Beatles used semaphore signals to promote Help!, their 5th British album. On original British cover, band members hand-gestured to spell out LPUS (on reverse print) or Help Us. It’s a clever use no doubt; but how do you communicate business messages? Do you hand gesture? Or, do you use homing pigeons and torch signals? Definitely not! It’s the age of computer and World Wide Web. Like every façade of life, technology has invaded business communication space rightfully. In fact, improved communication technology helped businesses to have a global reach. Unlike social and inter-personal…

Recently the co-chairmen of the Bi-Partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, Edward Markley and Joe Barton, sent a letter requesting that Mark Zuckerberg give details about Facebook’s plan to permit pre-teens access to the social mediasite. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Image via CrunchBase"][/caption] With children under 13 years old being protected by the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act which demands that parents give their consent regarding personal data to websites, it’s going to be difficult for Zuckerberg to carry through with…

Technology has made it easier for our generation to stay connected to each other in a variety of ways. We can give thanks to the rise of social media which allows us to stay in contact with all of our friends at the click of a button. Spotify is a good example of a company that uses social media to its advantage to allow you to see the music that you’re friends are listening to in real-time. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="96" caption="(Photo credit: Wikipedia)"][/caption] In an effort to connect music and love, Spotify recently partnered with two match-making application companies…

When all considerations are tallied, it’s possible that Salesforce has invested over a billion dollars into social media through the purchase of Buddy Media and Radian6, not to mention the smaller companies they bought such as Rypple and Jigsaw. Is all of this an ego play to be the biggest and baddest in social media, or is this a series of great moves for the CRM company? [caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via CrunchBase"][/caption] Social media is extremely hard to predict and the numbers involved are staggering, but the buzz that will surround the company in 2013…

It only takes 140-characters or less to send a Tweet and it takes under 1,000 employees to operate the company according to research done by social media firm Social Jumpstart. In fact, Disney’s Club Penguin, a social network for kids, has more employees. LinkedIn has nearly 1,800 employees and Facebook has over 3,000. Comparing the different leaders in social media, it’s easy to see which niches take the most effort. Social news site Reddit, for example, has 11 employees servicing “The Front Page of the Internet”, a site that can send hundreds of thousands of unique visitors in hours to a picture…

It’s bad news enough when your mother discreetly sends you a friend request via your favorite social media site. This means every unsavory picture or comment you have needs to be addressed, blocked, or deleted lest your mother goes into a tailspin. Yet it could be worse, you could find yourself staring at a friend request from your dear old grandmother or grandfather. Good news though! A brand new social media site is making your Pop Pop their next target audience. If your grandparent has their own Facebook profile you may experience some of the most cringe worthy posts and comments. Your page…

For decades politicians have fought to gain a foothold in the crucial 18-24 demographic. No longer is this just a matter of having a photograph taken with a pop star or well-known celebrity, but instead a strong presence on social media is becoming a necessity in order to connect with young voters. These changes in electioneering were most recently evident in the French Presidential elections earlier this year. Both Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy fought to gain the younger population’s vote by using social media – notably Twitter – it may just be coincidence that Hollande (the winner)…

This generation’s filmmakers have not been able to accurately portray the ethos of the social media generation yet. When will the John Hughes of the social media generation emerge? The filmmaker John Hughes is considered by many to be the voice of the generation that grew up in the 80s. His movies, such as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, were accurate portrayals of what it was like to grow up during that decade. Move into the 90s and we have movies like You’ve Got Mail, which involves two people who can’t stand each other in real life but connect through email using…

Social media is allowing a whole new generation to emerge. With young adults and children taking over social networking sites, it shows just how advanced our youth is today. They are using social media to their advantage, connecting with people (of course, as we all do), but they are also using it to promote themselves in numerous ways, turning themselves into a media entity. Recently, AXA has released a fascinating study showing how children these days are using social media to build their own personal digital brand. It seems that they are realizing more and more that they have the power to shape…

Everybody has a different view of social media: enthusiastic, annoyed, indifferent.  However, when it comes to being amusing, nothing beats the apocalyptic view of social media.  Nothing makes me happier than those wonderful people who view Facebook as a harbinger of the End of Days.   They’ve become increasingly rare, therefore I was pleasantly surprised to read Andrew Keen go on about how Facebook threatens to “Zuck up” the human race. Now, you probably have come across Keen’s thesis before, and he doesn’t really tread any new ground.  In a nutshell he says that the endless…