“I gotta have more cowbell!” It has become one of the most popular skits in Saturday Night Live history. When Chistopher Walken played The Bruce Dickinson in a skit that had Will Ferrell playing Gene Frenkle from the band Blue Oyster Cult, the need for more cowbell was born. It was a good skit, but the absurdity of enhancing the song with the obnoxious sound of the cowbell really hit home and made it memorable. In social media, that’s the whole point. When you look at the various posting styles that businesses employ on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and others, there’s something normally missing. Few…

On the surface, Facebook seems like the perfect venue on which to build a service, even a business. It’s wildly popular, easy to develop on, and is the source of viral spread for many apps and services. If you cross a certain line, though, Facebook becomes that pretty face with an axe behind its back ready to hack your business into bits and pieces. The new MessageMe app isn’t the first victim of Facebook’s jealous blade, but it’s one of the most bizarre because it doesn’t appear to be the type of thing that Facebook would chop up. They did, though, cutting off access to Social Graph today and giving yet…

This is a topic that has been covered so many times that one might wonder how it keeps popping up. The reality (from a content perspective) is that Facebook posting best practices is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s frustrating to businesses and annoying to bloggers, but at the end of the day there’s one simple truth: whatever worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow. That’s Facebook. It’s social media in general from a business perspective. There are three dynamics at work and they rarely do more than lightly influence the other two: Facebook and other social media sites…

One of the most important lessons you can learn in Facebook marketing for your business is that you can have a much greater impact on your performance online through Facebook by focusing on what’s happening in the real world. Facebook is virtual, but that doesn’t mean it has to focus on the virtual world. Make it real. If your business is out there doing things in the real world, you have plenty of potential Facebook content to post on your page (as well as you other social media pages and profiles). Do you participate in charities and local events? Do you sponsor a little league team? Do you have a monthly…

Netflix has wanted to go social for a long time. They have been held back by an antiquated law that was rightfully removed late last year. Now, people will be able to share their movie and television show loves on social media. That’s great, and the video for that is below. Here, we’ll talk more about the warrantless email tapping that was attached to the bill. Here’s an excerpt: Now, as always, law enforcement does not need to supply a warrant to read your emails. They don’t need probably cause. They don’t even need to suspect that you have committed a crime. They only need to have “reasonable…

There are a lot of ways that Hollywood has changed the way we use the internet. On one side, the internet is an incredible well of knowledge and innovation, a place of creativity, inspiration, and easy communication. There is no question that the internet has, for better or for worse, morphed the way we view ourselves and our place in society. Consequentially, it has also changed entertainment, marketing, and networking. Alongside the innovations of the internet and of new technology are the innovators who use these tools and give them purpose. There is no point in having this technology if no…

There are two sad realities about online tracking. One reality is that the majority of people have their online activities tracked on nearly every website that they visit and these tracking protocols have very little oversight, nearly no rules associated with them, and can be stored indefinitely by anyone, even sites or companies that you’ve never visited. The other sad reality is that everyone has the ability to stop the tracking, but it would mean doing things that few are willing to do. These things include setting cookies to expire automatically when browsers are closed, ending the use of…

The world of dating is going to get easier – and more complicated – thanks to Google glass. It’s already so easy to find out about various topics or to learn about a person in particular just by using our smartphones, but when Google Glass arrives, it will make it easier to go covert with the date-impressing research. Okay, so it won’t. So the video below is satirical and you can’t really get away with being on a date in the middle of a political discussion while watching football. It doesn’t matter. The funny nature of this video should be taken at face value but the real implications of what Google Glass,…

It was probably just a statistical anomaly. There’s not chance that a social network that is comprised 3:2 women over men would intentionally invite a shockingly high percentage of male journalists to their biggest press event in a while, right? They sent out invites to the publications and by strange coincidence, the ratio of male journalists covering it versus women was a staggering 18:1 according to Buzzfeed (who by sheer fate ended up sending one of the women who attended the event). As you can see in the image below, the event to announce the new Facebook news feed redesign was more male-dominated…

Facebook is redesigning their news feed again and this time it looks like a very positive set of changes. The social network has been notorious over the years for making changes that were initially hated by users universally, but this time they seem to be addressing concerns that users have been voicing for a while. The big problem they may face is with businesses that are struggling to use the platform to get exposure. There will be three primary changes: Bigger pictures, articles, maps, and events will be presented to users in their feeds. This is a good change for most, but those who rely on text…