Social Media

Turkey hotlines revolutionized the way home cooks dealt with kitchen emergencies during Thanksgiving. Now, hotlines are being joined by social media, videos, apps and other twenty-first century ways of solving bird problems. The Butterball Turkey Talk-Line women -- and they are all women -- have bee...

Google has introduced Google+ Pages, an element of its Google+ social network that has been much anticipated by corporate brands. Pages provides a public placeholder on the Google+ network for any entity -- not just companies. A sports club like FC Barcelona, for example, could have its own page. Or...

Before it went public, Groupon priced its stock at what turned out to be a highly conservative $20 dollars per share. Ha! was the market's response Friday morning, the day Groupon finally debuted on Nasdaq. Trading immediately pushed the share price up to $27.96. The low of the day was $ 25.90 and t...

Forecasters are trying desperately to get a handle on the pending collision between social, local and mobile media, or SoLoMo. The part that most of them forget is the reality check. It's even better and much bigger than they thought. The challenge for most forecasters is they look at one aspect of ...

The U.S. Department of Labor and Facebook are collaborating on an initiative that they hope will link more unemployed people with potential employers -- a job search page on Facebook. The page also highlights available training programs and educational opportunities. Facebook intends to drive traffi...

Will Skype give Microsoft street cred in social networking? At Web 2.0 on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discussed the company's current and future projects. He touched on Windows Phone, Microsoft Office, Xbox Live, Bing and the recent go-ahead on its Skype acquisition, the buy he characterize...

There's a new social network in town -- Chime.in, the brainchild of Bill Gross, known for creating Google's AdWords platform. Gross is the CEO of UberMedia, the developer of popular Twitter clients Echofon and Ubersocial. Chime.in launched as a public beta on Tuesday and will fully launch in Novemb...

The latest innovations in SEO are definitely social signals and how they impact search results. We are seeing a shift in the authority scores that Google is weighing. It is not based solely on in-bound links and page content, but also on the amount of social sharing and social signals that you actua...

Online privacy was in the news again this week -- and Facebook, not surprisingly, figured prominently in many of the stories. What was surprising, however, was that Facebook wasn't being castigated for implementing some new policy that made it appear the social networking giant was trampling users' ...

As the one major social networking site that actually has gone public, LinkedIn is facing more pressure than its competitors to produce revenue and ultimately turn a profit. Because it now answers to antsy anonymous shareholders -- rather than somewhat more patient venture capitalists or angel inv...

A social network makes changes to its privacy policy. Shortly thereafter, users are shocked to see their names and photos appear in in-house ads. For example, an ad promoting the services of a local printer might include the faces of three "followers" of that particular company. Is this Facebook pri...

Google+ challenged its top competitor Facebook on Thursday by adding games to the newly launched social networking site. Google has begun a gradual roll-out of the games, stating they should be fully available to all users soon. Google+ users will have a selection of 16 games to choose from at first...

It just makes sense that consumers tend to trust the opinions and recommendations of friends before they trust those of advertisers, promoters and retailers. Social shopping sites, which combine features of social networking with online sales, seek to capitalize on the sharing and trust that exist b...

As recently as just a few years ago, consumers had a limited set of research options when they were looking to make an informed product purchase. They may have done a Google search to learn where to buy the product or noticed an advertisement and visited a store to speak with a sales rep about it. F...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that Google+ could be the most significant product release in the history of social media. That declaration was based on my belief that this platform represents Google's best -- and perhaps last -- chance to offer Facebook any competition in the social networking arena...