Advice for small businesses on using social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and how to integrate these tools into the marketing and recruiting efforts of your company. Consider this: It wasn’t until 1997 that the Internet reached 50 million users in the United States. Facebook gained over 100 million users in the U.S. from January 2009 to January 2010, marking a 145 percent growth rate w...

Now you can learn SEO tips and optimization from Google which has made available for download a 49 page PDF entitled: Google’s SEO Report Card (released Mar 1, 2010). This report was actually prepared for in-house use at Google after doing a review to identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages. These improvements could: help users find your pages more easily in search eng...

The Three Natural Laws of Social Media You Can’t Fake Having A Personality.  Be Yourself, be open, be authentic. You Can’t Automate Trust.  Do what you say you will.  Don’t worry about making mistakes, real people aren’t perfect.  “We trust people whose inside values are visible on the outside.” – Liz Strauss Help others to help yourself.  Think of others first, then they will think of you.  Would you...

A large number of aircraft and watercraft have disappeared over the years without a trace in the area of the western Atlantic Ocean (east of Florida and north of Cuba and Puerto Rico) known as the Bermuda Triangle or the Devil's Triangle. Many have attributed these disappearances to aliens, paranormal activity and other strange theories. Now scientists have discovered a more plausible cause for the...

One of my favorite blogs is:  Singularity Hub Keith Kleiner, AKA “Keith Singularity”, has a great post at Singularity Hub about 12 videos that give us reasons to love the future. “Most simply look neat, some are pretty freakin’ weird, a few are sublime. Enjoy.”  Click the photo below to see the 12 videos: 12 Videos That Will Help You Love the Future at Singularity Hub follow Singularity Hub on Twitter ...

Charlene Li, social media analyst and co-author of “groundswell – winning in a world transformed by social technologies”, spoke on the future of Social Networks (slides are available on SlideShare, summary available at allfacebook) on March 6, 2008.  She stated: I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that...

Surprise! Only 20% of the Fortune Global 100 Companies are using all four platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Blogs Burson-Marsteller released the results of a global survey of social media use by a sample of the Fortune Global 100 list (29 U.S. companies, 48 European, 20 Asia-Pacific, 3 Latin America) – between Nov 2009 and Jan 2010. The results are very interesting Although most of these companies are u...

Joe Chernov (Director of Content for Eloqua), blogged recently about giving away the “Eloqua Social Media Playbook”, a 42 page guide to conducting business (and yourself) on the Social Web. There is something both thrilling and humbling about taking your best work, undressing it of all commercial value, and giving it away for free. But I am beginning to think the thrill outweighs the humility, bec...

What is the “social glue” that adheres couples, families, communities and societies while acting as an “economic lubricant”? Why, it’s Oxytocin! – a hormone that is a neurotransmitter in our brains (AKA the hormone of love or the cuddle chemical) - it influences our ability to bond with others. Tim Kocher recently published at his blog a post entitled:  Neuroeconomics – Social Networking “Feels” Like Falling i...

Jesse Thomas of award-winning creative agency Jess3 has been working through an infographic challenge: trying to accurately depict the size of the key players in the geo / social space and has created a handy visual of the size of the internet’s behemoths—including Skype, Facebook, Yahoo Mail—and new tech companies on the scene like Foursquare and BrightKite. The infographic also includes a visualization of each co...