Author: Louie Baur

At the World Economic Forum in 2004, Bill Gates made an interesting promise. “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” The rise of social media has had others making other predictions for years. One such prediction has been in the form of bloggers and technology experts declaring that email will be dead by 2009, then 2010, then 2011… and on… and on. Spam and email both persist. They have both improved as well. According to Litmus, email was still the most popular online activity of 2012 despite Facebook taking up the bulk of our online time. Is your business using it? Are you improving on your practices,…

When Facebook announced last week that Insights, their page-level analytics platform, had been reporting the wrong numbers for several months, most took it as a growing pain of a company growing into its own. It was a minor negative, something that caused a handful of “Facebook advertising has a long way to go” blog posts but one that will be forgotten tomorrow (if it hasn’t been forgotten already). Put on your conspiracy theory hats, kids, as I tell you what may be really happening here. Since Monday, the numbers have gone up as expected. In some cases, they’ve gone way up. Some of the pages that we…

They say you learn something new every day. I learned something about Pinterest the other day that blew my mind a little. Users like links. This might seem like a no-brainer to some, but it goes against what I’ve learned in my years on the various social networks. On most networks, there are images and there are links. Images normally perform the best across the board. Links, on the other hand, do not. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all prefer images over links. It isn’t just the algorithms on Facebook and Google+, it’s also the overall community sentiment on all three, including Twitter. Pinterest…

The concept of a car that drives itself without our input is a scary prospect to some. Anyone who has been in a collision that they feel they couldn’t have avoided knows that even split-second human reactions are often not enough to prevent an accident. While there will be those who are extremely trusting of the technology, others may not even consider it as an option when they do come out. Some note that computers are not as smart as humans when it comes to real-life input. The set of commands necessary to teach are robot how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a standard kitchen is so long that…

Twitter is still the most used social network by businesses. This surprises some, but the latest statistics showed that 77% of businesses were on Twitter versus 74% on Facebook. It’s not a big difference, but it’s still at least a little surprising to many who view Facebook as the big social network and Twitter as the other guy in the field. Twitter is easier. It requires less time. It’s more about communication than popularity and there are no algorithms that can make your efforts meaningless like they can on Twitter. I’m not suggesting that businesses should be on Twitter and not Facebook. On the…

“Never” is a bold word. It is absolute and endless. To say that something can never happen is one of the most ignorant things that someone can say (or blog) in public. Thankfully, I tempered my statement with the word, “may”. “Impossible” is word that is similar to “never”. I’ll invoke it now: it isn’t impossible for social media to continue in one form or another indefinitely because of its nature. As long as there are humans, there’s a good chance that there will be some variation of social media. It’s a hard cat to put back in the bag. The folks over at Dashburst put together a graphic that explains five…

Anyone who has been on Twitter as long as I have (6 years I believe) knows that the site has gone through major transformations in the past. Lately, Vine might be the only major change in a while but there was a time when it seemed like proper Twitter etiquette changed week by week. When I first started, links were magical and very few people posted them. Today, many accounts post nothing but links. This is a big mistake. If you post only links, you’re really not posting anything at all. Why? Because people aren’t really following you if that’s the case. Run some tests. Use bitly or goo.gl or other click…

Those in social media marketing as a profession realize that there are certain unknowns when it comes to the new web. We know that people are on social media. We know that they don’t want direct marketing. We also know they’d rather get direct marketing than pay for the services, so there’s at least a little room for something. The question is, “what is that something?” Whether from B2C or B2B, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn give marketers the ability to try to reach the target audience and generate leads. The vast majority are trying. Most are failing, or at least not meeting…

Facebook is about to get real and make their push into the physical wallets that they’ve always coveted. It’s not an evil plan of world domination (though it could be argued that it’s a step in that direction) but rather an innovative spin on the gift card industry that might actually have the legs to work. Gift giving on Facebook never really took off for the social network. They’ve had some success with digital Starbucks cards, but the whole of their gifting program has been unsuccessful. Their latest addition, physical gift cards, has some interesting features that might help it to stand out and…

It may not be the strangest geek find of all time, but it’s up there. Leonard Nimoy who played the ever-logical and always-lovable Spock on Star Trek, is found in the video below sings the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. The “bravest hobbit of them all” gets the full 60s treatment, including girls in sweatshirts and long ears with signs supporting the star of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Originally filmed in 1967 for a variety show called Malibu U, it was later part of segment for Funk Me Up Scotty, a 1996 BBC2 documentary that followed the musical careers of the stars of the original Star Trek. Warning: After…