Call this a #protip for social media use. If you’re helping your grandmother count her life savings, don’t try to impress your friends by snapping a picture of it and posting it on Facebook, particularly when your home address is on your Facebook profile. That’s exactly what a 17-year-old Australian girl did while helping her 72-year-old grandmother. Thankfully, the masked robbers armed with knives and a club broke into her own house and robbed her 47-year-old mother instead. It was her mom’s house that was on her Facebook page. As Jolie O’Dell at Venture Beat put it, “Use the sense God gave a horse…

As of 2012, printed newspaper has been surpassed big time by online news revenue. Networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming the new “Sunday’s paper” causing traditional news outlets to be a thing of the past. At least three times a week, about 46% of people read the news online. This number will continue to increase. Already, over 50% of people find out about breaking news through social media. You can find out about anything and everything via social media. As far as online news sources go, Facebook dominates how people are finding out about things. With 59% of consumers…

For those of you that don’t know, Klout is a way of measuring digital influence through social networking platforms. I’ll admit that I was fully engrossed in checking my score compulsively when I first discovered it and was more elated than a kid on Christmas when my score broke a certain number. Granted, it’s still a modest score, but I feel good about it. Or I did until I really sat down and really thought about it. Please note that, while I write this, I’m sure my Klout score is depreciating in value. Soon I’ll be back to a lowly ten. Klout and clout are really two different things. Klout is…

Facebook gives itself a facelift by improving the user experience yet again. Facebook’s Timeline, which was implemented back earlier in the year, was given the digital makeover by compressing the user profile across the cover photo. Previous Timelines were bulky and gaudy, with large tabs under the cover photo where profile visitors could cruise a user’s profile. Timeline has now designed the user’s profile to be subtle and manageable but does this improvement really do anything for the Facebook experience? With millions of dollars in revenue from the Facebook IPO and all the publicity…

She already dominated the pop world, but now with over 51 million fans on Facebook and 24 million Twitter followers, Lady Gaga plans to conquer the social media world with her very own site. The plan is to round up all of her fans and unite them under one roof, a separate social media site deemed properly, “Little Monsters.”  Here, fans are able to connect with one another and share all things Gaga related, as well as share their own pictures and videos. According to developers, Little Monsters resembles Pinterest and Reddit, allowing users to scroll through picture tiles, post and repost images…

It’s about time! Finally there is an iPhone app for Facebook page administrators to be “on-the-go” and still be up to date with their fans. As a community manager, my business associates and I feel this app will be a great addition to our methods of managing our client’s pages. With social media comes a feeling of instant gratification. I think with social media, there should be timeliness with the response on a post that fans want to see. Everyone has immediate access to what you post and everything that they post, they want an immediate response on. For a community manager it allows for your…

I don’t know about anyone else, but I think Apple has a huge “underground” stronghold on social media – and they don’t pay a damn thing for it. Apple for some reason or another has an unparalleled ever surrounding hype about itself that just attracts everyone in the technology era. Especially now with the Worldwide Developers Conference coming up the second week in June, I am seeing an increasingly steady trend of Apple product rumors. As a social media marketer, it is unbelievable to me that Apple is able to have users do it on their own for them. That is part of why Apple is as successful…

It looks like Pinterest. It acts like Digg. The newest player in the social media sphere adds some features from Stumbleupon and Twitter to the mix to form Thruzt, now entering into public beta. Unlike many of its predecessors, Thruzt encourages networks to be formed within the community to draw attention to submissions. Users select content on the web that they find valuable or write up their own stories on their blogs and submit it to Thruzt. Then, the “game” is on to get it enough votes to get popular. The first thing people will notice when visiting is that the layout is very similar to Pinterest….

It’s all a matter of expectations. When we go to Facebook, we expect to see our friends and family detailing (often too much so) their lives through pictures and declarations that range from mundane to awesome. When we go to Twitter, we expect to see news from trusted sources (depending on who you’re following) and quick tidbits from our friends. When we go to Google+, we expect to see people talking about why others should be on Google+. When we go to Pinterest, we expect to see cool things to buy (amongst other things, of course). That’s why they just got a lot of money. This expectation has been set…

Social media is proving to be a gold mine for professionals in the area of marketing and public relations. Marketing career data suggests that more demographic information is available through online means than ever before, and many applications allow information to be quickly analyzed for business purposes. This growth in the amount of marketing work available has led to an explosion in salaries among social marketing professionals. Nationally, salaries for social media marketing jobs typically range from $40,000 to $90,000 per year, according to business news website HispanicBusiness.com….