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For retailers, it’s usually the most wonderful time of the year, but with consumer spending down because of the recession, businesses are looking to social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to draw in more holiday shoppers. Deloitte recently released its 24th Annual Holiday Retail Spending and Trends Survey. They questioned over 10,000 consumers and found that 17%… Read more
A new study recently released shows that more than the ‘average Joe’ is using social media to develop networks. Savvy political leaders are employing the strength of the Internet to reach constituents and develop policies.… Read more
Traditionally, most spy agencies relied on secret satellites and clandestine agents but now the CIA wants to monitor “open source” intelligence. That is, bites taken from newspapers, TV shows and Internet postings.… Read more
At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA, the VP of Google announced that a new Google Labs experiment will be starting soon. The latest experiment will help searches find information from their social network contacts with every Google search. The project will be launching in the next few weeks. In order to use the service effectively, you have… Read more
An experiment by MIT involving social media has been almost as revealing as what others can learn about you from an online social media site. Many people sign on to the social media sites in order to reconnect with old friends, new friends, and family members but many may fail to understand just what a profile on sites like MySpace,… Read more
As social media continues to change the way consumers think and shop, the FTC is changing the rules to protect those consumer interests. The new rules are now requiring bloggers and social media users to disclose any payments received for a written review of a product or service. Violators can face punishment that includes a warning letter to up to… Read more
How could anyone see the media insanity disguised as “coverage” of Michael Jackson’s life and death (Every. Single. Minute. Of. His. Life.) and wonder how the death of a celebrity, albeit one of the most popular celebrities in recent memory, preempt stories of freedom protests in Iran? More currently, is anyone aware there is a calculated program of eradication of… Read more
Michael Jackson’s death not only affected millions of fans worldwide this week, but he nearly brought half the Internet down with him. Within minutes of TMZ breaking the story, traffic on Twitter spontaneously doubled, while Facebook updates tripled. Widespread slowdowns and outages plagued entire networks, with a mass effect not seen since the Google Failure earlier this year.… Read more
To lackluster fanfare, facebook users were given the option to claim a new vanity URL for their profiles at 12:01 a.m. EDT. Rumors had been circulating for weeks about the idea of Facebook allowing celebrities, organizations, and bands to select special vanity URLs to replace the random set of numbers that had been used since the site’s inception. The consensus… Read more
In what has basically become a bizarre, corporate-sized version of, “He said, he said”, Erick Schonfeld of techcrunch.com has opened a big yucky can of worms. His February 20, 2009, report that CBS subsidiary Last.fm divulged privatized, detailed user preference information has been incendiary, to say the least. The commentary on his post, “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening… Read more
