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…

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….

One of the biggest problems faced when businesses try to use social media as a marketing tool is that there are simply too many social media sites. A day doesn’t go by when I’m not asked about this new site or that old site and whether or not they can be used is marketing. Most can. However, most simply do not have the reach to make them worthwhile. For the majority of businesses, if they stay focused on four current social sites, they’ll have the vast majority of their marketing covered. Some big sites were excluded. It’s not that Tumblr doesn’t have its place or that Foursquare is useless. It’s that the…

For the past several years, content has been a component of search engine and social media marketing that fell far below the tricks and techniques that helped achieve business goals. It was possible to be successful with limited or low-quality content. In fact, there are those who were able to succeed with no content at all, fooling the search engines and social media sites with methods that proved to be more fruitful than actually creating content that the audience wanted. Those days are finally behind us. It has been a long time coming, but now that search engines, social media sites, and people…

It may not be bigger worldwide, but Alexa shows Pinterest is now ahead of Tumblr in overall US traffic and reach. On the list of top 500 sites in the United States, Pinterest weighs in at #17, one ahead of Tumblr. The photo sharing site shares a little with Tumblr in function, but the form of the site is completely different. Tumblr combines microblogging, photosharing, and GIF-heavy offbeat content into a full blogging platform that rivals Wordpress and Blogger for adoption. Pinterest, on the other hand, has a more modern interface that displays a feed in an adaptive format, giving users the ability…

A little less than a month ago, Twitter blocked API privileges for Instagram making it unable to allow users to find Twitter friends and add them. Now, Twitter has done pretty much the same thing with Tumblr. The sign-up procedure of Tumblr normally includes a step that allows you to find friends on the service using Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. Now, the Twitter option has been removed. What is Twitter thinking? What is the purpose behind not allowing people to integrate with other services so easily? Twitter has always been an easy way for people to share their own data; by signing up through Twitter…