You have the world at your fingertips. Social media is our most recent progression in the history of our communication and yet, some people are still unaware of what social media entails. Many people get hung up on social networks that they think that is all there is to social media and nothing more… they could not be more wrong. Interacting in a public forum is a form of social media, I would even go as far as saying that MSN Messenger and AOL were early adapters to the shifting within our communication, the one on one chats to the chat rooms of Yahoo. Social media began in small spurts and progressed…

I have a confession to make; I am guilty of writing too much when trying to explain something via Skype, or through a chat messaging system. It has been often said “What are you writing a book?” and then I switched to making sure I pressed enter after every few sentence to prevent hearing that again. But it got me thinking, since the original caps on characters began with text messaging we have really shorten how much we truly want to read in a messaging format. Twitter mimicked this behavior by completely tapping into our short attention spans. …

From August 16th to 19th, I attended Gen Con, a hobby game convention held in the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis. The four-day convention was attended by over 41,000 unique individuals this year, which marked its most successful year to date. Started in 1967, Gen Con is one of the world’s first gaming conventions. Unlike the NY and CA Comic Cons, or E3, Gen Con is mainly focused on tabletop games, like Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and board games like Settlers of Catan. Attendance numbers for Gen Con peaked in the mid-90s at around 30,000 unique visitors,…

Pinterest can be such a fun place to post pictures you either take yourself or find on the web. Creating creative boards that you can fill with pictures displaying your interests is easy, and sharing your personality through visualization seems to be the latest trend. Although Pinterest will allow its users to pin from a Browser plug-in or from a website through the “pin it” button, you may notice that if you copy and paste the title and url into the description box, you will get sent to a Pinterest jail-like pop-up. This pop-up will remind you of Pinterest’s etiquette or even warn you that what…

The latest Joy of Tech comic from Geek Culture hits many people in today’s economy close to home. It’s all fun and games until it happens to you and companies are going to extreme measures to make sure that the people they lay off don’t go and bad mouth them on social media. Opinions are often more powerful than facts and the power of social media allows people to spread their opinions in different ways today….

It’s one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world. It is both the subject of addiction and ridicule with opponents and avid users often going at each other in person or on other social networks. It is huge in the United States, but it’s also very popular in countries such as Brazil, Japan, Mexico, and Russia. For better or for worse, Twitter has become a huge part of our daily lives whether we use it as individuals or not. Political campaigns are judged by it. News is spread through it. Malware is shared, embarrassing images can go viral, and the minute details of many people’s lives can be found through…

Social media is changing the digital marketing landscape. In the past 5 years, social media has become a major component of online marketing, embraced by small business owners and major corporations. Social media has become such a major part of online marketing; some corporations create divisions in their corporations for the sole purpose of conducting marketing on social media outlets. In the past, social media websites were not considered important for marketing, now they are considered to be highly important. The importance placed on them has led to some websites being valued at billions…

Have you noticed the increase of pictures on Social Networks as of late? Google+ users have pretty much been doing this since the social network was still closed to the public. However, Facebook users have taken the picture sharing up a notch since that is what many people seem to be sharing these days. I am not complaining, in fact I personally part-take in posting pictures since learning that pictures that are directly uploaded to the site are preferred by the Facebook algorithm, more so than links. In fact this states true for anything that is organically added to the site like a status update or…

Put the Custom in Customers. Businesses have learned that Social Media is no longer a presumed fad, it is actually an evolution of our communication and due to this they have inserted themselves on Social Networks, revamped their Internet Marketing strategies and learned as much as they can about adding the human touch to their social activities and advertisements, but what about their websites? So maybe your website isn’t the place you prefer to socialize and perhaps you want to keep that aspect to the social sites you build upon daily, adding a blog to your website can be a form of humanizing…

There seems to be a lot of surprise surrounding the amount of personal data that is being used by websites and social networks, as if all of a sudden this is new. Yes, Facebook in particular has received a lot of flak for its secrecy of using personal data for Marketing and Advertising purposes. The secrecy should be more upsetting than the fact that in this instance, Facebook uses personal data to substitute for dollars. Many ask why… the answer? Facebook is a business. As much as we (the users) like to think that Facebook is ours and arguably, we have helped build Facebook, since it is after all, a…