Opinion

Perhaps more than anything else, it is discourse that separates social media from most conventional forms of communication. Take that away and its value is significantly diminished.[read more]

In the wake of the AP and Verizon phone record scandals and the Supreme Court’s decision to allow DNA swabbing of people arrested for “serious crimes,” people are finally questioning tradeoffs between freedom and security.[read more]

The average person on the internet knows nothing about third party tracking and targeting. The very idea that there is a third party that is tracking our online behavior feels wrong. It feels invasive. But in actuality this is both old news and benign.[read more]

The NSA was recently embroiled in a scandal where it was revealed that it had collected massive amounts of data from private U.S. citizens using telecommunications services in a program called PRISM. It was revealed that the major technology companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and Apple, also provided data to the NSA.[read more]

Best iPhone apps

The iPhone has become a much more integrated device for managing productivity. Recently, a new breed of iPhone apps have begun to hit the App Store that have more intuitive and sleek interfaces. After testing many, here are 11 of the best productivity apps that I've found for the iPhone.[read more]

Idiot crooks make me giggle and the news seems to be filled with criminals who insist on confession to the crimes they commit…even if they do so unintentionally via a social media channel like Twitter or Facebook.[read more]

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Social media has grown a lot since 2010, and marketers have undoubtedly become a bit more comfortable with new media, but the problems of competency and time still haunt a business’s marketing efforts. A social media manager is often brought into a company to solve those problems.[read more]

Zero Moment of Truth

A critical moment for consumer/brand interactions is the Zero Moment of Truth (or ZMOT). ZMOT encompasses the time between consumers’ first exposure to advertising for a product and the ultimate purchase decision—with emphasis on the online research of the product that happens in between.[read more]

The article was shared on major social networks close to a thousand times, and gathered an impressive reader response of over 500 comments within 24 hours of being posted on The Guardian’s site. For an article on economics, a subject which many consider to be snooze-worthy, these numbers are pretty astounding. How did it happen?[read more]

I've discussed some of the “rights” and “wrongs” (very loosely defined, of course) of social media posting before, but the issue of tonality is so subtle, it’s easy to overlook when you’re preparing to launch your social media streams or writing your social media policy.[read more]

Social media "Giants"

The Giants not only lead the pack when it comes to social innovation and engagement, but they’re the OG’s when it comes to implementing it – they were among the first teams to adopt Instagram and Google+, quickly recognizing the wide demographic of their quirky, rabid fan-base.[read more]

attribution/shutterstock

Learning how to properly attribute sources in social media is good behavior and good business. Giving nods online is part of the etiquette of the internet. The more we follow these simple rules of attribution online, the more generous the social media culture will become.[read more]

Google+ lessons

I’m sure all of you know that Yahoo recently acquired Tumblr and is showing signs of having learned from Google’s creeping strategy with Google+. But instead of going after the techies and marketing types it’s focusing its reach on the creatives of cyberspace.[read more]

Facebook and Google are battling to purchase Waze, a start-up that uses crowdsourced traffic reports to help you on your way. Waze may also be the way to jumpstart location-based advertising and grow mobile ad revenue fast. But which giant will pay more for the risky bet of "synergy?"[read more]

I still have some troubleshooting steps to do to try and restore my old emails, including a system restore from backup. While I won't go back to using Outlook no matter how that turns out, I do still hope to recover those lost messages and then import everything into Gmail so that I have my complete email history again. I often refer back to old emails for project information, so recovering them is still important.[read more]

As more businesses continue to enter the blogosphere, they run the risk of publishing clichéd, outdated articles in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. As I’ve worked to grow my own company blog, I’ve seen plenty of other business blogs that continue to publish material that is either uninteresting or unprofessional and, to stem the flow of poorly written postings, here are five topics I earnestly believe business blogs should avoid.[read more]

lanier67, Flickr

This isn’t hard to respond to comments on some platforms like Facebook where most comments can be visibly seen on the post itself. However, mentions of your brand can be harder to track on forums you’re not a part of or on social networks like Twitter where you get a steady stream of content on your feed. To help you monitor mentions of your brand, you can use a tool like Mentions to track your name and get real-time alerts.[read more]

Marcy Kaptur (D-OH9) tweeted a joke from the White House Correspondents Dinner. But then she erased it 8 minutes later. What if more members of Congress could embrace the boldness of a funny tweet, without running away from it as if scared of their own shadow? We might see more real discussions among our elected officials as they work to solve our very real problems.[read more]

Most social media campaigns are doomed from the beginning. Nothing you can't recover from. But if you start off on the wrong foot, then it's hard to convince others (or yourself) to keep persevering in the face of lackluster results.[read more]

Right now Google has one of the best long term visions compared to any other major company. What is this vision? Well, it’s to slowly corral each internet user (so basically, everybody) to think of Google not as only a piece of the internet, but the internet.[read more]