 May 2012 | 9:44 am

  Dell shares tumbled 18% this morning after the company missed its April quarter earnings report. Dell reported FY Q1 revenue of $14.42 billion and profits of 43 cents a share, falling short of Street estimates at $14.9 billion and 46 cents. The company also projected that next quarter’s revenue will come in lower than expect at $14.71 billion versus $15 billion. Dell Chief Financial Officer Brian T. Gladden admitted during the company’s first-quarter 2013 earnings conference call that its results “were mixed.” Though it didn’t mention the iPad by name, PC maker…

• The Truth About Yahoo’s ‘Interim’ CEO

  Business Insider

  23 May 2012 | 7:45 am

  After Yahoo fired CEO Scott Thompson for lying on his resume, it promoted Americas boss Ross Levinsohn to “Interim CEO.” But Levinsohn is not the same kind of “interim” CEO that Yahoo CFO Tim Morse was last fall. Morse’s job was to be a placeholder while the board formed a search comittee to find an eventual replacement to Carol Bartz. Levinsohn, we’re told by sources who have spoken to Yahoo executives and board members, has been instructed to go run the business as if he were Yahoo’s permenant CEO. And indeed, the board has yet to form a search…

• Apple’s Design Guru: Our Process Hasn’t Changed Even Without Steve Jobs

  Seth Fiegerman

  23 May 2012 | 7:34 am

  Many assumed Apple’s process of developing new products would suffer without the oversight of its visionary leader Steve Jobs, but according to the head of Apple’s design department, it has mostly been business as usual since Jobs left the company. “We’re developing products in exactly the same way that we were two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago,” said Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, in an extended interview with The Telegraph. “It’s not that there are a few of us working in the same way: there is a large…

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  Connect - Digital Marketing Expertise from iCrossing

• ICO backs down on ‘cookie law’ as deadline looms

  Sam Vining

  24 May 2012 | 7:33 am

  Tomorrow the year-long moratorium on compliance will end and the EU ‘cookie law’ (or e-Privacy directive) will come into effect. But don’t worry: it’s now becoming clear that the ICO will not be handing down fines for the non-compliant. Among other measures, the legislation calls for a user to be given ‘clear and comprehensive information’ and have ‘given his or her consent’ before a site places or uses cookies on a user’s machine. However, confusion from site owners and marketers on topics like the meaning of ‘consent’, how this should be collected, and which forms of…

• Trust Flow & Citation Flow, MajesticSEO’s New Link Metrics

  Tibor Palocsay

  15 May 2012 | 6:55 am

  The basis of how good a website’s SEO value is is judged on many aspects, but most consider the most important factor to be the SEO ‘equity’ passed to the site from external linking sources. These ‘backlinks’ are monitored to try and gain an understanding of the value that they are passing to the site. There are many tools that allow you to measure these values, one of which is Majestic SEO. Yesterday Majestic SEO announced two new link metrics, Citation Flow and Trust Flow, for measuring the perceived quality of a domain, subdomain or page. Google.co.uk Over the last couple of…

• Luxury, Automotive & Electronics Brands Rank Top In Google+ Engagement

  Modestos Siotos

  11 May 2012 | 4:26 am

  A recent report published by social media analytics experts Simply Measured unveiled that automotive, electronics and luxury are the top 3 industries on Google+ user engagement within the Interbrand Top 100 brands. According to Simply Measured CEO Adam Schoenfeld  ”luxury and automotive brands are clearly finding Google+ to be an effective way to connect with consumers”. Brands like Ferrari, GUCCI and Burberry appear to be in the top of the Interbrand Top 100 list in the number Google+ circlers (followers). Some other useful points include: 64% of the Interbrand Top 100 brands now…

• No such thing as a random satsuma

  Danny Chadburn

  30 Apr 2012 | 1:45 am

  The brightonSEO conference earlier this month came and went with a flurry of insight and opinion, and a hadouken. Those returning after a classic sun-drenched Brighton lunch hour were treated to a presentation from iCrossing’s very own Charlie Peverett. He told a tale of innocence, how he spent his days as an editor blissfully oblivious to the intricacies of SEO. However, when the curtain was pulled back he peered into a murky world that revealed the true reason why nobody was reading his content The presentation is now available to view in all its glory, where you’ll discover…

• Formula 1: Race Result — Shanghai / China — Sakhir / Bahrain

  marc.belle

  27 Apr 2012 | 6:11 am

  After 2 somewhat unpredicatble and very compelling races here are the results for the last 2. Apologies for the slight delay on these it has been a manic couple of weeks for Creative HQ! We particularly like the look of Shanghai! Bahrain- Post from: Connect Formula 1: Race Result — Shanghai / China — Sakhir / Bahrain

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  Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

• Decision making landscape - towards a better map

  Mark Earls

  4 May 2012 | 5:21 am

    In a recent post about what BE is missing, I referred to this Crawford chart that I feel captures the individualist model clearly: it places individuals - like a Ptolemaic Earth - at the heart of things. The alternative is not a Copernican one - shifting the focus from one planet/individual to another while retaining the structure of concentric circles around the focal point. No, a better conceptual map would be more like this: a repeated pattern of Crawford's individual circles or a series of interacting individual balls: And most importantly of all, a dynamic pattern - one that…

• "All that matters in the end...

  Mark Earls

  26 Apr 2012 | 4:27 am

  ...is other people". That's what the priest said at my mother's funeral, two years ago this week. Today I'm off to another funeral (second one this week). Our dear friend John Cronk died on 12th April in the Royal Marsden. Although he'd been ill for a while, it still seems like a ghastly adminstrative mistake. A real friend, through thick and thin. A genuine 'mensch' who made our lives better just by being part of them. I'll post the professional appreciation I've done for him at a later date.= but today, just do this for me: whatever else you're…

• Blinded by the technolight

  Mark Earls

  23 Apr 2012 | 5:34 am

  As if by magic: Tom's cartoon explores the underlying technophilia which dogs marekting and policy-making too much. Brain porn or Digital Everything - it's all technophilia, I'm afraid

• Neuroscientism and neuroporn (updated)

  Mark Earls

  23 Apr 2012 | 4:15 am

  Am feeling for Jonah Lehrer this weekend, following Steven Poole's review of his latest book, Imagine - How Creativity Work in the Guardian. I've met Jonah a couple of times and read his work frequently and - as is often the case - feel for the real person I've construed in my head. Unflattering reviews are never pleasant to receive (I've had a few in my time and much as I'd like to pretend they don't hurt, they genuinely do) but at the heart of this one is a critique that I have a lot of sympathy with, if it's true - namely Imagine's overwhelming…

• Habit and the HERD (I)

  Mark Earls

  20 Apr 2012 | 5:06 am

  Am ploughing my way through Charles Duhigg's new book on Habits at the moment and - the basic point about habits and our tendency default to low-level cognitive activity aside - am finding it all rather disappointingly and over familiar territory.  Not just in terms of the overkill of neuro-cartography ("we know that this is important because there's something going on in the brain here...") but in terms of the ideas of habits being shaped by rewards and repetition (in what way is this not classical conditioning?). Add to that the lionising of dead Mad Men and their…

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  C R U C E S

• A camera for Instagram called the Socialmatic

  Michael Myers

  21 May 2012 | 4:54 am

  Antonio De Rosa is raising money to build out a camera specifically for Instagram. (If you just ignore the fact that Instagram was bought by Facebook, it seems MUCH cooler.) The camera is called a the Socialmatic and the video below outlines all that the device does. They have 41 days left to raise the ...

• The new business reality: a feature as a business model

  Michael Myers

  20 May 2012 | 4:26 am

  It’s almost comical to say there is a new business reality at play. This is because there are so many forces at work lately, that it seems as though new realities are created and killed almost every quarter. Opportunistic turbulence is probably the best term for it. I’d like to call one out for review ...

• A BIG FAT infographic about mobile!

  Michael Myers

  18 May 2012 | 4:43 am

• Create your own infographics with easel.ly

  Michael Myers

  17 May 2012 | 7:48 am

• Facebook Mobile stats from Socialbakers (infographic)

  Michael Myers

  13 May 2012 | 7:58 am

• 

  Ben Werdmuller von Elgg

• Over the Air 2012

  Ben Werdmuller

  26 May 2012 | 5:06 am

  I’m going to be speaking at Over the Air next Saturday, June 2nd, 2012: For two days over 600 mobile developers & designers will be based at Station X, hacking in the shadows of the WWII Enigma & Lorenz code-breakers, and hanging out at the home of Colossus the world’s first electronic digital programmable computer. I’m really looking forward to it – not least because Bletchley Park played such an important role in both the history of computing and the second world war. I’m also excited because my fellow speakers are people like Daniel Appelquist…

• Why can’t I …

  Ben Werdmuller

  18 May 2012 | 4:15 am

  … Embed a discussion forum in a blog post? … Stick games in an RSS feed and have them be playable in Google Reader? … Post an encyclopedia to Pinterest? … Bookmark a scene in a video? … Move my profile to another site or domain name without breaking everything? … Create a slideshow of newspaper articles? And email it to you? … Link to an object? … Make a movie like we make the web? (Collaboratively, with little bits in lots of places, all linked together?) … Store my own Facebook profile, and choose the form of content I share there?

• The Edinburgh Festivals API: a case study in innovation

  Ben Werdmuller

  14 May 2012 | 3:11 am

  I was the inaugural Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, working with Rohan Gunatillake and the Edinburgh Festivals on open data and digital accessibility. Here’s a video from Rudman Consulting for AmbiTIon Scotland about the Festivals API portion of the project: Related entries Open data in the arts (0) Edinburgh Festivals Lab Geek in Residence (1) The Open Stack and truly open APIs (0)

• Ani DiFranco’s crowdsourced video for “Which Side Are You On?”

  Ben Werdmuller

  9 May 2012 | 8:54 am

  It’s nice to see my favorite musician embrace social media a little more: Here she is on Twitter and Facebook. I came to the project late, and I’m not sure how the photos were contributed; there’s a site at whichside.net, but it’s not hugely inspiring. Nonetheless, the song is, and it’s a great start. Related entries Hannah’s album, and why Bandcamp is awesome (0) Music! (2) Ben’s Big Gig (1)

• The river and the tide

  Ben Werdmuller

  8 May 2012 | 8:48 am

  Most data on the web comes as a river. Blog posts, photos, Facebook updates, tweets, news stories, videos, cloud files – all lists with the newest at the top. It’s the design pattern of the Internet. Within this design pattern, there are four main places where innovation can occur: How you consume the river. How you filter the river. Where the river lives. How and what you post to the river. Right now, all the value lies in the first three. Social news apps suddenly declined when Facebook changed how its river works; Technology Review recently moved its content into an RSS feed…

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  Suzemuse - Create. Share. Learn. Be Brilliant. Personal Blog of Susan Murphy.

• Curiosity

  Susan Murphy

  25 May 2012 | 5:44 am

  When I was growing up on a tiny island on the west coast of Canada, we didn’t have a lot of the things that city kids did – no movie theatres, no McDonalds, no cable TV. So we had to find other things to do – and that often involved being gently pushed out the door first thing in the morning by my Mom. We spent our days riding bikes, playing in the woods behind our house, exploring the world around us. That exploration led to a curiosity that has stayed with me my entire life. People sometimes ask me how I have learned everything I know about digital storytelling and social…

• Sometimes It’s What You Don’t Know

  Susan Murphy

  23 May 2012 | 4:00 am

  Remember how I occasionally will get on your case a bit about what it takes to overcome your fears and just get out there and start telling your stories? Well, I’ve been away from this blog for a bit, working on publishing some other things, so I haven’t been bugging you about it. But I’m back, so consider yourself warned. As some of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook may be aware, my husband Greg and our friend Tom are making a horror/thriller web series called “Scream All You Want“. Right now we are in the middle of shooting, and it’s consuming many…

• Practicing Safe Social Media

  Susan Murphy

  22 May 2012 | 1:48 pm

  A few weeks ago I was privileged to be invited to Woodroffe High School to talk to the students there about using social media responsibly. I spend a good deal of time talking to people of all ages about social media, and for me, the opportunity to spend a few hours with high school students was at once exciting and terrifying. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been in a high school auditorium, particularly standing at the front of it. As the principal introduced me and I took the stage, I flashed back to my days playing alto sax in Jazz Band – only this time my solo…

• The Secret to Understanding Social Media

  Susan Murphy

  27 Apr 2012 | 4:08 am

  If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you’ll be aware of the tremendous impact social media has had on my life and career in the past 6 years or so. It’s brought about incredible opportunities for my business, allowed me to meet and become close friends with many wonderful people, and it’s changed the course of my teaching career. So many people are clamoring to figure this space out right now. What does it really mean, this fundamental shift in the way we communicate? Why should we care? How do we do it? Where do we start? These are all questions…

• Zen and the Art of Getting Over Yourself

  Susan Murphy

  23 Apr 2012 | 4:42 am

  Yesterday I did something totally out of my comfort zone. I went to a recording studio and laid down a few tracks. The studio, in case you’re curious, is in my friend Dennis’ basement. He’s got quite the set up. Dennis asked me to come by after he heard this recording that I did using my iPad and Soundcloud. That was my first step out of my comfort zone a few weeks ago. I have been learning how to sing and play guitar at the same time for about 25 years (yeah, I know), and I figured that I’d gotten this song to the point that I’d just record it. I had no…

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  Social Networking for Newbies

• What to do if you have more than one LinkedIn account

  admin

  18 May 2012 | 10:24 pm

  Having multiple LinkedIn accounts is a bad idea. First, LinkedIn’s terms of service (TOS) prohibit having more than one LinkedIn account. So having multiple LinkedIn accounts could result in all of them being suspended by LinkedIn. Secondly, it creates confusion from people who want to connect with you. Unfortunately there is no way to combine LinkedIn accounts. What you need to do is close the duplicate(s) account(s) (click here to see how to do this.) However before closing the accounts, you should export your connections (click here to see how to do this) and your recommendations…

• Networking Math – The power of growing your LinkedIn network

  admin

  18 May 2012 | 10:30 am

  The following is an article shared by Konstantin Danilov, CFA, CAIA. The original article can be found here. You can also connect with Konstantin via twitter at @NetworkingStrat. I thought he really brought home the many benefits of growing your LinkedIn network. Enjoy If you thought that professional networking was all about business lunches and networking events, you might be surprised to learn that it’s really about numbers and probabilities. All different kinds of networks – from telecomm to social media – behave in relatively similar ways according to something known as…

• Is the LinkedIn premium service worth it?

  admin

  24 Apr 2012 | 10:33 pm

  Let me start by offering an analogy. Premium vs. regular gasoline (petrol.) Fact is that some vehicles really benefit from the Premium grade gasoline. However for many others, it is a waste of money. So as far as the premium LinkedIn service, it all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. The premium version offers more options than the free version but the fact of the matter is that most people fail to fully utilize the free version and therefore waste their money on the premium. In my opinion the premium version works when you need to have specific searches that only the premium…

• Should we connect with strangers on LinkedIn?

  admin

  20 Apr 2012 | 8:01 am

  I recently wrote this article on the topic. I’m curious if you would vote differently after reading it. Please vote and comment.

• How to change your LinkedIn Group’s name

  admin

  18 Apr 2012 | 2:46 pm

  Please watch the video below if you need to change your Group’s name. One caveat: you are limited to making five changes in the group description. So plan accordingly.

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  GROWMAP.COM

• Video Mobile Apps: Evan White of Viddy Interview – Future of Publishing

  Steve

  24 May 2012 | 7:54 am

  Up till now, it has been relatively hard to share videos online compared to pictures. You can upload them directly to YouTube on your phone, but most of your friends won’t see them unless you put them on Facebook. Influence People CMO Murray Newlands interviews Viddy CMO Evan White to introduce you to their new video mobile app Viddy. How Social Video is Revolutionizing Publishing WHAT IS VIDDY? What Twitter is to Social Media, Viddy is for videos. Twitter limits messages to 140 characters; Viddy limits videos to 15 seconds Viddy makes one-click sharing of 15 second videos to Social Sites…

• Chris Brogan Interview – Video Creation for Business – Future of Publishing

  Steve

  17 May 2012 | 2:32 pm

  Businesses can’t talk down to customers anymore. They need to genuinely form a two-way or multi-way flow of communication with the people who buy their products so that those people see that the brand is valuable and feel appreciated for their loyalty. In this Future of Publishing episode, host Murray Newlands interviews social marketing consultant Chris Brogan  about this and gives tips at how you can produce great video content that’s more engaging with your audience: Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on…

• 5 Ways to Promote a Cause Using Pinterest

  asmarty

  15 May 2012 | 6:02 pm

  For the last several years, people have been using social media sites YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to promote their non-profits and causes. Given the way it works as a natural means of sharing content, that is only to be expected. You have probably used these sources yourself, if you have been promoting a cause. But there is a new website that has been generating interest for awhile, and slowly you are seeing such efforts being shifted there. I am talking, of course, about Pinterest. This social media sensation has created a huge following, especially among women. What Is Pinterest? This is…

• Facebook iPhone App UI Change: Videos and Pictures on Social Media – Future of Engagement

  Steve

  15 May 2012 | 12:17 am

  People use their eyesight to do almost anything. This ranges from analyzing their environment to analyzing the text in a book. We even used our eyesight as our primary means of finding and catching prey back when we lived in the wild. Facebook took advantage of humans being visual animals and faster mobile download speeds and decided to make pictures and videos bigger in their mobile app. Murray Newlands examines this change and how people reacted to it on social media in this week’s Future of Engagement: Alerti social media monitoring chart about negative and positive conversations…

• 4 US Fundraising Conferences to Visit in 2012

  asmarty

  14 May 2012 | 12:16 pm

  This is a guest post by SEO, professional blogger and guest blogger Ann Smarty.  Ann (@seosmarty) owns MyBlogGuest.com and I just signed up for her new link monitoring tool. With so many worthwhile causes vying for the limited dollars that businesses and individuals have available to donate, fundraising for even the most pressing of needs can be a daunting task. With success dependent on the tools and knowledge that you bring to your desk each morning, it’s very important that every possible source is explored thoroughly. If you’re a fundraiser looking to up your game in the name…

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  TheWayoftheWeb

• The future is now…

  Dan Thornton

  17 May 2012 | 2:43 am

  At least it is while I’m reading my latest book purchase. I always love looking through charity shops to see what people once wanted but have let go due to changing tastes, changing fashions etc. And occasionally you stumble across something like ‘The Road Ahead’ by Bill Gates for the bargain price of £1! For one thing, it’s hard not to be impressed when the cover was shot by Annie Leibovitz – puts all the talk of ‘rock star’ marketeers and developers now into perspective! The other is that I’ve only skimmed the first few page so far, but…

• 3D Printing in 2012 – innovation coming thick and fast

  Dan Thornton

  9 May 2012 | 8:37 am

  When I wrote ‘2012 – the year of 3D Printing?‘, I didn’t realise it would quickly become one of my most popular ever posts, get masses of great comments and end up featured on other sites including the Wall Street Journal. But that was back in August,2011, so how are my predictions fairing up now we’re approaching halfway through 2012? Well, I’d say pretty good – it’s still going to be a while before we see a 3D printer in every home, but the capabilities to make use of them have already arrived, and the hardware itself is getting cheaper. Plus…

• Why I love writing and technology…

  Dan Thornton

  2 May 2012 | 9:41 am

  …because done well, both can inspire people to act. Whether it’s laughter or tears, love or hate, making a purchase or revolting against a government – both can provide amazing tools to inspire and encourage. It’s how I ended up combining writing and marketing. And it’s why I don’t dream about one day turning this business into an ‘SEO’ agency. Or a ‘social media’ agency. I dream growing this business into something larger which is known for being able to enable change and action both internally and externally. And it’s why I…

• Still here – 6 years of blogging and 4 years of data…

  Dan Thornton

  30 Apr 2012 | 4:18 pm

  Although I started publicly blogging at TheWayoftheWeb on a blogspot account back in 2006, it was only in 2008 that I switched to WordPress and installed my current Google Analytics account, so May 1 is kind of an anniversary. Technically I really started blogging back in about 1999 with a Homestead website, but that didn’t progress further than some horrific design decisions and a couple of extremely half-hearted business ideas, such as a database of pub reviews (I still occasionally wonder how much revenue the likes of FancyAPint make!) Either way I’ve constantly veered between…

• Facebook’s Trending Articles – adding irrelevance into my network

  Dan Thornton

  25 Apr 2012 | 4:58 pm

  Facebook started testing ‘Trending Articles’ roughly a week ago, but they’ve appeared in my own account for the first time today. Now below the latest update from my network, I get a block displaying 5 articles read by someone connected to me, like so (name of friend removed as who knows whether they want it displayed publicly) I have the vaguest idea that this might be about American Football – a sport I rarely watch as I’m not a big fan, and it’s not freely available in the UK. In fact, none of the 5 highlighted stories were particularly interesting or…

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  Connection Agent

• The Ultimate Competitive Advantage

  Steve Woodruff

  22 May 2012 | 5:38 am

  You can have boundless energy, a really hot product, great pricing, solid staff, and a top-of-the-line Lexus in the CEO parking space, and still go down in flames. If you want to succeed (long-term) as a leader, as a business, as a consultant – really, as a person – then there’s one thing you absolutely need to have. One huge advantage. And it’s something that we can ALL acquire. Clear vision. It can be a process getting to 20/20 clarity – sometimes, a lot of “doing” is what gets you to better “seeing” – but when you know who you…

• Connection Pinball

  Steve Woodruff

  21 May 2012 | 7:02 am

  Scanning my usual set of columns in Hootsuite this morning, I wondered, “Is there a blog post here – just looking  at these people?” In my DM column I saw Liz Marshall and Terry Starbucker. Yep, there was a story. You see, I met Terry in our early days of blogging – probably 2008, at the famous Blogger Social ’08. Our friendship had little to do with my business at the time (which was and still is focused on pharma), but we were both blogging on marketing and business topics, and we hit it off. In 2009, I made my only appearance at SXSW, mainly to chaperone my…

• Seeing 20/20 in 3-D

  Steve Woodruff

  17 May 2012 | 5:10 am

  A little while back, I got new prescription glasses. And there was that moment, putting them on, when I realized what it is like to see 20/20 again. All of us who wear contacts or glasses know that wonderful feeling. The slow drift toward unclear vision often goes unrecognized until someone fits us with a new pair of lenses. The fact is, clear vision is not an option. Whatever other investment I may forego, I will always spend the necessary funds to see clearly – because that is foundational to everything I must do! Amazingly, however, few of your competitors will do so. That’s…

• Words With Baggage

  Steve Woodruff

  15 May 2012 | 5:11 am

  While facilitating a workshop on vendor/project management with a client yesterday, I felt compelled to emphasize that one of the keys to communication between two parties (say, client project manager –> vendor project manager) is realizing that words carry baggage. And I do not speak of “baggage” here pejoratively, as we often do, but simply descriptively. There is the dictionary definition of a word or phrase. Then, there is the meaning and significance embedded in our minds, which is attached to an (accurate or not) personal definition, past experiences, images,…

• LeadershipChat: Transitions

  Steve Woodruff

  14 May 2012 | 3:12 am

  Markets change. Companies change. Circumstances change. And leaders transition in and out of their roles. How is this handled? What are the upsides, the downsides, and the pitfalls of leadership transitions? That will be our topic of discussion for LeadershipChat this week. In and of themselves, transitions are neither inherently good nor evil. They’re simply a fact of life. The reasons for them, and the way they are handled, make the difference between a positive and negative experience. Sudden transitions due to scandal or sub-par performance can rock the boat temporarily, but may…

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  Mike's Lifestream

• The World’s Best Bartender

  28 May 2012 | 1:39 am

  via youtube.com Alexander Shtifanov from Ukraine has the most incredible bar tricks I’ve ever seen.

• Facebook Addiction: Fact or Fad?

  27 May 2012 | 3:41 pm

• How Pinterest Drives Retail Sales

  27 May 2012 | 3:37 pm

• What do consumers think of social media marketing on mobile?

  27 May 2012 | 3:35 pm

• Who and What is a Facebook Power User?

  27 May 2012 | 3:31 pm

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  WordPress.com News

• Photo Blogging 101, Part 3

  Erica V.

  28 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Beyond developing your photo blog and cultivating devoted followers, how can you take your phlog to the next level? Here’s a few extra resources that can help you along the way. Stay Organized Using categories to divide your photographs by type is a great way to make it easier for visitors to navigate your site, especially as your portfolio of images continues to grow. For example, as you categorize photos as “Travel” or “Black and White,” you can then add those category pages to your site’s navigation bar. If you’re using your photo blog to generate…

• Notifications, Refreshed

  Andy Skelton

  25 May 2012 | 7:43 am

  Stuff happens all the time on WordPress.com. You’re blogging, commenting, liking, and following like never before. Every hour a record is broken and someone’s day is made. We’ve always known about your love affair with stats. We like watching numbers grow, too. And we also like to see the events that the numbers represent. We think of Notifications as a magnifier for Stats: you can zoom in to see exactly who did what and then connect with them. The original Notifications menu first appeared in the WordPress.com toolbar as a small orange button and a stream of activities…

• 7 Food Blogs to Follow This Summer

  Erica

  23 May 2012 | 1:54 pm

  With the official first day of summer right around the corner, now is a great time to start collecting recipes for your favorite warm-weather treats. You’ll find endless inspiration by browsing through topics like recipe, grilling, and summer in the WordPress.com Reader, and discover tons of great ideas by exploring our collection of recommended food blogs. Here are seven mouthwatering recipes from a handful of fantastic blogs that are sure to delight all summer long: The Patterned Plate Mango and Coconut Ice Cream We Call Him Yes! Chef! Grilled Skirt Steak and Artichokes The Faux…

• Photo Blogging 101, Part 2

  Erica V.

  21 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Now that you’ve been snapping away, you’ll want to build your photographic following. WordPress.com has an excellent photo blogging community, which you can tap into by following these tips and tricks. Tags, topics, and phloggers, oh my! Tags work to connect your blog to the larger WordPress.com community, so you can see others who are writing, or photographing, the same subjects as you. By tagging your post as “Photography” or “Black and White,” your posts will be included in the respective Topic page so that other viewers can find your site. If you…

• Look Before You Leap

  Jane Wells

  18 May 2012 | 12:31 pm

  Trying out new themes is fun, isn’t it? I think so! The thing about changing my blog’s theme that has traditionally bugged me, though, is the 10-15 minutes right after you click “Activate” when you have to rush through uploading a new custom header, maybe resetting the background, fiddling with a new sidebar configuration, and other transition adjustments so that people won’t see your site in a half-switched state. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to that — I don’t like to leave things half-painted either — but luckily for me we’ve just…

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  Social Media Bird Brain

• A Google Search Change - Will Your Nonprofit Be Considered Relevant?

  24 May 2012 | 2:21 pm

  Google Search With Knowledge Graph Panel Google has subtly changed its search results layout to include something called a Knowledge Graph. When some search results are returned, a panel on the right of the page may display, providing what Google has determined is an appropriate bit of extra information related to the search terms. In my example (left), I searched for Nitrous Oxide and

• Is Your Small Nonprofit Uncomfortable? Good.

  17 May 2012 | 6:34 pm

  Like I expect many of you do, I get the NPQ's email newsletter. In the most recent, I found Leaning Into Discomfort : Social Sector Leadership in the 21st Century. For me, the last two paragraphs really hit me because I often prod when I should pivot. And it's true that a desire to protect can make us play it safer and stay in the comfort zone. There may be times to do that, but those times

• To Mobile or Not To Mobile, Part 3

  9 May 2012 | 10:56 pm

  Image from whatsyourdigitaliq.com We've looked at what's involved with evolving your social communication by making your website either Mobile Friendly or Mobile Optimized in Parts 1 and 2 of this blog post. Now let's see if evolution is imminently required or can be put off for a while. Smartphone Adoption Rates Remember that Google/Ipsos report from Part I? Smartphones have penetrated the

• To Mobile or Not to Mobile? Part 2

  30 Apr 2012 | 7:10 pm

  Image from whatsyourdigitaliq.com So let's pick up where we left off last time, looking at what's involved in either creating a separate mobile website or redesigning your site to be mobile-friendly or optimized for mobile. Separate Mobile Site One of the reasons a separate mobile site can be problematic is that most non-mobile optimized sites have a lot of content. When you have a lot of

• Facebook Profile Image Change

  25 Apr 2012 | 2:22 pm

  Facebook is changing the size of profile pictures from 120x120 to 160x160 pixels. If you incorporate your profile pic as part of your Timeline Cover photo, this can affect your layout: Image via digitalwizdom This guy's head might be placed differently at 160px and look a leeettle strange... If your profile pic and timeline cover aren't integrated, then don't worry about it. That is all.

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  Social Media, Internet Marketing, and Life connected | Josh S Peters

• Personal Update: I’m changing jobs

  Josh S Peters

  25 May 2012 | 2:45 pm

  So this is a rather bitter sweet post. Today is officially my last day with The Search Agency as their Manager, Social Media and Tuesday I start with Fanscape as as Senior Social Media Manager. It’s a good shift and a good change for me professionally, but it’s not without it’s twinge of bitterness in that I will deeply miss some of the people I have worked with at The Search Agency. It’s been a great 15 months at The Search Agency. I made my first friends here in LA at The Search Agency and the business trips have taken me to places in the US that I have never been…

• Twitter Analytics… we’re waiting

  Josh S Peters

  24 May 2012 | 11:54 am

  The Twitter Analytics we were promised... in 2011... and never got. I wrote a post for WebProNews, Dear Twitter Analytics… You’re Late,  that was 1/2 rant and 1/2 informational. The rant is about how long it’s been that Twitter has promised us analytics, but never delivered. It’s truly a gross tale of broken promises and underachievement. The informational 1/2 is a list of sites / methods that you can use to get Twitter analytics data. Which, it’s great that they exist, but you have to be a little suspicious of the accuracy since it’s not coming directly…

• Making time for someday

  Josh S Peters

  11 May 2012 | 11:03 am

  Just schedule it Ever notice how all of those projects you want to get to “someday” just keep piling up? I have a To-Do list on Astrid that has 50+ entries tagged “someday” and until recently that list just kept growing. Last week I started scheduling “someday” time. Just an hour or two chunks at a time, typically during the evening, or on the weekend and to ensure I get them done I remove myself from home-based distractions and go to a coffee shop until the project is done. Of course this only works if your “someday” projects are on the…

• The 60 Minute Social Media Audit

  Josh S Peters

  26 Apr 2012 | 9:54 am

  All it takes is 60 minutes I have a guest post up on Mashable, about running a 60 minute social media audit every quarter to make sure your social is “up-to-snuff”. The audit is in no way complete, nor is it a full business audit where you look at metrics, conversions, goals, KPIs, or ROI. It’s a tactical and maintenance audit that will help you keep on top of all the little things that slide between the cracks and get put off. Head on over to Mashable and take a look at 60 Minutes to a More Efficient Social Business Strategy and if you get a second I’d love to get…

• Generic Experiences Produce Generic Responses

  Josh S Peters

  11 Apr 2012 | 10:57 am

  Generic is forgettable When was the last time you read or looked at something and said “Gee, that’s really average. I think I’ll share it.”. Or how about the last time you saw a product and thought “This is so generic I must have it.”. Unless you’re a hipster, this probably hasn’t happened recently if ever in your life. Even when you’re bargain shopping and buying generic brands you’re not excited about it, it’s just something you do. You go through the motions. Now think about the last time something excited you, amazed you,…

• 

  Corporate Eye

• CEOs Cite Social Media as Number 2 in Hierarchy of Customer Interaction Methods

  Susan Gunelius

  24 May 2012 | 11:15 pm

  CEOs Cite Social Media as Number 2 in Hierarchy of Customer Interaction MethodsTraditional marketing practice for years has placed face-to-face as the number one method of interacting with consumers with websites coming in second place. However, new research by IBM, which surveyed over 1,700 CEOs across 18 industries and 64 countries, reveals that CEOs expect social media to steal the second spot within three to five years. Traditional media will plummet to the bottom of the hierarchy of customer interaction methods during that time. At the heart of social media is transparency, and CEOs are…

• Consumer Engagement is on the Rise for Google+ Company Pages

  Susan Gunelius

  23 May 2012 | 9:10 pm

  Consumer Engagement is on the Rise for Google+ Company PagesGoogle+ introduced Company Pages in November 2011, just a few months after the social network rolled out in full to the public. Emarketer explains that it’s been estimated that fewer than 10% of the U.S. consumer population has a Google+ profile, far less than its social networking competitors like Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped brands from creating Company Pages and trying to engage with consumers via those pages. Given the fact that Google+ is already affecting social search on Google, having a Company Page is an essential…

• A Barrelful of Cookies

  Lucy

  23 May 2012 | 12:44 am

  A Barrelful of Cookies Over the last few days, I visited every FTSE 100 corporate website to see how they are responding to the European Union Cookie Law. Obviously things are changing very fast, since the extension period for compliance ends on 26 May, but I found the following good practices at the time I looked… I like 1 website (BT) explicitly asks for consent via a pop-up from the footer bar. BT has received a lot of coverage for their solution to the Cookie Law, and it is worth visiting their site to see how they have implemented it, if you haven’t already. 1 links to their…

• Only 5% Say Yes to Cookies

  Lucy

  22 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  Only 5% Say Yes to CookiesWorried that the new European Union Cookie Law is going to adversely impact your online business? Many people see the new Cookie Law as potentially putting up a barrier to website visitors, or putting them off so that they are less likely to browse. We don’t sell anything directly via our site here at Corporate Eye, so our business would not be put at risk by any ‘cookie barrier’, but we do use cookies—especially to find out which pages and topics are of most interest to our audience—and having to get permission beforehand is going to be a…

• Coca-Cola Takes Content Marketing to a New Level with the Content 2020 Project

  Susan Gunelius

  21 May 2012 | 7:24 pm

  Coca-Cola Takes Content Marketing to a New Level with the Content 2020 ProjectThe Coca-Cola Company is prioritizing content more than ever in its marketing strategy as part of a new mission to move from “creative excellence to content excellence” through its Content 2020 Project in the U.K.  The company defines content as “the creation of stories that are to be expressed through every possible connection.” For the Coca-Cola Company, “each story must have value and significance to people’s lives.” The Coca-Cola Company views content as an opportunity…

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  Vino Party - Il blog sul Vino

• Vitigno Aglianico

  Fabio Mele

  22 May 2012 | 6:10 am

  L’Aglianico è un vitigno particolarmente antico, tanto che nei secoli la sua famiglia si è suddivisa in molte varianti e sottovarianti, contribuendo a creare non poca confusione nelle classificazioni. Già Catone aveva individuato tre varietà distinte, con Plinio diventano cinque e con Columella diventano sei. La domanda che sorge spontanea, quindi, è se veramente l’Aglianico di oggi sia lo stesso che ha reso famosi in antichità i vini della Campania felix. Ciò che è certo è che questo vitigno fu importato da coloni greci provenienti dalla Tessaglia nell’VIII secolo avanti…

• Lacrima di Morro d’Alba Doc

  Fabio Mele

  2 May 2012 | 3:07 pm

  Il Lacrima di Morro d’Alba è un vino dal color rosso rubino istituito Doc nel 1985. Oltre che Morro d’Alba, viene prodotto nei territori comunali di Ostra, Monte San Vito, San Marcello, Senigallia, Belvedere Ostrense. La sua produzione è molto antica e secondo la tradizione giaà nel 1167 fu apprezzato da Federico Barbarossa quando dimorò presso il Castello di Morro d’Alba durante l’assedio di Ancona. Visivamente presenta oltre al rosso anche delle sfumature purpuree e violacee. All’olfatto è gradevole ed intenso, leggermente speziato, possiamo ritrovare elementi fruttati e…

• Dolcetto d’Alba Doc

  Fabio Mele

  2 May 2012 | 3:03 pm

  Il Dolcetto d’Alba è un vino dal colore rosso rubino che è stato istituito Doc nel 1974 ed è prodotto interamente nelle province di Asti e Cuneo ed interamente con uve dell’omonimo vitigno. Viene prodotto anche nella tipologia Doc Superiore con invecchiamento di un anno. La tradizione vuole che sia il vino più bevuto nella zona delle Langhe piemontesi. All’odore si presenta gradevole e distintivo con richiami floreali e di liquirizia, il gusto è notevolmente asciutto e tendente all’amarognolo grazie ad un retrogusto di mandorla amara, molto armonico. Assieme ad altri prodotti…

• Vitigno Lacrima

  Fabio Mele

  2 May 2012 | 2:57 pm

  Il vitigno Lacrima viene coltivato attualmente soprattutto in provincia di Ancona, più precisamente nelle campagne attorno a Morro d’Alba. In passato sembra che questo vitigno fosse diffuso anche nel resto delle Marche, in Campania, Umbria e Puglia. Nei secoli la sua presenza è regredita alla zona di Morro d’Alba. Per questo motivo ha anche rischiato l’estinzione negli scorsi decenni, fino a quando negli Anni Ottanta è stato tutelato con moderne coltivazioni e con la denominazione d’origine.  È conosciuto anche con il nome di Lacrima Nera o di Lacrima di Morro d’Alba. Piccole…

• Vitigno Dolcetto

  Fabio Mele

  2 May 2012 | 2:55 pm

  La coltivazione del vitigno Dolcetto risale alla fine del Cinquecento secondo testimonianze certe. Le stesse testimonianze rimandano alla zona di coltivazione del basso Piemonte (Monferrato e Liguria), per diffondersi in seguito nell’Oltrepò Pavese, nell’Alessandrino e nel Cuneese. Nella zona di Tortona è necessario non confondere il nome “Nebbiolo” che viene dato ai vitigni locali, trattandosi in realtà sempre di Dolcetto. All’inizio del Novecento era tra i vitigni più coltivati delle zone settentrionali d’Italia, fu poi notevolmente ridotto a causa della fillossera. Dal…

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  Marketing Conversation

• The Unique Marketing Qualities of Social Media

  speters

  10 May 2012 | 4:38 pm

  The controversial though common aphorism that “corporations are people” applies well to the social media landscape, where entrepreneurial individuals are branding themselves just as readily as a transnational company. Social media is at its heart a communal arrangement where online entities are judged more for their transparency than they are their content. This bodes well [...] The controversial though common aphorism that “corporations are people” applies well to the social media landscape, where entrepreneurial individuals are branding themselves just as readily as a transnational…

• Mastering The Two-Way Nature Of Social Media Marketing

  speters

  30 Apr 2012 | 6:47 pm

  When describing the difference between social media marketing and traditional techniques, experts will often focus on the interactive nature that the former offers. With social media, consumers can promote a brand by discussing it and by posting on a product page. Businesses and consumers can communicate back and forth as peers, even within the confines [...] When describing the difference between social media marketing and traditional techniques, experts will often focus on the interactive nature that the former offers. With social media, consumers can promote a brand by discussing it and by…

• The U.S. Census: Then & Now

  speters

  11 Apr 2012 | 3:19 pm

  Via: Home Insurance Guide Via: Home Insurance Guide

• How to use Google+ for business extended video tutorial

  Chris Abraham

  9 Apr 2012 | 8:40 am

  I really felt like I needed to rush it through my recent free 30-minute How to Use Google+ for Business webinar, and that made me sad. There is so much ground to cover. So I sat down and used my trusty copy of Camtasia to record just about everything I know in this 80 minutes [...] I really felt like I needed to rush it through my recent free 30-minute How to Use Google+ for Business webinar, and that made me sad. There is so much ground to cover. So I sat down and used my trusty copy of Camtasia to record just about everything I know in this 80 minutes of (obviously unscripted) tutorial on…

• Forget the Bear, Outrun Your Competition

  Chris Abraham

  6 Apr 2012 | 7:00 am

  The best thing about social media marketing is that you don’t have to be the most popular, have the most followers, or be the most sophisticated, you just have to do a better job than all your direct competitors. You don’t have to be the fastest, the biggest, or the strongest in order to win [...] Image via Wikipedia The best thing about social media marketing is that you don’t have to be the most popular, have the most followers, or be the most sophisticated, you just have to do a better job than all your direct competitors. You don’t have to be the fastest, the…

• 

  Chris Abraham

• In memoriam

  Chris Abraham

  28 May 2012 | 10:06 am

• In memoriam

  Chris Abraham

  28 May 2012 | 10:06 am

• Après-Church

  Chris Abraham

  27 May 2012 | 11:35 am

  Taken at Bob & Edith’s Diner

• Birthday of the Church

  Chris Abraham

  27 May 2012 | 10:59 am

  Taken at Trinity Episcopal Church

• 2 hours too many at the Cantina

  Chris Abraham

  26 May 2012 | 10:50 pm

  Taken at Cantina Marina

• 

  Riffs, Tiffs and What Ifs

• What’s Your Difference?

  Steve Kayser

  24 May 2012 | 6:48 am

  Through the trials and travails of life we rarely stop to think of what we are doing or have done that makes a difference. A real difference. Something that makes the world a little bit better in any way – no matter how small.

• How to Create and Finish Anything … Work the Do

  Steve Kayser

  22 May 2012 | 9:59 am

  Do the Work is a shut up and do-it guide. It treads some of the same turf as the "War of Art." It fights the intractable, implacable, insidious foe of mankind –Resistance. But it’s also an indispensable guide to winning at business or life.

• Who Influenced You? Interview with Bestselling Author Dr. Ken Blanchard

  Steve Kayser

  21 May 2012 | 4:55 pm

  You've sold 20 million copies of your books and "The One Minute Manager" is revered in business circles and still being used as a guide almost 30 years after publication. I think it's because of your storytelling style. The parable with deep knowledge embedded in it. Who influenced you?

• Great Leaders GROW – Interview with Bestselling Author Dr. Ken Blanchard

  Steve Kayser

  10 May 2012 | 8:12 am

  Successful leaders don’t rest on their laurels. Leadership has to be a living process, not a title, not a business card. "The path to increased influence, impact, and leadership effectiveness is paved with personal growth. Our capacity to grow determines our capacity to lead. It’s really that simple.

• The Third Hand: Nothing is Ever as It Seems

  Steve Kayser

  3 Apr 2012 | 11:58 am

  The old man was singled out by the crowd at a family get together. Dressed in bib overalls, worn T-shirt and a past prime denim cap. He was a hard-working farmer. It showed. The crowd urged him on... “Come on old man, play! Bring out the third hand.”

• 

  Uber.la - tech reviews, opinion and wit

• Improving the Signal-to-Noise Ratio in Life and Social Media

  jmacofearth

  27 May 2012 | 1:53 pm

  I guess in some ways my signal has also been cleaned by this person's clarification today. I will no longer offer the walks or connections that we used to share. It simply is too painful for them to have me in their lives.

• Assimilation: The Google Takeover! How Many Ways Do You Google?

  jmacofearth

  25 May 2012 | 5:03 am

  Oh webby world what are we weaving? When Google/Amazon/Experian merge into one company will SKYNET have been created? Or is Google working to become self-aware all by itself, with the help of each and every one of us users? I am sorry... I have already been assimilated.

• A Water Landing for Facebook's IPO: What Do We Have to Lose?

  jmacofearth

  24 May 2012 | 11:57 am

  A swift and agressive Facebook departure might not signal the end of the dot com bubble v 2.o, but the beginning of real growth and real potential to do it better. And you know the tech teams at Google+ and Pinterest are watching the current stock crisis and legal morass with hungry eyes.

• Positive Forces: Delayed, Deflected, Divorced, Distracted, But Not Deterred

  jmacofearth

  24 May 2012 | 4:35 am

  Bottom Line: Positive Forces have Positive Momentum. And I'm all about the "MO!"

• Hyper-Connected Issues: "How Are We Connected Again?"

  jmacofearth

  22 May 2012 | 4:58 am

  Where do you connect? How do you sort through all the possibilities to recognize a face and put it with a name? The augmented reality of the web and the web-enabled phone have made the game much more challenging and complex.

• 

  Digital Marketing Blog // Digital Operative

• Fixed Navigation in Web Design and 10 Innovative Uses From Around the Internet

  evan

  23 May 2012 | 2:53 pm

  There is a relatively new practice that is starting to appear on the web more often each day. This user experience/user interface trend is referred to as a “fixed” or “sticky” navigation although I like the term “weightless” for its floating characteristics. This label is given to any top navigation (or sometimes side navigation) that stays at the top of your web browser at all times, even while scrolling down the page. Now I say trend only because it is still a new practice that is being used on a frequent basis, sometimes just for the novelty. People often associate trends with…

• Street Art Appreciation

  BJ

  10 May 2012 | 12:49 am

  As a company whose culture thrives on creativity, no matter if that is born of technology, marketing, design or pure business mind; we here at DO love to look outside of our walls for true inspiration. On this evening, while working on an international marketing program for a client, I wandered the streets of urban culture and artists. I was drawn into a labyrinth of laborious art across the globe. And I wanted to share it with everyone. Part of what makes our digital agency so unique is our ability to derive inspiration from everywhere at anytime. It’s even a core interview question…

• Digital Operative Featured on Magento eCommerce Blog

  adamlu

  17 Apr 2012 | 10:33 am

  When magicians Dan and Dave needed their eCommerce site built they had an extra trick up their sleeve – Digital Operative. These two magicians needed an upgrade from their original eCommerce platform and Digital Operative – a Magento Solution Partner was happy to comply. Here at Digital Operative we put our creative, design, marketing, and development minds together and put together a site we are really proud of. It combines a clean layout with unparalleled shopping functionality. Features include: Streaming video product type, A unique user interface for product organization and…

• Magento Go SEO checklist

  adamlu

  23 Feb 2012 | 10:55 am

  This is the Magento GO checklist from the presentation “What You Should Know about SEO“  from February 22, 2012 by BJ Cook and Adam Lundquist. This checklist will help you with the basics of SEO and get your Magento Go store off the ground. You can download our 2-page SEO checklist here:  Digital Operative’s SEO checklist for Magento Go

• 3 ways Pinterest can help market your business!

  adamlu

  17 Feb 2012 | 5:06 pm

  Pinterest is the social network darling of the moment, and your business should be making money from it. You may not have heard of Pinterest, but your consumers have. Pinterest is large (3.3 million users) and it captures users attention (average site time 72 minutes). I will briefly describe what Pinterest is, what makes it unique, and how you can use it to drive traffic to your website. What is Pinterest? Pinterest is basically a virtual bulletin board. It is a way to share interesting images online. A user will have many different boards, each themed around a different subject. When a user…

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  the i.d.e.a. brand

• 40 Reasons to Celebrate Mike’s 40th

  Ryan B.

  25 May 2012 | 12:42 pm

  I’ve had the luxury of riding the same roller coaster ride for the past 8 years with the ever-so-talented Mike Fennessy. First, at Fishtank and now here at i.d.e.a. Below are 40 delightful reasons to tip-the-cap (and a drink) to ‘Iron Mike’ as he celebrates turning 40 this weekend: 40. Bday Trip to Mandarin House. There may only be a handful of chopstick-worthy San Diego Chinese restaurants that can compete. Mandarin House is one of them. Thanks to Mike’s bday, we’re on our way. 39. He quit smoking. I don’t even think gum ...

• LinkedIn for You and Your Business

  Robin

  25 May 2012 | 9:51 am

  If you haven’t realized the business potential of LinkedIn yet, you are behind the times, friend. It is the sleeping giant of social media, though big moves like purchasing SlideShare for $119 million are steps to change that. Job hunters and hiring managers constantly search the social site to build out networks, beef up personal and company profiles, and ultimately make informed business decisions. Echoing earlier Great Matters reports about inbound marketing on the rise, here are a few i.d.e.a.s about how ...

• Get Your Digital On at Interactive Day San Diego 2012

  Jon

  24 May 2012 | 11:45 am

  Staying ahead of the curve. On top of your game. One step ahead. In front of the ball.  Outside the box. Lame analogies aside, our industry needs continual professional development in order to properly lead our brand partners forward. Which is why many of our i.d.e.a. team members will be at Interactive Day San Diego, sponsored by San Diego AdClub on June 15.  AdClub has been growing this fantastic event for several years now, and the lineup gets better each time.  ...

• Inbound Smart-keting

  Alex Tuthill

  22 May 2012 | 10:58 am

  Inbound Marketing is on the rise, and latest statistics from a HubSpot webinar prove that these marketing channels are providing both value and results for many companies who do it right. Indra’s latest post featured an Inbound Marketing pro who has mastered the content that belongs in Inbound Marketing. But let’s take a step back and evaluate what Inbound Marketing includes, why it is slowly taking over marketing budgets, and why it is such an important complement to traditional outbound channels. ...

• Creatives: Treat Yourself Like a Client

  Fennessy

  17 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  For any creative company there comes a time when we are doing work for ourselves. Be it branding, advertising or the ever changing digital landscape. But one thing that never seems to change, is the excitement of working on creative for ourselves. Before long, that feeling of excitement gives way to frustration, as inevitably one of two things tend to happen – our own projects get put on a back burner for paying client work or we become so overly ...

• 

  Technology & Marketing Law Blog

• First Circuit Rejects Data Insecurity Claims on the Basis of Article III Standing--Katz v Pershing

  25 May 2012 | 10:47 am

  [Post by Venkat Balasubramani] Katz v. Pershing, 11-1983 (1st Cir.; Feb. 28, 2012) [This is an old catch up post...

• LLC Members in Online Store Venture Bound by Partnership Fiduciary Duties -- Health and Body Store v. Justbrand Limited

  24 May 2012 | 4:41 pm

  [Post by Venkat Balasubramani] Health and Body Store, LLC v. Justbrand Limited, 11-4132 (3d Cir.; May 11, 2012) *Sigh.* Another...

• What Are Appropriate Compensatory Damages for 3 Fake Competitor Reviews? The Surprising Answer--Fireworks Restoration v. Hosto

  24 May 2012 | 11:43 am

  By Eric Goldman The Fireworks Restoration Company v. Hosto, ED97181 (Mo. App. Ct. May 9, 2012) Hosto and Mitchell formed...

• Facebook Post and Blog Entry About Judicial Endorsement Held to be Defamatory -- Lewis v. Rapp

  22 May 2012 | 10:33 am

  [Post by Venkat Balasubramani] Lewis v. Rapp, COA11-1188 (N.C. Ct. App.; May 1, 2012) Lewis was a senior judge in...

• Doctors' Online Reputation Management and Patient Reviews (Talk Notes from ASAPS Annual Meeting)

  21 May 2012 | 10:38 am

  By Eric Goldman I recently spoke at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) in...

• 

  zioneyemedia.com

• Twitter Updates for 2012-05-28

  David

  28 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  Wallpaper That Blocks Wi-Fi http://t.co/NFCE8h2j # http://t.co/hTZgTq0I and the Value of Online Word of Mouth http://t.co/Nqaa4wK7 # Tension rod on the underside of a table with a paper roll for coloring. awesome idea! http://t.co/il2c3hig # BATMAN ICE TRAY!! omg omg omg!! http://t.co/xbdhehqs # fun fun fun! http://t.co/kvo7lujC #

• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-27

  David

  27 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  Sucks being sick EVERY SPRING AND FALL in #nashville hate it!! # Are you on Pinterest? Follow my pins at http://t.co/X5T0rhxa! # Hey #Seattle you going to take this from those rednecks from #OklahomaCity http://t.co/t86XFi5r not cool # TYVM RT @motionaudio7: Cheers/Happy Monday to our friends! @zioneyemedia @KatieGlantz @daftks @eyeplaydesign @ubergio @pixelBender67… # RT @designnewz: 25 Examples Of Beautiful Fruit Logos – http://t.co/8MKtVc2Z ^ZM # @JasonFalls Congratulations on your new venture!!! # RT @p3rsonalshopp3r: RT @JasonFalls: Great tips on improving your website's…

• Twitter Updates for 2012-05-27

  David

  27 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  Possible hair cuts http://t.co/HdNAW85a # BMW-i8-concept-4 http://t.co/ok6XJko3 # When you see this in your garage, you know you truly made it. http://t.co/pjEfp7zE # Sunset GT 40 http://t.co/SGx8ZYjn # NISSAN GT-R SpecV rear http://t.co/deQ422Ay # 2012 Acura TSX Special Edition in Milano Red http://t.co/dvP3emYy # chalk board wall. #chalk http://t.co/BedkL5p1 # movies movies movies meghannorias http://t.co/bkEepHxE # highlights http://t.co/0KPDhOJ6 # @strong sexy abs health-beauty http://t.co/77G5ewIh # Xabi in action http://t.co/Nsaiqhxw # How to Choose the Right Running Shoes for You…

• Twitter Updates for 2012-05-26

  David

  26 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  A Beginner's Guide to #RUBY http://t.co/kQvUbs6J via @smashingmag # Pricing Your Work Right as a Designer http://t.co/IkBuow0V # How to Use the New Timeline Panel in Photoshop CS6 via @envatopsd http://t.co/ALuh4DGE #photoshopcs6 #tutorials # Online Jobs are on the Rise via @freelancesw http://t.co/D8vSw1Ib # WordPress Meet Responsive Design #responsivedesign #wordpress http://t.co/Tfcmjt1o # FREE Download Stylish Church WordPress Theme via @vandelaydesign http://t.co/StGKmHo4 # RT @seotweetz: Last hour's #SEO leaders: @mrahmadawais @ClaraLlopart @zioneyemedia @SEOvaorg @leonstreete…

• Twitter Updates for 2012-05-25

  David

  25 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  @whiterose_is yeah I hear that :( in reply to WhiteRose_is # RT @jeremiahbonds: I didn't make my way up to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian. Haha! yeah # RT @speckyboy: 25 Completely Free Fonts Perfect for @fontface http://t.co/QtB41ly0 # Whitespark's Local Citation Finder Review via @seobook #seo http://t.co/d0knAHf7 #

• 

  FreshNetworks Blog

• Facebook ads – focus on growing and engaging your fan base

  Jon Stokes

  24 May 2012 | 9:17 am

  TweetFacebook has been very much in the spotlight, with a great amount of press attention on the run-up to last week’s IPO and the company’s recent stock performance. One big headline was the announcement that General Motors was pulling its $10million Facebook ads account. This has clearly rocked confidence in the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook, but may not come as a surprise to many, as a social media setting is not necessarily the prime location for people seeking product information on a car. It is important to note that while GM may be pulling its advertising, it will…

• The science of social media ROI

  Matt Rhodes

  15 May 2012 | 9:05 am

  TweetLast week I presented at a webinar as part of a series looking at the science of social, focusing on social media ROI and demystifying the confusion that surround it. The problem with social media ROI is that it is so easy to measure so many things that we become overwhelmed by measures. We think that everything is important and that everything is a measure of ROI. It isn’t. And it isn’t. Followers and Likes do not make ROI; moreover they stop us from thinking about the bigger business benefit of social. We need to measure different things for different reasons, not just…

• Twinteresting: why can’t we curate tweets?

  Hamid Sirhan

  15 May 2012 | 3:24 am

  Tweet It is no secret that Pinterest is a great way to share discoverable content. The “waterfall stream” format can really help rapid skimming of visual content. Take, for example, the ‘Pinterest for Facebook’,  Friendsheet, or Pinstagram, the Pinterest-style Instagram feed. People are finding ways to curate images from a variety of sources, but what about the ability to do this with items that are primarily textual, or links? Using favourites as a stopgap I use Twitter prolifically, but a lot of my usage focuses on finding new information – blog posts and news…

• Three simple ways B2B marketers can get value from LinkedIn

  Matt Rhodes

  10 May 2012 | 8:34 am

  TweetWhen thinking about social media and how to use it for your brand, our initial reaction is often to think about the channels we can use and the conversations we can have. But using social media does not necessarily mean having a channel or joining a conversation. There can often be as much value (and sometimes even more) from listening to what others are saying. For B2B brands LinkedIn is a great example of where social media can be used as much to listen and learn as to talk and engage. From ambassadors, to market information and even competitor research, here are three ways that…

• WalmartLabs – taking Big Data into retail

  Jon Stokes

  9 May 2012 | 8:16 am

  Tweet Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, acquired social media firm Kosmix just over a year ago, creating @WalmartLabs, with the intention to use this specialist R&D unit to define the future of commerce by merging social, mobile and retail. So far WalmartLabs has released two interesting developments using social: • ShopyCat – the gift recommendation engine This Facebook application uses your Facebook profile to suggest suitable products for you, based on the interests and hobbies of your friends. An interesting aspect of this approach is that the app will offer links…

• 

  LJ Jones's Blog

• When I was a kid......

  LJ Jones

  3 May 2012 | 5:49 pm

  When I was a kid........ vital Nintendo knowledge, like how to beat a boss or a cool cheat code, was passed from one kid to another at school. You couldn't look it up on the internet when you got stuck. You just figured it out and it worked pretty well. Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Select Start..... you kept a tape in your "BOOM Box", ready to hit record when your favorite song came on the radio so that you could savor that song over and over again. Sometimes you waited for days just so you could get the entire song..... you had to rewind and fast forward things. Cassette tapes.

• Scientist Identify Geek Gene

  LJ Jones

  26 Apr 2012 | 1:49 pm

  Geek GeneScientists have finally identified the geek gene. That all important part of our DNA that makes us love things like Star Wars, Comic Books, Sci-Fi and Video Games. It explains why full grown men are willing to dress up in red tights and pretend they have Super Speed.Scientist theorize that this gene is also responsible for most social awkwardness and also inhibits men and the occasional woman from talking to the opposite sex.Geek ChromosomeOften large chains of the geek gene are woven together to form an actual geek chromosome, creating super geeks. Geeks so geeky, they rarely see…

• Math With Friends

  LJ Jones

  27 Feb 2012 | 12:42 pm

  I have never been very good with word based games like Scrabble, so I came up with a game that is a little more my speed and one I can beat my wife at.  I call it Math With Friends.  It's more fun than a spelling bee.  It's based on word games like Scrabble but way more fun because it uses math.

• Brick Website

  LJ Jones

  23 Feb 2012 | 2:29 pm

  I have had this blog for a long time, but haven't had anything on www.ljjones.com as an actual site. So I decided to build something. Its inspired by LEGOs and the idea that you can build or create anything you want out of life. I made the whole thing out of bricks. If you like LEGOs then check out my site.I have no affiliation with LEGO. I do however, think they are a great toy for both kids and adults.

• Agencies: How to land new business.

  LJ Jones

  9 Feb 2012 | 12:54 pm

  As a marketing manager, I am the gate keeper. The person that holds the keys to the budget and the person who decides what campaigns we run. As the gate keeper, everyone wants to talk to me. I'm a popular guy. (But only because I have money).So here's a little bit of advice when you pitch me a campaign. Help me grow my business. Don't help me grow yours.They don't say it out loud, but when a person is pitching me, in the back of their mind I can hear them thinking: "He's got money. If we could just get him to sign this one year contract, it will help grow our business."Before they pitch me,…

• 

  shesgotclients.com

• Want to Know How to Connect with Marketers Who Want to Promote You?

  Christine

  22 May 2012 | 1:03 pm

  Come into my living room for a bit. I’m with five of my mastermind partners, and we’re talking about marketing techniques that are working for us now. Pull up a chair. I want to introduce you to everyone. I’d like to share your products and website with my friends, and tell them about the value you bring to your audience. We’d love to have you on our next telesummit. Interview one of us for your next teleseminar? Sure. We’d love to work with you. Sound like a dream? Well, it’s not. You can create the same kind of scenario for yourself, a tribe of…

• How to Kick Your “Compare and Despair” Habit

  Christine

  17 May 2012 | 1:02 pm

  This month’s “Third Thursday” video tip is all about what I call “compare and despair” syndrome. In the age of Facebook and an online world where we have 24-7 access to everyone else’s “highlight reel,” it’s really easy to compare ourselves to other people–and then judge ourselves about where we are based on what we see that they’re doing. Unfortunately, we more often compare ourselves not with those less fortunate (and feel grateful for what we have), but with those we perceive as having or being more. The result? Envy, and…

• Have These Questions About Masterminding With Me?

  Christine

  16 May 2012 | 7:19 am

  I’ve been reflecting on the incredible applications that have been coming in for my brand new IMPACT Mastermind. In fact it’s exciting to see how global this group is that’s forming–with members already joining from South Africa and France! However, many of you are asking me how to know for sure whether it’s time for YOU to step up into a Mastermind. So today I want to address some FAQs that have been coming in to us here about the IMPACT Mastermind: Q. How large is this Mastermind group going to be? A. It was important to us to keep this group small enough where…

• Mastermind With Me For An Entire Year…

  Christine

  9 May 2012 | 9:57 am

  Yesterday was my husband Sean’s birthday and we had a nice quiet dinner at home. I’m not the fanciest of cooks, but I made scallops and asparagus for him. I mention it because every time his May birthday rolls around, I realize how close we are to another year being nearly half over. And I wonder…how is 2012 going for you in your business? If you’ve got a nagging feeling that you’re not quite where you’d hope to be at this point in the year, I think you’ll want to watch a brief new video I made for you. It’s only 4 minutes, and in it I share a quick…

• A 3-Step Process to Finding Public Speaking Gigs to Build Your Business

  Christine

  2 May 2012 | 11:19 am

  While I’m known for coaching entrepreneurs on how to grow a business online, I’m also fond of telling my clients and students to get out from behind the computer once in a while too! Yes, technology can be fantastic, but it’s vitally important to connect with people face to face as well. Public speaking is a powerful way to accomplish this, and is something I did a good amount of early on in my business especially. Because of its many benefits, I continue to seek out these opportunities today, and one of the biggest questions I receive around this is about HOW to find these speaking…

• 

  Zazoo

• A Pin-teresting concept

  ray

  1 May 2012 | 4:48 am

  So you think you’ve finished your studies? You may have graduated years ago, but let me tell you, in today’s economy, school is never out. If you don’t have it already, you need to develop a philosophy of life-long learning. Things are changing much too fast to rely simply on what you learned at uni or [...]

• Digital natives vs. digital immigrants

  ray

  25 Apr 2012 | 5:06 pm

  By Ray Welling In the competition between digital natives – Gen Y, which has grown up with online technology and digital immigrants – those of us who can remember typewriters and phones with cords attached – for primacy online, it seems that the digital natives have gained the upper hand. Think Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, and a billion [...]

• On joining the Creative Economy

  ray

  22 Mar 2012 | 3:08 am

  Ray has started a new gig, writing a column/blog for Smarter Business Ideas, a magazine and website for small businesses who use Telstra services. Here’s an excerpt from his first post: With both his kids following their father down the difficult path of a ‘creative’, Ray Welling offers the next generation some sound business advice that they [...]

• The Jim Morrison guide to relevance through social marketing

  ray

  19 Sep 2011 | 3:28 pm

  From Ray’s NETT blog: What are the most important factors to consider when you’re communicating ideas to people? How do you get your message across successfully? From my days as a journalist writing for newspapers and magazines through to my current work presenting digital marketing messages or lecturing to students, a few common themes have emerged in terms [...]

• The more things change…

  ray

  22 Aug 2011 | 5:20 am

  From Ray’s NETT blog: Despite working with new technology every day (or maybe because of it!), I like to collect old wares, and my idea of a good weekend includes some time spent trawling through antique and vintage shops. A recent acquisition was a set of books on ‘modern business’ produced by the Alexander Hamilton Institute back in [...]

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  Online Marketing Blog

• 5 of the Most Important Content & Social Media Tips For A Successful Business Blog

  Lee Odden

  28 May 2012 | 7:15 am

  The tendency for corporate marketers and their agencies to chase shiny social objects seems to be manifesting as conflicting trends in the usefulness of social media for business. Companies that execute their social media marketing tactics poorly often conclude the channel doesn’t work. A good example is the “corporate blogging is dying” story which contrasts with a study that shows blogging is the second most effective B2B lead generation tactic. I’ve always said that tools are only as good as the skills of the people using them and the moving target of social savvy…

• Online Marketing News: Local Optimization Opportunity, Facebook Advertising Issues, Google Knowledge Graph Takes Over

  Ashley Zeckman

  25 May 2012 | 4:21 am

  The Local Web – The Single Largest Opportunity For National Brands This infographic by Balihoo shares the significance of marketing locally to your potential customers.  According to this infographic: 73% of online search activity is related to local content 82% of local Internet searches follow-up offline 23.6%  the percentage that digital media is expected to represent of advertising by 2015 Featured Team Member Story Sara Duane-Gladden – Is Facebook Advertising the Problem?  Or Are Brands Expectations the Culprit? GM made waves last week when it pulled $10 million in annual…

• Marketo Summit Session: Engaging with Cross Channel Marketing

  Brian Larson

  24 May 2012 | 1:01 pm

  [Note from Brian: Please note that Marketo is a client of TopRank Online Marketing] When was the last time you heard of a really successful email campaign? Or TV ad campaign? Or a campaign on any channel for that matter? It’s likely been awhile. The reason that isolated, channel-specific campaigns are rarely discussed these days is simple: they rarely work. That by no means is saying that email, or TV, or social, can’t be incredibly effective platforms to market your messages. Cross channel (see multiple channel) marketing is effective because each of these platforms can have an…

• Marketo Summit Session: Destroying the 7 Myths of B2B Social Media by Jay Baer

  Brian Larson

  24 May 2012 | 4:16 am

  Jay Baer Keynotes Wednesday Lunch Session at 2012 Marketo Summit There has long been a widely held (and incorrect) belief that social media is a B2C sandbox. ’Stay out B2B marketers, this social thing has nothing to do with you.’ Of course, there have been countless studies that have documented B2B marketers successes in driving results in social. With the notion that social is only for B2C debunked, in its place now are new myths. Each chalked-full of misinformation and hyperbole regarding B2B’s ability to implement, engage and monitor social. Jay Baer, President of…

• Infographic Feeding Frenzy: 4 Tips for Wading the Waters of Data Visualization

  Ashley Zeckman

  23 May 2012 | 7:52 am

  Note from Ashley: Please welcome this guest post from Shawna Kenyon, an Associate Account Manager with TopRank Online Marketing. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, if that’s true then how many is an Infographic worth? Infographics are all the rage right now, and it’s not surprising B2B marketers are paying attention. When people talk about infographics we often hear the phrase ‘data visualization’. That’s because we have the means to transform information that could otherwise be deemed bland or boring, into something creative and compelling. There is a method to the…

• 

  Content Matters

• Unable to Game LinkedIn, Chris Brogan Calls It Quits

  Barry Graubart

  21 May 2012 | 8:23 am

  Interesting post from social media guru Chris Brogan today nothing that he’s quit LinkedIn. According to Brogan, the reason that he quit is that LinkedIn has failed to fix a perceived bug he reported a month ago that he “can’t seem to add people back when they request he connect”. That sounded odd to me as I connect with people on LinkedIn all the time and have never had a problem. It was then that I saw in his post that he had 16,097 LinkedIn connections. Now, I have no insight into the workings of LinkedIn and the exact reason he’s been unable to Link to others, but something…

• News Flash: Crappy Replica Apps Won't Save Publishing

  Barry Graubart

  15 May 2012 | 6:18 am

  My Twitter stream was all abuzz yesterday with tweets suggesting that the App Economy was over. I must have missed that official announcement, so I clicked through to read a bit more. The root of all the excitement, it turns out, was a post by Jason Pontin, Publisher of MIT Technology Review entitled Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps. The article shares MIT’s experiences in developing, launching and promoting an app for the respected Technology Review magazine.  And the author points to the MIT experience as evidence that the mobile web, not native apps, are the compelling path forward for…

• Developing Your Mobile Strategy in a Multi-platform World

  Barry Graubart

  14 May 2012 | 12:44 pm

  At the bootcamp session at last week's Content VIA Platforms conference, I gave a presentation on developing a mobile strategy in a multi-platform world. It was a fun discussion, spotlighting why HTML5 vs. native app doesn't have to be a religious war, among other topics. I've posted the slides here. Developing your mobile strategy siia via bootcamp - barry graubart At the bootcamp, we also discussed the recent Jason Pontin post, Why Publishers Don't Like Apps and my response, News Flash: Crappy Replica Apps Won't Save Publishing. 

• I Moved

  Barry Graubart

  17 Apr 2012 | 1:25 pm

  I'm pleased to announce that I've recently joined Reis, Inc. as Vice President of Marketing for ReisReports.com. Reis is the leading provider of commercial real estate information and analytics to lenders and investors. For more than 30 years, Reis has been the authoritative source for rent, vacancy, absorption and new construction data. In my new role I'll be leading the growth of ReisReports.com, a platform aimed at bringing Reis content to new audiences. For more information visit ReisReports or drop me a note.

• Is Apple a Net Job Creator or Destroyer?

  Barry Graubart

  2 Mar 2012 | 1:29 pm

  Apple's been taking heat lately about their manufacturing locations and treatment of workers at FoxConn and elsewhere. Today, the company struck back, releasing a study showing that the Company and its ecosystem have been responsible for the creation of 514,000 U.S. jobs. About 10% of those jobs are with Apple itself (47,000 of their 70,000 employees are in the U.S.), the rest include jobs by companies in their supply chain (e.g. Corning, creator of iPad and iPhone screens) as well as those of the Fedex workers who deliver their products. The company also made a point of noting that their 21…

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  FUEL LINES

• Ad agency new business resume tips that earn return phone calls

  Michael Gass

  26 May 2012 | 7:24 am

  Four resume tips for agency new business development positions that get noticed. By Steve Congdon From time to time you will find yourself looking for an ad agency new business development job. Either you’re at an agency and unhappy. Or, you’re on the streets, trying to find your next position. From time to time I get a retained recruiting assignment from a firm. Agencies appreciate this as they now have a practiced hand that helps them find effective new business leaders. Of course, before starting Thunderclap, I’ve also been on the other side: seeking a new business gig. So, when you…

• Ad Agencies: Independence does not mean having to go it alone

  Michael Gass

  15 May 2012 | 1:56 pm

  Ad Agency networks offer many benefits for small to midsize independent advertising agencies.  This is a guest post written by my friend,  Peter Gerritsen, president of Transworld Advertising Agency Network better known as TAAN, the oldest and among the largest ad agency networks in the world, with 52 member agencies operating in 32 different countries. Peter Gerritsen, president of TAAN Not a single person in this business can truly say they do it all by themselves.  We all work with many different resources, vendors, staff, clients, media, consultants, friends, mentors,…

• Why ad agencies should learn about Springpad

  Michael Gass

  14 May 2012 | 7:54 am

  Springpad re-imagines how sharing and discovery should work. If you are a regular reader of Fuel Lines, you know that I am a big fan of Edward Boches, Chief Innovation Officer (formerly Chief Creative Officer and Chief Social Media Officer) at Mullen. Edward was among the few creatives to understand the importance of social media as an active practitioner. He has led his agency by example. I’m honored to have Edward share a new social media platform through this guest post that will help your agency and your clients. Over the last five plus years we’ve seen the emergence of…

• AMC’s The Pitch: Chemistry with the TV audience is different than with the potential client

  Michael Gass

  13 May 2012 | 4:52 am

  Prospective clients are looking for chemistry and likability in their ad agency partners and it doesn’t have to be a crap shoot.  BooneOakley, a small 20 person ad agency in Charlotte, NC, showcased its unusual chemistry on “The Pitch” before a nationally televised audience. They were competing against a New York agency, Conversation, to be selected to develop an ad campaign for the popchips company. BooneOakley didn’t win the client, but evidently they won over the television audience. According to the initial results of AMC’s The Pitch Poll – “Who…

• Nobody Reads Ad Agency Blogs

  Michael Gass

  8 May 2012 | 9:32 pm

  Why most agencies may be ready to ditch their blog and why they shouldn’t.  Jack Marshall, a staff writer for Digiday wrote an article that is creating lots of buzz entitled, “Agencies Ditch Blogs.” He points to a study conducted by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, that reveals that only 37% of Fortune 500 companies now maintain a blog. That is down from 50% that was reported in 2010. Jack makes an assumption that this is  that this is probably true of advertising agencies: “It seems there’s a similar trend among agencies. Though many sporadically…

• 

  Jon Dale

• 365 Days of Pikes Peak – The Journey

  Jon Dale

  16 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  This is a guest post from Shaun Dagget (aka The Pikes Peak Guy). Shaun is best known for photographing Pikes Peak every single day for a year as a result he’s somewhat a of legend in this part of the country. He launched a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign and has gone on to release a series of companion products to his original coffee table book (which he’s just released in a softcover version). His story is amazing and has huge implications for publishing specifically and business in general. Shaun is a perfect example of the kind of entrepreneur Chris Guillebeau talks…

• Review of The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

  Jon Dale

  8 May 2012 | 11:41 am

  Every once in a while a book comes along that hits you right between the eyes and changes everything. For me this happened when I read Tribes and realized that the way business and marketing works had changed and most people didn’t realize it. My life’s work is a result of the change in thinking I experienced while reading that book. A few weeks ago I was priveleged to receive an advance copy of Chris Guillebaue’s new book, The $100 Startup.  I’m convinced this book is going to do for thousands of people what Tribes did for me.  It’s going to change the way…

• How long should your blog posts be?

  Jon Dale

  25 Apr 2012 | 4:00 am

  I get this question a lot.  My answer is really simple. As long as it needs to be and no longer.

• Sabbaticals, calling and the thought process behind Moolala

  Jon Dale

  22 Sep 2011 | 8:11 am

  Many of you know that I’ve been taking a blogging sabbatical while we launch Moolala. In some ways it’s been amazingly freeing but there are other times I’ve got ideas bouncing around that I’d really like to share. Yesterday I sat down with Kevin Miller for an episode of his Free Agent Underground Podcast.  We talked about figuring out your life calling (one of my favorite subjects) and he got me to share several different stories from my early days in business and a lot about our philosophy in launching Moolala. Most people will just hear the audio version of this…

• Do Not Reply

  Jon Dale

  22 Jun 2011 | 1:11 pm

  There are few things more frustrating than hitting reply and composing an email only to realize that you’re replying to DONOTREPLY@wedontcareaboutyou.com. I think using a DO NOT REPLY address is one of rudest things a company can do.  It’s tantamount to saying “We don’t care if you want to talk to us.” Just my 2 cents…take it or leave it.

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  Kneale Mann

• Questionable Leadership

  Kneale Mann

  28 May 2012 | 3:30 am

  There is a theory that the two sides of a conversation are talking and waiting to talk. Well, we know that’s a rather cynical view, but what if we decided to do the listening for a change and give others the time and space to share their thoughts and ideas? If you’re like me, this isn't always an easy tactic. We get passionate and want to genuinely improve the ideas presented. The two focus words this year for me are listening and patience. They are powerful and empowering to everyone involved. Three Essential Words Chris Westfall reminds us of a significant phrase we can…

• Starve Your Fear

  Kneale Mann

  24 May 2012 | 3:10 am

  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. Steve Jobs Last week, I was talking with a colleague who had been sick for a week and she mentioned the old saying ‘starve a fever, feed a cold’. It made me wonder what would happen if we applied that to our lives by feeding our passions and not giving any table scraps to those fears. Yes, easier said than done but worth a shot. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. Bertrand Russell Some organizations, for all their efforts, become a dysfunctional environment. This…

• The 3 Questions of Clarity

  Kneale Mann

  20 May 2012 | 3:22 am

  One way I help clients is to gain clarity on finding better ways to grow their people, leadership talent and their business. The old cliché that we are far too close to our own stuff to see it with any objectivity is often true. We all know deep down that we are flawed and make mistakes. We know we don’t have it all figured out. And we know there's work to do. But part of finding clarity is discovering the joy in the work rather than the seemingly unattainable finish line. Purpose can often be more important than making quota or hitting numbers. And how long does the satisfaction from a…

• Zuckerbook and the Millionaires

  Kneale Mann

  19 May 2012 | 3:25 am

  Last January the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded The Social Network four Golden Globes for Best Picture, best original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, best direction from the wonderfully talented David Fincher and best screenplay by one of the most gifted writers today, Aaron Sorkin. This week, the founders and venture capitalists surrounding Facebook began to cash in their chips. After hundreds of millions of years of networking socially, there are more billionaires and millionaires this week due to an initial public offering that speculators are saying will value…

• Push Beyond Your Limits

  Kneale Mann

  17 May 2012 | 2:50 am

  There have been moments in your life when you felt you didn’t have the answer. Conversely, there have been times when you allowed yourself to dream, if only for a moment, about what you wanted in your life, your career, your family or your lifestyle. And perhaps you paused. Then went back to what you thought was reality. Caroline Casey was a global management consultant and changed it all to create her not-for-profit organization Kanchi. She discusses leadership, disabilities, elephants and how we must push beyond our limits and accomplish more. Kneale Mann caroline casey | TED

• 

  The Fresh Peel

• How Pinterest Drives Online Sales as the Third Most Popular Social Network in the World

  Chris Wilson

  28 May 2012 | 7:30 am

  Pinterest has grown at a crazy rate of 145% since January 1st of 2012. Preliminary reports indicate that Pinterest users are more likely to buy than leads from other social networks. I think this is largely because Pinterest is still new and it presents products/designs/ideas/interests in a virtual format that is similar to shopping in a physical store, making it fun to browse. Via: MediaTapper

• Why Mobile Ads in Emerging Markets are the Future

  Chris Wilson

  28 May 2012 | 7:11 am

  Mobile is growing rapidly in many emerging markets around the world and is overtaking desktop activities in established markets, making it a prime marketing opportunity for the future. Via: Jana

• Tesco Introduce a Virtual Mobile Clothes Shopping Experience for F&F Line

  Chris Wilson

  28 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  Tesco has partnered with Aurasma to give more visibility to it’s F&F clothing line with virtual window shopping experience in some of the smaller London stores that don’t have enough floor space to carry the whole line. Great concept. But it’s still hard not to be skeptical of how well a virtual campaign like this can drive interest over a physical store experience. Via: PSFK

• SpotOn Tries to Do What Foursquare Couldn’t – Blend Social Location with Loyalty

  Chris Wilson

  27 May 2012 | 2:17 pm

  Interesting concept from SpotOn. The idea is to create a virtual loyalty program for multiple businesses all through the same mobile application. In many ways they are trying to do what Foursquare hasn’t been able to do. Connect social location (check-ins) with a loyalty marketing program. It also looks like SpotOn works a lot more like a traditional loyalty program – tying rewards to purchases and not just check-ins – which is a lot more valuable to marketers.

• Mobile Driven Pre-Purchase Behaviors of Consumers

  Chris Wilson

  25 May 2012 | 7:40 am

  Though integration with technology – extending touch points across multiple channels – is important. The physical store experience is still important. Via: Social Commerce Today

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  Social Networking Watch: News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industry

• Facebook Reportedly Hiring Former Apple iPhone Engineers

  Mark Brooks

  28 May 2012 | 6:53 am

  APPLE INSIDER - May 28 - Facebook has reportedly hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone as well as one engineer that worked on the iPad. One tipster suggested that the current effort is the company's third attempt to build a smartphone. An HTC/Facebook smartphone could arrive as early as the third quarter of this year. The resulting device would not "necessarily" compete directly with Apple. Since Facebook sells advertising, a smartphone could challenge Google and its Android mobile OS, which operates as a vehicle for Google's…

• Facebook IPO Fallout Continues

  Mark Brooks

  27 May 2012 | 1:30 pm

  WASHINGTON POST - May 24 - In mid-May, as Facebook prepared for IPO, an analyst at Morgan Stanley began advising clients orally that Facebook profits would probably be lower than previously estimated. The investors who received and took note of these warnings may have saved lots of money. The value of Facebook stock rose briefly on its first day and has since plunged 16% from its original price. Morgan Stanley, the IPO’s chief underwriter, is planning to make price adjustments for investors. See full article at Washington Post See all posts on Facebook

• Facebook Named In A Third Of Divorce Filings In 2011

  Mark Brooks

  27 May 2012 | 1:26 pm

  NY DAILY NEWS - May 25 - Facebook was implicated in a third of all divorce filings last year, according to Divorce-Online, a survey by a British legal service. U.S. divorce attorneys agree that Facebook is increasingly becoming a factor in marriage crack-ups. In 2009, Facebook was named in 1 in 5 divorce cases in the U.S. by Lindsay GoldwertSee full article at NY Daily News See all posts on Facebook

• Thanks To Our Sponsors

  Mark Brooks

  27 May 2012 | 6:04 am

• The Top Viral Video Campaign, Updated May 24th, 2012

  Mark Brooks

  27 May 2012 | 5:41 am

  Brand: Flying HorseCampaign: Non-Stop EnergyAgency: Ogilvy & Mather (Brazil)Source: VisibleMeasures.com

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  HighTalk

• The Demise of Traditional Filters

  gfsnell3

  24 May 2012 | 2:04 pm

    In many ways, traditional filters made it so much easier to find and consume content.  Traditional filters also came with the benefit of having a stamp of approval.  We knew the content had been, well, filtered. Take newspapers. Newspapers filter news and information for us.  Editors and journalists cover news they believed is important [...]

• O Twitter How Thou Can Annoy!

  gfsnell3

  21 May 2012 | 5:44 pm

    We all have pet peeves.  Behaviors and actions that annoy or irritate us more than they should.  When we witness these pet peeves in action they get us, well, peevish. Thus the name. There is no medium that fully showcases pet peeves quite like Twitter.  There are absolutely dozens of ways we can irritate [...]

• Facebook Dares to be Uncool

  gfsnell3

  16 May 2012 | 12:55 pm

  Despite the fact that Facebook’s IPO will likely value the company at more than $100 billion this week (about the same as the GDP of Vietnam), Facebook is no longer the Prom Queen. Just like Fonzie, hula hoops, Cabbage Patch kids, and Coldplay, Facebook isn’t cool anymore. It’s too damn big as it nears one [...]

• Social Media Will Not Cure Cancer

  gfsnell3

  15 May 2012 | 10:54 am

  One aspect of social media I dislike immensely is the sense of magical thinking hovers about it.  Some of the medium’s most rabid advocates possess a spooky evangelical zeal about digital communications. At times it can feel like snake-oil salesmen who promise miraculous cures. That’s why it’s not usual to find bold proclamations that social [...]

• Filters in the Age of Media Bombardment

  gfsnell3

  14 May 2012 | 7:03 am

  Forget 24/7 news cycle. Try 604,800 second news cycle (yes, that’s the number of seconds in a week). Forget the 40-hour work week. Try 168-hour work week.  Oh, you don’t work the entire 168-hours in an average week, but if you work in an executive position anywhere that’s the number of hours you’re “on call.”  [...]

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  Jeff Korhan - New Media and Small Business Marketing

• Get More from Your Email Marketing

  Jeff Korhan

  22 May 2012 | 7:42 pm

  How do you get the most out of your email marketing campaigns? Get the attention of your audience. This means giving them something of value at every turn.  Since giving away real products for free is probably not feasible, the logical alternative is delivering quality informational content that will help them do more of what they want to do – better, faster, or cheaper. Social media channels are great for sharing, but when what is shared is valuable and vitally important, email is still the preferred method for most businesses.  Consider your practices and you realize this is true.

• Facebook vs LinkedIn – Is a Public Company Better?

  Jeff Korhan

  20 May 2012 | 3:05 am

  Year-to-Date Price Chart of LinkedIn Shares Now that Facebook has finally gone public, investors and marketers alike are making comparisons with LinkedIn, a social network that went public one day shy of a year ago. I bought ten Facebook shares just to have a reason to periodically check-in and stay involved with the future business plans of Facebook, more as it relates to your business and mine. I was able to acquire my shares at the opening offer price of $38 by placing a limit order and patiently waiting for it to come back to that level, which it did just before the close of trading for…

• The Art and Science of Social Caring

  Jeff Korhan

  17 May 2012 | 7:51 am

  How many times have you heard someone comment that they do not care about the idle chatter their connections publish on the social networks? This may be what they enjoyed for lunch, how blue the sky is today, and that they are loving life or otherwise … HAVING AN AWESOME DAY! The truth is you should care about everything your social connections share with you. Here are two important reasons why. The Art of Caring – It’s the Right Thing to Do For any relationship to succeed, there has to be certain amount of give and take. This is especially true when the relationship is…

• Want to Be Luckier, Smarter, and Happier? Connect the Dots

  Jeff Korhan

  13 May 2012 | 3:55 am

  What could happen if you made a commitment to reconnecting with just a few of your former prospects or customers every day? If your experience is anything like mine, you will get luckier, smarter, and happier. I’ve recently been building a daily habit of reaching out to at least 3 prospects or customers – all randomly chosen. What I’m discovering is simple. When you start connecting (or reconnecting) the dots of your relationships, the past, present, and future magically merge together into one productive ecosystem.  And it is one that readily gets everything in your…

• Say Hi in 15 Languages

  Jeff Korhan

  7 May 2012 | 8:52 pm

  Once in a while a mobile app comes along that really delivers, and that is the reason for this recomendation about SayHi – a remarkably accurate translation app that I recently discovered. Having studied several different dialects of the Spanish language as a green industry professional, I can attest that SayHi does an excellent job of translating Spanish into traditional Castilian (textbook) Spanish. In other words, for the majority of Spanish speakers the translations with SayHi are spot on. I shared this app with my colleague in Quebec, who in turn shared it with her friends. The…

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  miketrap

• Love It Or Hate It, You Gotta Fix the PowerPoint First

  22 May 2012 | 10:04 am

  I have a love/hate thing with PowerPoint. The vast majority of it sucks. Every time we’re forced to endure some shmo standing up to read a wall full of bullets, a faerie dies. Microsoft is partly to blame, given how easy they make it to produce crap, but the truth is the real culprits is the craftsmen, not the tool. I shared a few thoughts on How To Present as one of my first posts on BostInno, which you can check out here. This post is less about that, and more about the important role PowerPoint is playing as we try to get better at marketing Actifio. PowerPoint is a tool that can help…

• Fascinating piece on the evolution of technology marketing, from...

  22 May 2012 | 6:39 am

  Fascinating piece on the evolution of technology marketing, from the Mad Men days forward… (via Make mainframes, not war: how Mad Men sold computers in the 1960s and 1970s | Ars Technica)

• Stay Close To Sales

  16 May 2012 | 7:37 am

  Stay Close To Sales: Been drinking from a firehose the last few days, starting with a sales meeting at 8:30 on my first day here in Waltham. It was a fitting start given some really good advice I got from the head of product and marketing at PTC last week…

• Copy matters. If you want to change behavior, you need to make...

  13 May 2012 | 6:04 pm

  Copy matters. If you want to change behavior, you need to make them FEEL something.

• Why I’m Leaving Holland-Mark

  11 May 2012 | 12:13 pm

  Why I’m Leaving Holland-Mark: This will be my last post for the Holland-Mark channel, and my last day at Holland-Mark. There’ll be plenty of time to talk about where I’m going and why I felt compelled to leave a successful partnership of good friends, but for my swan song here I thought I’d share a few thoughts on my journey that might be useful to you. It’s too long, but it’s a pretty good story. The short version is that I’ve come to organize the journey of my career in the same way I’ve tried to organize the journey of a business. I start with a Vision of who I am, and…

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  Phil Gerbyshak

• Effortless Address Book Additions – Thanks Keri and Eliz

  Phil Gerbyshak

  22 May 2012 | 10:45 am

  Did you know you could capture all your contacts information from your e-mail while you sleep? I wrote about this recently and I offered 2 people the chance to win a year’s premium service with my friends at WriteThat.Name. And the winners are: #5 and #2 Keri from Idea Girl Media and Eliz Greene from Embrace Your Heart.  I’ll be contacting you both to connect you with Brad at WriteThat.Name. Congratulations, and thanks also to Peter Borner, Jesse Petersen and Steve Hughes for participating! I have more contest winners to announce (and I will do so soon) as well as more contests…

• Happy Small Business Week

  Phil Gerbyshak

  21 May 2012 | 6:30 am

  In case you didn’t know, this week is National Small Business Week. It’s a great time to celebrate your successes if you’re a small business owner, or support a local small business if you’re a consumer. There’s a whole program geared to small business owners like you and me. Some of the sessions I may tune into the webcast are: Town Hall – Small Businesses Creating an Economy Built to Last National Awards Luncheon Honoring State Small Business Winners Business Matchmaking – Session 1 And of course, my favorite, the Social Media Forum, with fellow…

• E-Commerce Tools for Small Businesses

  Phil Gerbyshak

  20 May 2012 | 11:30 am

  Starting your own small business is much easier these days. There are a myriad of tools that allow a small business owner to attract new customers. The Internet allows a business to attract and help your prospects and customers each step of the way, in ways that are easy for you as the small business owner. Using these new tools will help your company grow its revenues and perhaps even eclipse your offline sales. Open A Merchant Credit Account The first thing your company needs to do is open a merchant account. What this does is allow your company to accept credit cards. Accepting credit…

• Fiji, Here We Come!

  Stephen P. Smith

  18 May 2012 | 6:35 am

  What a week! I am definitely ready for a vacation. Last week, at the beginning of my fun-filled adventure-with-a-sinus-infection I pounded out a piece about doing the most essential work so you could go away for a week: The “Vacation Razor” That’s what I am calling this effect. The ability of a scheduled absence from work to become a tool for slicing away everything that is not important, a method for eliminating all of the distractions and side-tracks. What if we could work like this all the time? No, I am not talking about the extra hours and increased stress and the other, negative…

• 3 Tips to Building Your Business with Social Media [video]

  Phil Gerbyshak

  17 May 2012 | 8:30 am

  I recently spoke to the Wisconsin chapter of the National Speakers Association and explained my thoughts on how speakers and other small businesses can build their businesses using social media, in just 3 simple ways. Do. Less. More. That was my whole talk. But really, there’s a LOT more to it. Thankfully they recorded it so you can give it a look and see for yourself how this can work for your business. Click here to view the embedded video. If that doesn’t come through for you, click on the headline or go right to the video of me sharing my business building tips on YouTube.

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  Simon Mainwaring

• Top 5 reasons Facebook will become an E-commerce giant and Top 5 reasons it won’t

  Simon

  25 May 2012 | 7:46 am

  Image: Brain Sins Yesterday it was announced that Karma, Facebook’s new gift app, will be instrumental in its e-commerce success. No doubt social data is an incredibly powerful e-commerce tool yet there are many reasons both for and against for arguing that Facebook will become the dominant e-commerce force. First off, here are 5 reasons that Facebook will dominate e-commerce. 1. Captive Audience: Facebook already owns the lion’s share of social media eyeballs and as platforms proliferate, more and more users will buy through the social network they know. 2. Social Search: As…

• Today’s social media landscape and where you fit in

  Simon

  21 May 2012 | 7:08 am

  When you look at this rather frightening infographic of social media landscape from Buddy Media/Luma, it’s easy to feel lost and overwhelmed. And it’s true that each day presents new opportunities and complexities for social media engagement and management. Yet this infographic also provides a rare chance to see the largers social media landscape and examine where your business or brand fits in. Here are several key questions to ask: 1. Which of the categories, strategies or tools listed above are you not using and why? 2. What platforms, tools or apps could you use to unlock new…

• How your brand wins over empowered customers to profit from social commerce

  Simon

  16 May 2012 | 10:20 am

  I recently had the pleasure of speaking at there First Data ‘Engaging Today’s Empowered Customer’ Summit in New Orleans where we discussed in detail the shifts that financial institutions, credit card associations, and merchants across all industries must make in order to command the attention of the social customer and earn the loyalty, trust, and goodwill that translates to profit. We discussed the new co-creative relationships between brands and customers, the importance of authentic purpose, and the ability of brands to architect communities that build their business…

• How social ads are winning over advertisers and consumers

  Simon

  14 May 2012 | 10:16 am

  Over the last two years we have seen a steady shift from Google Search to Social Search as consumers, faced with an overwhelming amount of choices and information, are turning to their peers within social networks for trusted recommendations as to what to buy. Now it seems advertisers are recognizing this trends and following suit. Over the past 12 months, the proportion of Facebook ad budgets allocated to “social ads” has increased fourfold, from 5% in March 2011, to 23% in March 2012, according to a report from Marin Software. What’s more social ads are expected to account for…

• Why you need more than good intentions to build a purposeful brand

  Simon

  10 May 2012 | 10:25 am

  Image: Hetemeel.com One of the most encouraging trends in today’s social business marketplace is the demonstration of greater social responsibility by brands. At one extreme you see large brands showing a greater commitment to their purpose, and at the other a growing number of  in social enterprises and entrepreneurs are emerging with responsibility baked into their business models. That said, no amount of good intentions will suffice if you overlook three key drivers of business success: 1. Brand Singularity: Too often brands (and many non-profits) mistake the cause for their brand.

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  Social Media University, Global

• Taking (Triple) Aim with ICSI

  Lee Aase

  7 May 2012 | 4:59 am

  I’m delighted to be working with Dr. Gary Oftedahl of the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement to present a pre-symposium workshop this afternoon. We’re going to be exploring how social media can support the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s “Triple Aim” : The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) believes that new designs can and must be developed to simultaneously accomplish three critical objectives, or what we call the “Triple Aim”: Improve the health of the population; Enhance the patient experience of care (including quality, access, and…

• A Chancellor Sabbatical

  Lee Aase

  17 Mar 2012 | 8:41 pm

  I know the new curriculum posts have been infrequent lately, but those following my Twitter stream know the main reason: it’s basketball season, and my son Joe and nephew Tom are two of the key players on our Austin High School basketball team. They’re both juniors and both were named first-team all-conference, along with a sophomore teammate, Zach Wessels. I’ll have some posts in the coming days about how I’m applying the SMUG curriculum and the four basic food groups of social media in support of their team. But first, I want to share some news coverage about a major…

• A Revolutionary Opportunity

  Lee Aase

  5 Mar 2012 | 5:25 am

  I received a call last November from a writer with Minnesota Monthly, the magazine Minnesota Public Radio sends to its donors, saying that its editors had been brainstorming an article idea for February’s issue and wanted to include me. The feature was to include a dozen Minnesotans they called “The Revolutionaries” and would involve a professional photo shoot, which they scheduled for December. The February issue was sent to subscribers and available on newsstands in mid-January, but the articles weren’t online until last week. Here’s the lead-in to the…

• An Aase State of Mind

  Lee Aase

  2 Feb 2012 | 11:34 am

  That’s the headline from this story in today’s Austin Daily Herald about basketball in my hometown, and about our family’s history (and hopefully future) of participating in Minnesota’s state high school basketball tournament. Here’s an excerpt: Austin center Joe Aase knows all about his dad Lee’s history on the basketball court. He knows he went to the state basketball tournament in 1981 with the Packers and he knows he played in the title game. Joe also knows about his sister Rebekah. He knows she played in the state basketball tournament in 2008 because he…

• Teachers Tweeting for Support and Inspiration

  Lee Aase

  21 Jan 2012 | 4:29 pm

  Today’s Washington Post has a nice story about how teachers are using Twitter to connect with each other and get just-in-time training. Here’s an excerpt: After her first year teaching history in a public high school in the District, Jamie Josephson was exhausted and plagued by self-doubt. Teaching had been more grueling than she ever expected. Law school began to sound appealing. Then she stumbled onto Twitter. In the vast social network on the Web, she discovered a community of mentors offering inspiration, commiseration and classroom-tested lesson plans. “Twitter essentially…

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  Are We Connected?

• Nor Cal Real Estate Expo

  Mike Mueller

  24 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Pleased as punch to be speaking at the Nor Cal Real Estate Expo today.  I really hope to see you there.  Last years even was incredible. Have you ever gone to a conference and wanted to see two different speakers but they were both speaking at the same time?  Guess what?  This year all sessions will be repeated at least once (once in the morning, and once in the afternoon)! I’m starting out the day bright and early with How to Blog Without Blogging Session times: 8:00-8:45 am and 4:00-4:45 pm Don’t have the time to blog? Mike Mueller will share with you was to add content to your…

• Video Friday

  Mike Mueller

  18 May 2012 | 5:00 am

  Friday Fun:  The Listing Video That was a lot of fun wasn’t it?  I love it!  I love that they don’t take themselves too seriously. Can I show you another? It’s not so fun. Matter of fact, it’s serious.  Very serious.  It’s also very important. Jennie Gisslow, (Coltons Aunt) is walking “Out of the Darkness” and would like your support. My son and I will be walking from sunset to sunrise in San Francisco this June to support The Out of the Darkness 18 mile walk for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. We are taking part in this event to…

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  Cracking the Code of Internet Marketing Strategies

• Search Engine Marketing: ROI vs. Profits

  Eric Tsai

  6 May 2012 | 11:20 pm

  In SEM (Search Engine Marketing) ROI is a safer metric, at the end of the day, than profit. The pros of going with ROI outweigh profit in the immediacy. Profit is almost always the primary goal in the long term, but marketers have a lot more control over ROI so programs are designed around this KPI first. This is a guest post from my good friend David Chung, who used to work with me in Search Marketing and now works for Google in Korea: Everyone’s getting smarter. Everything’s getting smarter, too. I recently swapped out my Android mobile device for a traditional flip phone and it took…

• 9 Keys to Increase Website Conversion Rate and Turn Visitors into Customers

  Eric Tsai

  20 Jul 2011 | 12:28 am

  If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you might remember a post I wrote recently called Why Attention is the New Currency Online. When I wrote it, I had been working to create a process to audit website conversions. Ultimately it turned into an article about capturing attention online because without attention there would be nobody looking at your links, images, videos and compelling content. And without people reading your content, you certainly won’t get any clicks. When people read your content online, links and clicks follow. However; you don’t want just any…

• Beyond Search: Social Customer, Social Commerce, Social Media

  Eric Tsai

  1 Jul 2011 | 2:15 am

  It seems as if all the talk in web marketing these days center on algorithm updates, social signals, mobile and display opportunities. Marketers and brands are eager to make adjustments trying new strategies to drive sales and increase profits. I think it’s important to know the difference between a sales channel and how sales are made. Search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO) and social media are all channels to engage and carry out your message with prospects and customers. Simply put, the medium is not the message. It’s a venue for you to generate demand…

• Learn to Extract Marketing Insights from Data

  Eric Tsai

  15 Jun 2011 | 2:00 am

  In working with many smart business people and analysts in the past few months, I came to appreciate the ease of accessing web analytics. Who knew that math and data would become a main revenue driving force for businesses big and small? Every business is fast becoming a data-generating machine. From upstream to downstream, data rewards us with actionable insights to make profitable decisions via controlled experiments allowing us to advance our business models. And yet, this is just the beginning as the number of people connected to the web continues to grow, so too does the vast amount of…

• A Holistic Approach to Marketing: Integrating Social, Search and People

  Eric Tsai

  29 Apr 2011 | 1:02 am

  As the dust begins to settle on the endless possibilities of social media, marketers are gearing up for the next wave of digital growth. From Google’s report on mobile is finally making an impact on search to how social media is used by 25% of the companies worldwide, I’ve always focused on opportunities that align with business objectives. Especially if there is a win win situation for both consumers and brands. As the demand for businesses to be more transparent and social media becomes mainstream so has the technology that supports it. This is happening both in B2C (business…

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  The Tyler Hayes

• Jim Dalrymple on Blogging

  28 May 2012 | 12:40 am

  Jim Dalrymple on Blogging: File this under: Internet Usage Prerequisites.

• Walk The Walk, Then Talk The Talk

  27 May 2012 | 11:15 pm

  Walk The Walk, Then Talk The Talk: From an insightful comment by avid A VC (Fred Wilson’s blog) commenter JLM, discussing Twilio’s recently-published Nine Values: As you discover your values, live them first and then publish them second. You cannot fool anyone when they are able to observe your own personal example. And a bonus nugget on leadership: Not everybody goes to bed at night worrying about the issues facing the company. Some folks just want to be lead to the Promised Land.

• Noble Pioneer

  8 May 2012 | 8:40 pm

  Noble Pioneer: I’ve been writing a second blog for just over four months now. It’s called Noble Pioneer and it’s about Earth, space, the cosmos, and everything in between. Space has been my number one passion since I could walk. In fact, the only two books I still have from my childhood are Where the Wild Things Are and I Want to Be an Astronaut. If you like space check out Noble Pioneer. I think you’ll love it. UPDATE: For those fine individuals who wish to follow Noble Pioneer but don’t have Tumblr accounts there is also a Noble Pioneer Twitter feed.

• Lehrer's Rules

  7 May 2012 | 1:54 pm

  Lehrer's Rules: An oldie but goldie. Jim Lehrer’s rules of journalism. (Via John Gruber.)

• Go Right

  6 May 2012 | 10:39 pm

  Go Right: If you played video games as a kid your heart has a spot for this video.

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  SociableBlog

• Geolocated Online Dating – How Does It Works and the Technology Behind It

  Guest Authors

  28 May 2012 | 7:11 am

  Online dating is no longer what it used to be; just like most things on the web, it inevitably changed and evolved as our technology advanced. The market has seen a recent change in growth from the old-school sites such as eHarmony and Match.com to the newer social dating sites like Badoo and Skout. One [...]

• Tips on Using Google+ To Improve Search Engine Rankings

  Guest Authors

  25 May 2012 | 8:45 am

  Search engine optimization changes all the time, which makes it imperative for SEO specialists to get acquainted with the new trends. Google+, the social network launched by the most popular search engine, is expected to start playing an important role in website search engine positioning in the future. In fact, the social network is already [...]

• My Social Media Has Fallen and It Can’t Get Up

  Guest Authors

  25 May 2012 | 7:32 am

  Most of us have seen the television commercial where the elderly woman has fallen and cannot get up. Now imagine if you’re a small business owner and the same thing has happened to your social media program. What are the options available to you in order to reinvigorate your campaign? The first and most important [...]

• PayPal Teams with ERPLY for New In-Store Wireless Payment System via Mobile Devices

  Social Guy

  25 May 2012 | 6:15 am

  ERPLY, the leading provider of cloud-based POS software, integrates PayPal for new seamless mobile payment solution, from single to multi-store, a new way to accept mobile payments and manage business operations. Consumers can simply “check-in” on their smartphone to their favorite stores and pay with PayPal. With this new development, retailers can accept payments from [...]

• How to Use Chatville, Facebook’s New Webcam App

  Guest Authors

  24 May 2012 | 9:22 am

  Chatville is an application that takes online socializing from a different perspective. Instead of the traditional contact-then-contact-back online communication method, the application instead mixes the entire crowd, allowing you to chat with random partners over multiple “rooms”. The incalculable element of this application makes it fun and exciting for a lot of its users. To [...]