If you’re one of those who almost deleted your Instagram account but did not because you figured you’d give them one last chance to stop leaning towards the dark side, the latest round of Facebook/Instagram controversy should be enough to push you over the edge. As has been widely covered, Instagram and Facebook are locking people out of their accounts and requiring government issued photo IDs to get back into them. The story isn’t the fact that they’re doing this; Facebook has been known to have zero concern for their users and a distinct willingness to push their social media addiction to the limits….

The cold war between Facebook and Twitter continued Thursday and nobody was really surprised by it. Vine, the new video app by Twitter that allows looping 6-second videos to be recorded and posted to the microblogging site, launched with the ability for users to find their Facebook friends that were also using the app. That ability lasted a few hours on Thursday before Facebook shut down API access. “It’s basically an annoyance, a hindrance on an easy way to connect with all your existing friends using the service,” wrote Mike Isaac. “It would have been a good way to jump into a new product, rather…

We talked about the way that Domino’s pizza posts customer responses on their Facebook in a clever and effective manner. Unfortunately, most businesses are not in the position to be able to post in the same way  whether it’s due to being a localized business or simply not having the brand recognition and customer interaction that the pizza chain has. The good news is that it can still be done well without being a nationally-recognized name. People might not be posting as often to social pages or visit the websites of local businesses, but one thing that happens regularly for many is the online reviews…

If there’s one word I hate using in marketing, it’s “engagement”. The term has been so overused and abused since the rise of social media that its meaning has become distorted. It’s defined in different ways and means different things to different people. Thankfully, the moves by search giants like Google and Bing as well as social giants like Facebook and Twitter have brought in at least a little uniformity to we should look for when trying to harness engagement. First and foremost, websites today must be engaging. That’s not to say that they have to be interactive; heavy websites that make people…

One of the biggest old-school truths that is obsolete today is the idea that you should follow everyone on Twitter that follows you. It was once considered “social media polite” to follow just about everyone who took the time to follow your own updates. This never included spammers or bots, of course, but when real people and companies followed yours, many gurus recommended giving them a follow back. The interactions and ways that Twitter has evolved over the years has brought it to the point that most businesses have corrected this old notion. As a social media society, we are more willing to not…

Facebook purists will pan this post. They will say that the best way to post to Facebook is to post whatever you’re doing or thinking right now, that “planning” posts is not only insincere but that it undermines the point of Facebook altogether. Their points are valid and noted. Now, let’s talk about reality. Busy people who have their own social media and potentially the social media profiles of sites and companies with which they work need tools. It’s true that the best way to post to Facebook is through the native interfaces – Facebook.com itself and their mobile app. However, there are drawbacks….

Americans crave football and appreciate a positive customer service experience. They pay, on average, about $100 a year for sports programming. Seventy-three percent of U.S. males and 55 percent of females watch football. How do they get their football fix? Sixty percent watch NFL football on television sets, and eight percent catch games on their computers. Twenty-seven percent of Americans watch between six and ten hours of football per week during the NFL season. The cable industry is thriving—it raked in 97.6 billion in revenue last year alone. So, how do consumers feel about the customer…

Go on any social network at any point throughout the day and you will be received with an array of images, not necessarily personal photos (although they are shared too) but images found or created from across the web shared on various social sites. Sites like Instagram where it has allowed us to customize our crafty photography with filters along with meme generators enabling us to create silly photos have most definitely played a role in making us want to share images we create. However, the rise of infographics has probably played the biggest hand in visual imagery becoming more of what we want…

Google Authorship has been around for a while. It has helped many bloggers and journalists stand out by having their images appear directly in search results next to the articles they publish. It highlights the number of people that have them in their Google+ circles and gives a link to other writings by the author. This is nothing new. Google AuthorRank has been given much speculation for about a year now. The idea is simple – Google will give higher rankings to those who have demonstrated expertise in a particular field. If someone is prolific at writing about a subject and their writing is well…

There’s always a risk when it comes to aggressive advertising and marketing that many are unwilling to take. On television, radio, search, and display ads, there will be those who do not appreciate what you’re putting in front of them. On social, this is greatly amplified because people have the ability to respond. It is nearly impossible to post effective content and make it visible to your target audience on Facebook without running into the occasional hater. In fact, if you’re not getting any negative comments at all, chances are either your message is not business-effective (are you promoting…