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…

When it comes to advertising today, things have changed. In some ways it’s due to social media. Searching for “I Love Zappos” yields 2,000,000 results. Searching for “I Love Dow Chemical Company” yields 3, according to Bob Garfield and Doug Levy at the SXSW panel titled “Cant’ Buy Me Likes”. Thanks to their presentation, this number is sure to go way up as people discuss it (such as this blog). By contrast, searching for “I Love Satan” yields 293,000. It’s not a good thing to be loved less than the prince of darkness. What has happened? Why is it that billion dollar ad branding campaigns get usurped…

The technology that Microsoft has been envisioning for the future is astounding, realistic, and will give us the opportunity to be more productive. That much is true. What’s not true is that they say these technologies will help bring families together. Judging by the recent history of technological advances, that’s the exact opposite effect of the technologies they describe in their video, “Microsoft’s New Envisioning Center: Live, Work, Play.” Take smartphones, for example. They are technological wonders that allow multiple methods of communication from face-to-face video interaction…

The opinions that we express in the real world are often not congruent with what we post on Twitter according to a report from Pew Research. Just because something is loved or hated on Twitter doesn’t mean that the real world feels the same way. Sometimes, the Twitter reality is opposite of real world reality. In politics, social media is left leaning, but both sides come out strong when there are complaints to be Tweeted. According to Pew: At times the Twitter conversation is more liberal than survey responses, while at other times it is more conservative. Often it is the overall negativity that…

To say that the internet has completely revolutionized the way we communicate with each other would be a serious understatement. People around the world can stay connected in real time through mediums such as Skype and Facebook, and information can be found instantaneously on almost any subject imaginable. No wonder we have so many self proclaimed “experts” out there. Politics has even found its place online. Many protest groups now choose to use Facebook as a means to organize public demonstrations. The Arab Spring protest may be one of the best examples of the Facebook organized demonstration….

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…

In one sentence, the advice that business owners and marketers need to hear is this: “Everything on your Facebook page should be centered around the real world.” No, I don’t mean the reality TV show that launched it all in 1992. When The Real World launched on MTV 27 seasons ago (yes, it’s still going strong in case you weren’t aware), it set in motion a genre of television that many people claim to hate but that still gets millions of viewers every day. Today, the day to day version of “the real world of marketing on Facebook” should take one concept from the original show intro: “…start getting real.”…

There are plenty of articles, blog posts, videos, and testimonials out there demonstrating that businesses are having tremendous success using Facebook and other social media sites to communicate successfully with their customers. Those aren’t the stories that you ever hear about, though. Instead, many are terrified of a major Facebook misstep such as what recently happened to Applebee’s. Those are the stories that are told, the ones that gurus discuss and warn about in blog posts to keep pageviews going to their websites. Just as the real world news has always had an attitude of, “if it bleeds,…