Klout, the social influence measure that is likely the most used and well-respected, rolled out a series of changes yesterday. They upgraded their iPhone app to include more features and made changes to their +K system. Giving someone a “+K” is like voting for them as an influencer for a particular topic. This helps their Klout score, which ranges from 10-100, and highlights them within that particular topic. Until today, an individual could be influential in up to 20 topics, but Klout expanded it to include all of the topics in which a person holds influence based upon their social media activity…

Quick, what’s your Twitter handle? What’s your Facebook profile URL? What’s you Google+ address? You were probably able to answer the first two questions. The third one is a mystery to nearly everyone. Sure, it’s easy to find you, particularly if you have a not-so-common name. Just search for their name on Google and if they have an account it should be prominently displayed, assuming they’re using it regularly. Internally, all you really need is their name and a rough idea of what they look like to find them. Too hard. We should be able to tell people where to go. We should be able to put it on a business…

It only takes 140-characters or less to send a Tweet and it takes under 1,000 employees to operate the company according to research done by social media firm Social Jumpstart. In fact, Disney’s Club Penguin, a social network for kids, has more employees. LinkedIn has nearly 1,800 employees and Facebook has over 3,000. Comparing the different leaders in social media, it’s easy to see which niches take the most effort. Social news site Reddit, for example, has 11 employees servicing “The Front Page of the Internet”, a site that can send hundreds of thousands of unique visitors in hours to a picture…

For decades politicians have fought to gain a foothold in the crucial 18-24 demographic. No longer is this just a matter of having a photograph taken with a pop star or well-known celebrity, but instead a strong presence on social media is becoming a necessity in order to connect with young voters. These changes in electioneering were most recently evident in the French Presidential elections earlier this year. Both Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy fought to gain the younger population’s vote by using social media – notably Twitter – it may just be coincidence that Hollande (the winner)…

This generation’s filmmakers have not been able to accurately portray the ethos of the social media generation yet. When will the John Hughes of the social media generation emerge? The filmmaker John Hughes is considered by many to be the voice of the generation that grew up in the 80s. His movies, such as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, were accurate portrayals of what it was like to grow up during that decade. Move into the 90s and we have movies like You’ve Got Mail, which involves two people who can’t stand each other in real life but connect through email using…

Social media is allowing a whole new generation to emerge. With young adults and children taking over social networking sites, it shows just how advanced our youth is today. They are using social media to their advantage, connecting with people (of course, as we all do), but they are also using it to promote themselves in numerous ways, turning themselves into a media entity. Recently, AXA has released a fascinating study showing how children these days are using social media to build their own personal digital brand. It seems that they are realizing more and more that they have the power to shape…

Everybody has a different view of social media: enthusiastic, annoyed, indifferent.  However, when it comes to being amusing, nothing beats the apocalyptic view of social media.  Nothing makes me happier than those wonderful people who view Facebook as a harbinger of the End of Days.   They’ve become increasingly rare, therefore I was pleasantly surprised to read Andrew Keen go on about how Facebook threatens to “Zuck up” the human race. Now, you probably have come across Keen’s thesis before, and he doesn’t really tread any new ground.  In a nutshell he says that the endless…

Kevin Rose has always been known as an “ideas guy”. His ventures haven’t always paid off as well as they could have with Revision3, Pownce, and Milk all selling for less than many would have thought and with Digg dropping out of prominence in the social news arena, but he’s tasted success with all of them at one point or another. Google is banking on that by moving him to Google Ventures after trying him out on the Google+ team for a short stint. Rose has had success in picking winners with a portfolio that has include Twitter, path, OMGPOP, and Foursquare. Three-year-old Google Ventures claims to have…

There was a time when an unhappy customer was an unhappy customer. Best practices said to deal with their concerns, empathize, try to fix it, and if you couldn’t move on. Today, the last step has changed thanks to social media. Customers are empowered to be able to voice their concerns to a much wider audience than ever before. The old saying was that an unhappy customer will tell 10 people. Today, they can tell 10 thousand with the click of a few buttons. At the very least, they can tell their friends, family, and co-workers by simply posting their disgust on Facebook. The game has changed. This infographic…

As of 2012, printed newspaper has been surpassed big time by online news revenue. Networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming the new “Sunday’s paper” causing traditional news outlets to be a thing of the past. At least three times a week, about 46% of people read the news online. This number will continue to increase. Already, over 50% of people find out about breaking news through social media. You can find out about anything and everything via social media. As far as online news sources go, Facebook dominates how people are finding out about things. With 59% of consumers…