This past Friday was the release of the highly anticipated summer blockbuster Superman: Man of Steel. The film brought in $125.1 million in its opening weekend – more than any other movie ever released in the month of June. On Twitter, the words “Man of Steel” are still trending as fans flocked to their computers and mobile devices to share their thoughts on the movie. With all the buzz surrounding the man in blue, I thought it’d be good to see what superheroes best represent our favorite social media sites. So here it is: the @Social #LeagueofJustice! Facebook: Superman Everybody should…

It took longer than most thought and may be a lighter hit than expected, but the exodus of a Yahoo-owned Tumblr has begun with the resignation of Creative Director Jacob Bijani. He was the fifth employee of the startup five years ago and the first designer to join the team. In a blog post, he did not mention Yahoo at all, nor did he discuss his relationship with any other executives. Today was my last day at Tumblr. Five years ago I joined a team of four as Tumblr’s first designer, creative director, and product engineer. That team has since grown to 182 of the most wonderful and talented people around….

Has the sleeping giant awoken or is this a last ditch effort to remain relevant? After buying Tumblr last week, Yahoo is now in the mix to buy Hulu with numbers in the $600m to $800m being tossed around. They don’t seem to be done yet, either. At the same time and separately, according to sources inside the company, Yahoo is also contemplating at least two other significant purchases — in the $150 million to $200 million range — each for a mobile and a communications company. Wow, guys. This really is Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo, isn’t it? The Tumblr deal was huge, even if mostly symbolic, but to be involved…

A social media study conducted by Pew (pdf) reveals some interesting facts about social media use by teenagers. One of the most interesting takeaways is that Tumblr just isn’t as popular as many people believe in the youngest demographic. Twitter is. It’s growing substantially with 24% of teens microblogging their 140-characters regularly in 2012 compared to 16% in 2011. Instagram is also growing in popularity with 11% of teens using Facebook’s mobile image darling. Compare this to Tumblr, a much older service and one that is wrongly associated by many to be a teen haven, is sitting at only 5%…

Yahoo is finally tossing its hat into the social media ring. Recently, Yahoo announced that it would be incorporating tweets into its newsfeed on Yahoo.com. This signals a serious shift, since Yahoo is giving equal weight to tweets and ‘bona fide news.’ Anyone who’s paying attention will have noticed that Twitter is one of the largest growing companies in the world. With over half a billion users and over $250 million in advertising revenue just last year, Twitter is also one of the most valuable brand strategy tools available to a company. However, Yahoo is now using Twitter as a news outlet,…

As Tumblr users cope with news of a new overlord, many are voicing both concern and annoyance at the $1.1 billion deal. The most vocal are getting their message heard and it’s spreading across Tumblr as well as other social networks, but it’s not enough to make Yahoo or Tumblr concerned. Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg noticed something Sunday after the rumors of a done deal started surfacing: “Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.” While some are saying this is just the beginning…

There are two stages to this gambit by Yahoo that must be accomplished. They have to beat out Facebook, Microsoft, and anybody else interested in the 10-digit price that Tumblr is likely to fetch in the coming days. Then, they have to let the site be as it is and make no changes at all to the platform. The Swisher/Kafka tandem over at AllThingsD have reported that the Yahoo board is going to meet this weekend to discuss buying the social blogging platform for a reported $1.1 billion in cash. Sources said that the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s CEO Marissa Mayer has decided that buying Tumblr was going…

Yahoo is quickly going the way of AOL in that it’s becoming a place that simply isn’t “cool”, at least to the emerging internet users and those 20- and 30-somethings who still want to be cutting edge (and 40-, and 50-…). Everyone knows it, even Yahoo itself. “One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.” They started heading in the right direction by getting a hip, young CEO to run the…

It’s not the hip, new thing anymore. That much is clear as Facebook approaches a decade of existence, but the appeal of Facebook doesn’t seem to be slowing for anyone else other than teenagers. That’s the premise of the infographic below and it seems to have some legs. Parents are getting on Facebook. This is a major downer for teens who once viewed Facebook as the online venue that they could “be themselves” without interactions or even knowledge from their parents and other adults. That isn’t the case anymore. As parents learn how to keep tabs on their kids online, kids are learning new ways to interact….

In an ideal world, marketing content through social media would be an extended process because we would all have the time to do it the right way. We could focus on positioning it, nurturing it, and timing everything out exactly like it should be timed. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world and we have to maximize our results while minimizing the time and effort to achieve them. There are plenty of shortcuts that make promoting content on social media faster and easier and there are plenty of techniques used to make the promotions more effective. The real key is to find the right mix of the two to…