Curated Stories Feb. 15, 2010

photo: Bob Elsdale
From Linda Zimmerman, in response to Is Your Social Media Director Qualified?

One point you made in the video I’d like to highlight. You mentioned Frank at Comcast who has taken his know…

This weekend I had the opportunity to present two sessions at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference; both sessions were focused around how authors can use social media to their advantage. Out of the 400 pe…

Do you want to optimize your website for search engines? Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t rocket science, but there are a lot of little things you need to know about it before you start trying to incre…

Facebook this weekend published a special Valentine’s day study about romantic relationships and happiness. The company’s Data Team sliced and diced the language used in millions of peoples’ status messages, t…

Jessica Faye Carter is an award-winning author and columnist. Her company, Nette Media develops social media technologies for women and multicultural communities, and she blogs at Technicultr.Women have firmly…

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and it apparently had the data team at Facebook thinking: Does being in a relationship (as defined by Facebook relationship status) really make individuals more happy? The resul…

Not only is Facebook now the top source of traffic to Web portal sites, the company has also enjoyed a huge percentage gain in U.S. search market share from Dec 2009 to Jan 2010. While nowhere near the volume…

Conversation Leads to Relationship

Last December I had the lovely experience of hearing both Shel Israel and Erik Qualman speak at the Social Media Club Chicago event.
Shel co-wrote the book on social me…

Blogging stops feeling like “social” media when homeland security knocks on your door.
(source: Orlando Weekly, http://fwix.com/orlando and other sites)
Reporters and members of the media are usually well v…

Early in my consulting career, I faced a potential PR disaster that taught me some lessons I will never forget. A client confused my company, Sterling Consulting Group, with another consulting company that also…

This morning, twenty four of the world’s largest telecom companies announced their plans to create the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), a unified open platform that lets developers build an application…

On Feburary 22 the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act will go into effect. What can you do to prepare yourself and your credit cards? Check out these tips to find out.Photo by Andres…

How to set up a newsreader in Facebook

Ive been seeing several articles about how Facebook is turning into the #1 newsreader (here, here and here). The trouble with them is that they tell you why you should, b…

We’ve talked a lot here in the last few months about some of the nuts and bolts of social media strategy and execution.
Stuff like time management and goal setting and measurement.
But the real key to getting…

One of the areas where social media will excel is in the opportunity to make things our own, to give them our own look and feel. Remember when you got your first personal computer? Remember changing the backgr…

My thoughts on the purpose roi of #socialmedia for business – New Post: Social Media Lifecycle Framework – http://bit.ly/d9EmTu

Leveraging social media for business purposes is centric to building trust and confidence with the markets you aim to serve. If you haven’t noticed consumer confidence and trust in institutions, go…

by Steve Wilkins
The patient-centered model of care is predicated among other things on physicians factoring in knowledge of the “person behind the patient” into their treatment. That’s means understan…

The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) recently produced a
playbook that contains more than 35 case studies of putting listening to work, written by Steve Rappaport, the Advertising Research Foundation’…

If you believe some pundits and fanboys, the coming of the iPad and the new market for Tablet PCs that it is expected to open up will revolutionize how I use a computer. It will change the way I browse the Int…

A friend of mine who is an experienced corporate marketer started a new business. The store just opened and being the good pal that I am, I was able to provide some advice regarding marketing on the web – spe…

A guest post by Scott Gulbransen, Senior Manager of Public Relations/Social Media at TurboTax.
When Todd Defren asked me to hammer out a post for his blog while he’s basking on a sun-drenched beach somewhere…

Social media profiles can also appear on these pages (although so can website links of course). I probably don’t have to tell you that the web is rapidly …

As we wrestle with political factions and mull over assorted ideas for reforming health-care in America, one simple solution bears discussion. Of course, we notoriously hate simple solutions. The modern Ame…

Paul Pasquale of Etnacom asks, “How do you keep track of everything and control what’s going on without feeling overwhelmed?” His answer: “Life by CRM.” The article details his strategy for using Highrise…

For link building purposes, some clients are just more desirable than others. There are some sites that are exciting, because the minute you land on the homepage you can immediately think of 100 angles to at…

Pepsi launched a promotional social media campaign in lieu of costly Super Bowl advertising through which it will donate $20 million to good causes identified and voted upon by consumers via the pro…

Television does not appear to be suffering the same way as its older mainstream media cousin, the newspaper. Deloitte’s 2009 “State of the Media Democracy” survey reports a 26 percent increase in th…

For many, many years, the classic example we’d use of a band who knew how to really connect with its fans (and give them a reason to buy) was The Grateful Dead — who were, for years, the highest grossing band…

Today’s post comes from Derrek J. Hull, voice of the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show and International Wine Spirits Beer Event (IWSB) blog Floored!, as well as its Twitter a…

In a relationship, everyone wants to have a sense of belonging, appreciation and loyalty. You want to feel like “you’re part of the group” if it’s with friends or feel appreciated by your significant ot…

Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
Windows Phone 7 Series is official, and Microsoft is playing to win — Windows Phone 7 Series. Get used to the name, because its now a part of the smartphone vernacular… h…

If you truly understand your niche, you can better find relevant linking partners. If you don’t, you’re going to waste loads of time pursuing targets that don’t work out, and you’re going to end up w…

As more and more companies decide that investing in a Twitter account is appropriate for their marketing campaign, one thing that traditionally gets lost in the discussion is how they will measure success.
A…

Google is already taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook with the recent launch of Buzz, which lets everyone on Gmail broadcast public status updates, share links, blog posts, photos, videos, and more. But…

There is no such thing as privacy on the Internet anymore—anything you say or do lives on ad infinitum in Internet memory. In the intro of his Harvard paper, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger notes that “In March 2…

We’ve discussed how you can integrate Buzz with your other social networks, but what about integrating Buzz with your blog? If you use a self-hosted WordPress blog (sorry, WordPress.com users), there are alr…

As you know I’m a big fan of the WordPress platform. Although it’s not the most optimal platform, there’s no question that it makes it easier to run a website. I was recently asked by Brian Clark of Copy…

The NYTimes recently covered research out of the University of Pennsylvania to understand the drivers of the NYTimes “most-emailed” list which appears on their site and reflects what stories readers…

Great point that’s often missed – multichannel retailers need multichannel return policies – http://bit.ly/bPh0Jo (via @econsultancy)

Smart post, worth reading: How not being annoying can get you 67% more cart completions – http://bit.ly/bRi2k1 (via @PatriceF @els_aerts)

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series…

When you want to to share music, movies, photos, or other files online, you’ve got countless options. We’ve examined most, and for our money, one tool emerges on top of the heap for its ease of use, wide suppor…

Those online platforms are all part of “social media.” And they are changing the way many people interact. That fact can be frightening for some small …

Brandchannel.com, February 12, 2010 — According to recent research at Penn State University, one in five (20 percent) tweets posted on Twitter includes an inquiry or information about a specific brand-rel…

It also asked how such sites could boost their organisation’s business, and whether the company’s reputation had ever been hurt by the use of social media. …

Many organisations are now using the connective power of social media to channel their employees’ social networking activity into positive and productive …

Some experts say social media could become the Internet’s next search engine. “People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are …

And, as social media like MySpace and Facebook emerged, marketing became less of a monologue and more of a multiparty conversation. …

Social media is increasingly the battlefield for disputes between David and Goliath. Thanks to the spotlight that social media tools like Twitter and Facebook can shine on these disputes, individuals have more…

Developers have flocked to Apple’s iPhone SDK, but there is a significant barrier to entry: knowledge of Objective-C, the programming language that is used to build native iPhone apps.
Fortunately, cooking up a…

A team is created in an attempt to strengthen a challenge to online fraudsters that has yet to result in any convictions.

If you thought pro golf was in trouble, how about this: David Stern says that the NBA will lose $400 million this year. It’s the insane salaries, of course. And the culprits aren’t the players, but the…

The book and media industries are going through interesting times, to put it mildly. As physical books prepare for their demise, the confusion around pricing of digital ones grows. Yet, whether physical or digi…

Filmmaker Kevin Smith sent a series of exasperated Tweets this weekend claiming that he’d been kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for being “too fat”.Proving, perhaps, the speed at which Twitter can s…

*The guest tip is by Matthew Yarro who writes about link building at JuiceeLinks.com*
I think that everyone understands that top-ranked websites receive more traffic, more sales and more brand recognition than…

To mark Valentine’s Day (though a day late), an excerpt from a love letter written in March 1908 by the American novelist Edith Wharton.I hope you’ve read The Age of Innocence, the best of her several supe…

Fred Wilson submits:
For years many industry observers including me have stated that email is the ultimate social network. If you take all the people I email with regularly, you’ll quickly figure out my top r…

One of my primary sources of information about the book publishing industry is Publishers Lunch Deluxe. It is published every workday by PublishersMarketplace as part of its premium membership service. If you a…

The most important piece of copy you write for a blog post, an email or any other type of written communication is your headline. This is even more true now as the information overload of today’s Internet mak…

Some brilliant insights process tips – #UX Case Study: Designing a user-focused web app – http://bit.ly/9qR8aU (via @briancray)