Curated Stories Apr. 5, 2010

Just because you can, it does not mean that you should. It’s a great line, and it’s a truism more and more people engaged in Social Media might want to take to heart.

One of the more pivotal moments in Social…

davebarnes points us to a recent response by the NYTimes’ ethicist, Randy Cohen, to a reader question, over the ethics of downloading an unauthorized ebook of a book where he already owned the physical book. C…

On Saturday Apple let the public get their hands on their newest creation, the iPad, setting off a flood of hype and media coverage which has likely yet to reach its peak. Yes, this is yet another post about th…

Part of the reason social media and software has taken off is its simplicity. Twitter was about the simplest conversation interface possible. People contact organizations on their blogs, Facebook …

Over on OPENForum, I wrote a post about how important decision-making is to a business. In the case of this post, I am mostly talking about deciding when NOT to do things, but I feel it goes even further than t…

I just read an outstanding article in the April issue of Inc. Magazine on Jerry Murrell and Five Guys Burgers and Fries (Ill be going to my first Five Guys this week, so Ill keep you posted). As of this p…

Pat Kitano is one of the smartest people I know. I met Pat years ago during my Blogging Systems days when my business partner Richard Nacht and I were trying to convince the real estate industry that blogging w…

Over the past few months, we’ve been discussing the various skills needed for effectively operating in a world characterized by information and accelerating change, and I’ve been assembling these ideas in…

A recent CNN article pointed out that a number of students have been changing their Facebook names in order to hide their profile from college recruiters and potential employers. This comes after a recent surv…

I finally got my hands on everyones latest religious experience.
I’ll be road-testing it over the next few days. So let’s start right in, shall we?
Here’s the first truth about the iPad:
It’s too heavy.
Serio…

With Facebook user base growing well past 400M users, it’s inevitable that a percentage of them might be sociopaths, taking advantage of the social network’s very features to accomplish their goals. Several…

From Entrepreneur: Many top blogs, including social news site Mashable.com, continue to focus on the effectiveness of pay-per-click advertising through Google’s ever-popular search and content networks. But n…

Cliqset and Status.net are hardly representative of social media as a whole. However, Google Buzz, while certainly not as dominant as say, Facebook, …

In our ongoing Social Media Ethical Dilemma series, we’ve discussed a number of scenarios in which clients had asked SHIFT to not only help develop their online strategy, but also lend in interacting with the…

It sure seems counter-intuitive. A bigger market may seem to have more customers, but it’s also easier to get lost in.
Just choosing a smaller domain, a vertical and defining it sets a small business apart…

Twitter Favorites is like that barking dog. You aren’t sure how to deal with it, and keep looking for some obedience classes to tame ‘the beast’.
I “favorite” several quality Tweets that I see come th…

Interactive PR, sometimes called social PR, is a combination of search-optimizing press releases, creating social media releases through tools like PitchEngine, blogger outreach and the use of socia…

It’s easy to create online social profiles. Lucky for you, it’s just as easy to create profiles that help promote your personal brand. Follow these 3 simple steps each time you make a new profile or g…

Several weeks ago we received a presentation from a major Canadian newspaper publisher entitled “New Approach to Media Relations for PR Consultants.” In it, the presenter outlined a new pr…

Sign up for Google Voice and you get a new phone number that works as a virtual switchboard for all your incoming calls from all your various phone lines. Making and receiving calls with Google Voice is easy,…

Joe Clark on iPad critics:

This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something…

Facebook continues to tweak the way that brands and consumers interact on the network, replacing unofficial fan pages with “community pages,” as noted in the lead story of today’s SmartBr…

This is another addition to our ongoing series of tutorials and case studies on landing pages that work.
David Gilbert wants to help parents monitor their school-aged children’s activities online. He’s don…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.Successful business people are alw…

It took me a long time to realize that I was not the only “story guru” in the professional organization of which I serve on the executive board, the Career Management Alliance. Story also figures prominen…

One of the peculiar habits we have in our hyperactive, short attention span culture is the habit of looking for the big secret. We strive desperately to look for the next big thing, the next big secret, the mag…

Beware those obsessed with time normalization and comparing efforts to others. There is no blanket right or wrong answer to how much time you should spend for your digital PR and marketing. Those attempting…

Jim Sterne has written an outstanding book called Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment which releases this week.

This is the third book in my New Rules of Social Media…

Recently, I wrote about the need for a type of journalism that provides context and background and explanations that compliment the traditional ways in which news is delivered to us through a time-stamped, “e…

In a recent post I wrote that the companies that get more business are those where people
energize the contact, lean into the conversation, make the
experience human, find new ways to communicate with cust…

Touchpoints serve as the point of contact between a buyer and a seller. As the race to socialize commerce escalates, these touchpoints represent the nodes that define the human network, connecting people acros…

The web, in general, has always been a positive place for personal branding. No one is going to write someone else a negative LinkedIn recommendation, and even if they did, it doesn’t have to…

Social Media is fast becoming the marketing medium of choice to reach prospects and customers as they become ever more deeply immersed and engaged online. …

I have finally finished Linchpin: Are You Indispensible?, Seth Godin’s most recent book, and I liked it a lot. How could I not? It got my brain working overtime thinking about this and that and everything in…

Explanation of perceived affordances why it’s important to design for task flow – http://bit.ly/cTtGeq (via @johnnyholland)

February 2009, and mid-way through the ever-controversial TED conference in Long Beach, California, a pianist called ‘ELEW‘ took to the stage.
Dressed in a black suit and white shirt – cuffs open and fla…

The second installment of Toward A New Understanding of Publishing is up over at the FM Blog. From it:
… what does it mean to have a good voice? And how does that relate to publishing?
Marketers have always a…

As if some cosmic wager between God and the Devil were coming to a head, Duke plays Butler tonight for the 2010 NCAA Mens Basketball Championship. Naturally, the Devils got Duke. I have hated Duke for 45 ye…

When Google announced its big jump into the social stream with the launch of Google Buzz back in February, the company thought it was doing everyone a favor by having users auto-follow the people they emailed a…

If the sold out pre-orders are any indication of the device’s pre-launch consumer demand, it looks as though Apple has struck gold with the iPad. Although it remains to be seen if the iPad can achieve the mass…

PC World – I have had my iPad for a little over 24 hours now. I have customized it with the various iPad apps that I think will add value to my new tablet device–one of which is Pages, the Apple iWork word pro…

Episode #197 of Six Pixels of Separation – The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Without question, Sally Hogshead is one of the most fascinating women in Marketing today. Scratch…

While President Obama’s use of the social web to connect with voters and raise funds has been well-documented, it may be Scott Brown’s impossible 2010 senatorial win that cements the social web’s role…

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Some dates, we never forget – July 4, 1776, November 22, 1963 or September 11, 2001. Other dates, when we look back, we realize were significant, we just d…

Some former enthusiasts are pulling out completely – sometimes with the help of social media “suicide” programs – while others are simply creating new …

… checks for potential job candidates, students are being forced to think twice about what actions they make when posting on social media sites. …

I’m speaking about Social CRM at the New Communications Forum in a few weeks and I’ve been doing a bit of research and thinking around this topic. I wanted to give you a sneak peak at some of the ideas a…

Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG) have changed the way we do business as professionals, and these new professional networks and business-focused online …

I’m sure you’ve read through “top doctor” rankings and online physician ratings. It is only human to seek perceived leaders. But as sometimes seen in politics, those who have reached the pinnacles are o…

Elayne Zalis (pictured), whom I met on Facebook, has compiled a huge, fascinating collection of Autobiographical/Biographical Webs: Selected Links, an outgrowth, she told me, of her academic studies of experime…

It’s no secret that there weren’t many iPads given out ahead of time. Apple is, of course, notorious for their extreme secrecy and the hammer that inevitably comes down on leakers and embargo breakers. They…

Amazon’s great iPad application makes this Kindle user very happy.

At the end of this video from this year’s Davos (at 2:30), Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposes the need to create an academic discipline — cutting across technology, psychology, anthropology, and other fields —…