Curated Stories Feb. 23, 2010

In between writing hits like “Sugar Magnolia” and “Franklin’s Tower,” it turns out The Grateful Dead were pretty shrewd businessmen. The Atlantic took a look at the band to find out what managers and freelancer…

Twitter Feb. 22 said its users were tweeting a combined 50 million times each day, indicating a huge bump in Twitter use despite claims that the Twitter machine is slowing. However, Twitter faces steep social n…

Nicholas de Wolff, National Film Fes­ti­val for Tal­ented Youth:
“Too many peo­ple are div­ing into the Web 2.0 and 3.0 pools
before they even know with whom they are swim­ming.”

Social business see…

Too many SEO’s and marketers worry about getting that #1 ranking in Google for their primary keyword/phrase. Of course, if that query is being highly searched and you rank first, you are going to receive…

PR firm Burson-Marsteller studied the 100 largest companies in the Fortune 500 list and found that 79% of then use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs to communicate with customers and other stakehol…

Finding the right people to follow on Twitter can offer a real competitive advantage in many lines of work. Some people are very good at it, they are super connected and they find great people to follow. Now…

You could hear the disappointment in my friends voice. I had a lot of respect for Toyota, she said. More than most onlookers, she knew the literature about its vaunted system of continuous process improvement….

The secret backdating of stock option grants is not just corporate hanky-panky, it is criminally fraudulent. Yet starting in 2006, well over 100 US public companies were investigated for engaging in the practic…

While not all your friends want to read every update from your company’s blog, there’s a lot of value in cross-promoting your blog posts on Facebook. If you want to learn more about effective cross-promoti…

After a company decides that it’s time to invest in a CRM system, the real fun begins. How can it possibly select the best tool from the myriad of offerings on the market? It’s all about doing the research — t…

Taking a 90-minute nap the day of a test or presentation sounds like a ludicrous luxury. But a recent study on the brain’s ability to recall facts found that napping at noon could mean a lot more brain power at…

I’m here in Phoenix Arizona as a keynote speaker to the Council of Alumni Associations Executives, these are the fine folks that manage alumni orginizations where you may have gone to college. The reason I�…

Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
How true. I suppose that’s why I enjoy collecting and…

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-…

Marketing research firm Nielsen has some stats on the habits of UK social networking users, and it once again shows that social networks, for the most part, adhere to the Pareto principle (also known as the 80…

Important read: 7 reasons your company should embrace #socialmedia for communications – http://bit.ly/azufJ0 (via @TNW_socialmedia)

There’s a whole lot of mystique, paranoia, and guessing as to how Google comes up with its generally best-in-class search results. Steven Levy at Wired digs in to discover what really makes Google’s search engi…

In all of the posts I’ve read about social media measurement, very few address the possible role of qualitative research — measuring when you don’t have data — so let’s take a look at that today, s…

Foursquare.com – If you like playing games, then Foursquare is one big social media game site. In this case you can “check in” using your mobile device to …

So, “Rewrite your site” came in at number one in the Top five things you need to do online in 2010. What a shame most companies will mess that job up quite atrociously.
And for one simple reason: they’ll a…

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.]…

Back in 1999, a well-circulated false press release made the rounds, supposedly written in response to Bill Gates’ jab at the auto industry at COMDEX that year. The memo joked:

If GM had developed technology…

Miss K sez, “This young woman made the best of a 10 hour stopover during Snowpocalypse ’09 by filming herself mugging around the empty airport.”

This is an epic use of downtime. I stand in awe, and am ashame…

Prieur du Plessis submits: Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses with Paul Maidment where capitalism went wrong and what its future iterations might be like. Complete Story »

Perfect for executives and for clients wanting a quick run down of social media – and why it is turning our lives upside down, this presentation brings together the seven short videos that clearly show the cont…

Gary Greenberg submits:In last week’s article on securitization, I gave a brief background of securitization as it impacted the dual collapse of real estate prices and the creation of credit. Of particular note…

Dear Facebook Friends,
I’ve been wondering when and how to do this for a while now but the time has come for me to bite the bullet and clean up what I’m doing on Facebook.
For 99% of you – this means that…

I saw some interesting Forrester research this week. We asked over 4,000 consumers about Single-ID systems, which permit a profile to be used on multiple Web sites and eliminate the need to register, create a…

Some small businesses are experimenting with new Web-marketing services that integrate social media. While entrepreneurs say they’ve …

In the late 90′s, a spokesperson for the Coca Cola corporation said, “Our primary competition isn’t Pepsi. Our real competition is water, tea, nimbupani and Pepsi… in that order.”

While it’s a gruesome thou…

[Intro by Ann] With social media marketing, engagement is the most important but it is still should be done right.
This post is te collection of video interviews our guest contributor Neal Rodriguez interview t…

Making the choice between promoting your business using your own name or that of a company is a very personal decision that sometimes takes a lot of consideration.

The most common option is to brand yoursel…

For anyone watching the Olympics lately (despite the efforts of NBC — really, NBC? Why air one of the most anticipated events of the games on MSNBC?! ), you may have seen this engaging Old Spice commercial wh…

Google Trends is a great tool to get an overview on terms people are searching for with the largest search engine in the world. It also shows interesting trends. And something is definitely going on with sear…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.Facebook is known for its uniformi…

Junta42 has been receiving quite a few calls/emails regarding our content marketing matching service versus the new Hubspot inbound marketing marketplace. In response, I took a few minutes to explain what…

More and more celebrity holdouts are joining the Twitter bandwagon. First Bill Gates started tweeting, then yesterday rapper Lil Wayne joined the service. Today, another famous figure has his own Twitter pre…

The S word was on the lips of all CEOs and politicians attending the World Economic Forum at Davos last month. No, it wasnt stimulus — as global leaders looked beyond the bailouts of 2009 and into the future….