“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…

Do you remember the person who consulted with you about social media and told you that brands are having tremendous success on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest? That’s the type of person that you’re reaching the most according to a report by NBCUniversal Integrated Media. The report is designed to show how consumers who are part of GenX and GenY are digesting their influences. It took a split approach to the study which consisted of 2,500 people – 2,000 were average respondents age 18-49 and the other 500 were “digital trendsetters” in the same age group which represent 5% of the national…

It was hot, then it was cold, then it was hot, then it was cold. Google+, the search giant’s 54th attempt at a social network, is going on two years old now and it has made a splash in the social media world with half a billion users, over 100 million of whom are considered “active”. These seem to be impressive numbers until you spend enough time on the site and realize that it’s still not in the same league as Facebook when it comes to engagement. People live a good portion of their lives on Facebook, while they struggle to remember to check their Google+. They aren’t far off from having a truly valid social…

We know where to find porn. There are more websites dedicated to giving people their skin fix than there are sites dedicated to curing cancer, solving political issues, or educating children. Why, then, does porn continue to pop up on so many apps and just about every user-generated content site? Vine, Twitter’s new 6-second video app, had major porn problems within hours of launch. 500px photography app had to settle for a 17+ rating on the app store over porn. Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Ning – they’ve all had their share of porn issues that keep popping up despite desperate measures taken…

There has been a lot of discussion about staying relevant on social media, rightfully so. Too many businesses are trying to “fit in” on Facebook and Google+ by posting funny images that they found on any of the various funny picture resources out there. They are not the right venues for such activities from a business perspective. Twitter, however, is. On Twitter, there is less of a differentiation between businesses and individuals. Facebook and Google+ both have pages for businesses that are handled differently from individual profiles. On Twitter, a profile is a profile whether it’s a person,…

A recent study by AdAge, which has been tracking such things since 2009, shows that there are over 180,000 people on Twitter who claim to be social media mavens, experts, consultants, ninjas, pros, warriors, or some other noun that’s intended to fill you with confidence about their ability to save you from the evil world of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. This is up from 16k when they first checked. It’s challenging for businesses to keep up. The world of social media offers so much potential, so many options, and has so many people using it every day that the allure to get involved is high, but there…

One of the biggest problems faced when businesses try to use social media as a marketing tool is that there are simply too many social media sites. A day doesn’t go by when I’m not asked about this new site or that old site and whether or not they can be used is marketing. Most can. However, most simply do not have the reach to make them worthwhile. For the majority of businesses, if they stay focused on four current social sites, they’ll have the vast majority of their marketing covered. Some big sites were excluded. It’s not that Tumblr doesn’t have its place or that Foursquare is useless. It’s that the…

You may notice a drop in your Pinterest followers today. Don’t worry – your popularity level hasn’t fallen. It’s just the spammers and bots that Pinterest is targeting, so the “loss” of followers won’t really be a loss at all. In fact, Pinterest estimates that 99% of users will only lose around 10 followers. It’s the bigger accounts that are going to be hit the hardest, but they won’t suffer at all in the engagement arena. Spam and bot accounts are the types that don’t really interact with you anyway so the drop is only going to sting a little in the pride department. For those who have purchased followers…

For the past several years, content has been a component of search engine and social media marketing that fell far below the tricks and techniques that helped achieve business goals. It was possible to be successful with limited or low-quality content. In fact, there are those who were able to succeed with no content at all, fooling the search engines and social media sites with methods that proved to be more fruitful than actually creating content that the audience wanted. Those days are finally behind us. It has been a long time coming, but now that search engines, social media sites, and people…

Pinterest is a fun image-sharing social network that allows us users to share visually with others publicly on what we deem enjoyable, cool, geeky, educational or fun. Truly the topics are endless since we are able to create our own boards, naming them what we want and the more imaginative the better. The site allows us to choose the category we want to add the board to as well as a description of what type of visual content people can expect within each board they choose to follow. …