Let’s start with the bottom line first. Both sides of the argument have valid points. With that said, let’s get to the facts on the matter… The full story can be found on Buzzfeed, but here’s the short version: A woman heard an inappropriate joke told behind her at a conference. She tweeted the incident including a picture of the perpetrators. Conference officials pulled her our, identified the perpetrators, then removed them. One of the perpetrators was fired from their job after the incident started going viral. The woman reporting the incident was fired from her job because of the backlash…

The social media world and offices across America were joined in laughter last week when a video by Pepsi featuring race car driver Jeff Gordon exploded all over Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The video showed an unsuspecting salesperson getting put through a harrowing experience during a test drive while being recorded by hidden camera. The only problem was that it was completely fake. In reality, that wasn’t a problem at all. It’s approaching 30 million YouTube views and has been shared over 2 million times on Facebook. The ad worked even if it was completely staged, even if the car salesperson…

There was a time in 2008 when Twitter really started taking off. Celebrities were starting to use it. Kevin Rose, former geek leader and entrepreneur, dissed his own startup, Pownce, by saying that he preferred Twitter. The company was on a good trajectory. That was on the surface. Behind the scenes, it was far from cozy. They were having coding issues. They couldn’t stay up for an entire day without presenting a fail whale for an extended period of time. They were, in essence, a tech company that was getting too popular for their own good and couldn’t figure out how to bring everything together. Then,…

Students, teachers, and researchers around the globe have used Wikipedia to extend their understanding on just about every subject of general interest known to humans. It isn’t just the academic types. Most people refer to Wikipedia on a regular basis to answer questions, in large part due to the fact that Google loves the site more than any other on the internet. It gets presented as the top result to more queries than anything else, even Google itself. Just how big is it? Today, it has over 25 million articles. Try to fit that into an encyclopedia. This and dozens of other amazing facts are available…

There’s a saying in online marketing that has been around for a while. “Content is king.” The truth is this – before the last year, it really wasn’t. Content has always been important, but it wasn’t until recent updates in Google and Facebook that content took a huge leap from being a portion of search and social marketing to become the actual hub through which search and social marketing flow. Today, marketing starts from content and works its way down versus recent years where content was simply a tool in the marketing strategy. Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter are getting smarter every day….

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…

“I gotta have more cowbell!” It has become one of the most popular skits in Saturday Night Live history. When Chistopher Walken played The Bruce Dickinson in a skit that had Will Ferrell playing Gene Frenkle from the band Blue Oyster Cult, the need for more cowbell was born. It was a good skit, but the absurdity of enhancing the song with the obnoxious sound of the cowbell really hit home and made it memorable. In social media, that’s the whole point. When you look at the various posting styles that businesses employ on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and others, there’s something normally missing. Few…

This is a topic that has been covered so many times that one might wonder how it keeps popping up. The reality (from a content perspective) is that Facebook posting best practices is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s frustrating to businesses and annoying to bloggers, but at the end of the day there’s one simple truth: whatever worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow. That’s Facebook. It’s social media in general from a business perspective. There are three dynamics at work and they rarely do more than lightly influence the other two: Facebook and other social media sites…

One of the most important lessons you can learn in Facebook marketing for your business is that you can have a much greater impact on your performance online through Facebook by focusing on what’s happening in the real world. Facebook is virtual, but that doesn’t mean it has to focus on the virtual world. Make it real. If your business is out there doing things in the real world, you have plenty of potential Facebook content to post on your page (as well as you other social media pages and profiles). Do you participate in charities and local events? Do you sponsor a little league team? Do you have a monthly…

They say you shouldn’t judge by appearances or even fashion styles. Einstein often looked like someone who couldn’t even dress himself or comb his hair, but he turned out to be pretty smart. The best barbers don’t always have the best haircuts. In North Korea, the best surgeons often wear a chef’s hat when presenting new technology to their leaders. That’s the conclusion that can be drawn by the image above, which was released by the state-controlled news agency describing the new Taesongsan General Hospital being built by the army on orders of Kim Jong Eun. As The Atlantic’s David Graham pointed…