The State of Social Media 2012 by The SEO Company...
What was once considered a trend has become a way of life - and now the way we do business. Download / Embed: http://bit.ly/KjsJZ6 Via maxOz 
Excerpted from article:
Shortform is introducing a bookmarklet for adding videos to their channels. The bookmarklet will work with all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer), making it easier for VJs to instantly update their playlists without having to open a new tab, copy and paste the URL, etc.
In addition to adding videos to their channels, the bookmarklet will also find all videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and CollegeHumor that are on a given page so that users can choose between them.
Shortform is also rolling out Facebook Open Graph integration, which will seamlessly share the channels that users are watching.
According to Shortform CEO Nader Ghaffari, the choice to share channels and not individual videos was not just meant to avoid spamming user news feeds, like some other high-profile video startups have over the past few weeks. It was also because Shortform is, at its core, about curated collections of videos, and it hopes to highlight those collections rather than individual pieces of content..."
Read full article here: http://j.mp/JXzOPl
Try out Shortform: http://www.shortform.com
Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
Social media can be a great marketing tool – if it’s used correctly. don’t just jump on the bandwagon.
The reality is that social media ‘experts’ are what web designers were back in the late 90s: Everyone with a computer and an Internet connection could all of a sudden transform your business into this online mecca. What really happened was that companies who pioneered the online space found themselves, and their websites, in a miserable heap of disappointment. The very same lessons from the 90s and web development can be applied to the social media frontier we find ourselves in today. There are businesses that have truly embraced social media and make it an integral part of their business, and successfully engage in conversations with their customers. 
Every post you "like." Every friend you add or fan page you join. Every place you check in, and every Web page you recommend. To you, those are ways to enjoy, expand and improve your experience on Facebook. To Facebook, they're the building blocks of a multibillion-dollar company. In business, there's a well-worn line that could apply to the social-networking behemoth: If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product. In this case, you're a product worth, to Facebook, an average $4.84 a year. As Facebook hits Wall Street this week with a public stock offering that could value the company at more than $100 billion, investors appear dazzled by the company's uncanny ability to put the right advertisements in front of its roughly 900 million users. ![How Social Media Impacts Google Organic Search - Google+ Wins! [Infographic] | pamorama | Contentmarketing | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/B3t1wzsN309tCy0_jkjT7jl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
Social media has a measurable impact on Google organic search results, with Google+ improving rankings the most. Though the study wasn’t statistically ideal, it showed that social media has a measurable impact on Google organic search results, with Google properties impacting the websites’ organic search rankings the most. 1. Increasing the number of Google+ Business Page followers yielded the biggest change in position: +14.63
Via contentmarketingdigest 
A new Infographic from market research firm Lab42 found that 51% of consumers are using smartphones during their workouts, whether for checking email (33%) or tracking their pace (43%). Listening to music is the most popular way to incorporate mobile devices into a workout (91%). The study was conducted among 500 social media users who place a high emphasis on health and exercising. About 33% of respondents said they use apps to track fitness and food regimens, while 31% do similar tracking on websites. Using a game console remains a popular way to do workouts, as 14% use a gaming system to exercise. About 51% who do so said they use the Wii Fit. Overall, the study found that 74% consumers believe technology has made a positive impact in improving their weight loss efforts and even increases motivation (72%) to keep going. Via maxOz 
The Dark Knight Rises is an upcoming superhero film directed by Christopher Nolan, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan Nolan and the story with David S. Goyer. Based on the DC Comics character Batman, the film will be the third installment in Nolan's Batman film series, and is a sequel to Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). The Dark Knight Rises is intended to be the conclusion of the series. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman will all reprise their roles from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. The film will take place eight years after the events of The Dark Knight and will introduce the characters of Selina Kyle and Bane—portrayed by Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy, respectively—two villains from the Batman mythology.[ 
Google Analytics Adds a New Set of Social Reports: These new social reports “help you measure the impact of your social marketing initiatives and evaluate the effect social media has on your goals and ecommerce activities.” 
From the official site: "The Yahoo Marketing Dashboard provides a consolidated view of a business’s marketing results and reputation.
Key features include:
1) Business listings: Find out how many search engines and directories include your business and discover new listing opportunities you may be missing.
2) Online business reputation: Learn what customers are saying about you across the Web, so you can be responsive to their needs and provide better customer service.
3) Web site traffic: Discover how many people are visiting your site and where they are coming from by viewing Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, or Google Analytics site traffic reports.
4) Marketing campaigns: Track key metrics from email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, so you know what is working.
5) Online sales: Know how your daily sales are doing with order and revenue reporting from your Yahoo! Merchant Solutions online store.
6) Marketing ideas - Learn about new marketing approaches and leading marketing service providers who can help your business grow."
P.S.: The Marketing Dashboard is specifically designed for small business owners, not marketing experts.
The service is free and is targeted ONLY at US-based businesses.
Find out more: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/dashboard/index.html ;
Video tutorials: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/marketing-dashboard/getting-started ;
Try it out here: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/marketing-dashboard
Via Giuseppe Mauriello, Robin Good 
2 billion people are online. 85% of customers expect businesses to be active in social media. Word of mouse = word of mouth.
Here are 7 reasons - http://bit.ly/JrexbQ - and some thought provoking questions to get you loving Facebook, Twitter, emarketing, blogs and more...
#1. 80% businesses are NOT passionate Show you’re human. Business is built on relationships. Your web presence must show you are passionate #2. 55% more web visitors & 67% more leads for businesses that blog #3. 68% Email subscribers & Twitter followers are likely to buy #4. 20-30% Emarketing response rate #5. 30% customer questions & compliments get no reply #6. 77% customers read brand posts but don’t comment #7. 71% complaints on Twitter are NOT responded to
Download / Embed: http://bit.ly/JrexbQ ; Via maxOz, janlgordon ![Interest in Pinterest Reaches a Fever Pitch [INFOGRAPHIC] | Contentmarketing | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/SmPasEt_B3CXTwmgnixwAzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
Could Pinterest be the silver bullet for retailers on social media? This infographic explains why Pinterest users are such good consumers. Via Jonha Revesencio, roberto toppi 
I love my family and how easily we play off each other when it comes to banter. We always manage to crack each other up, so I hope you can get a chuckle out of twelve of our favorite movie quotes. What quotes lead to hysterics in your household or office environment?
This post was written by Jonathan Crowe for business2community. I selected this two part series because they have great information, tools and resources.
Last week’s post laid out a case for content curation – I selected this today because it has great information and resources.
**But no matter how airtight that case may be, the fact is theory is one thing, practice another.
As Sales Benchmark Index CEO Greg Alexander points out, even if companies decide to adopt content marketing strategies, that doesn’t mean they’ll be successful.
It all comes down to the value of the content you’re offering your customers, and to that end my favorite tip Alexander offers to B2B companies is:
“Give away your how-to knowledge.”
Here are some takeaways:
Use Beth Kanter's Curation Primer - Beth always gives away information, tools and resources along with very valuable insights
Robin Good has a lot of interesting things to say regarding the importance of your visual delivery of content curation, and what’s in store for the future
Define and conquer
**Define who your audience is, organize it so it's easy to navigate on your site
Have Your content come to you - Best Online free curation tools
Before You Post, what are you bringing to the table?
**The best content curators provide more than just links and copy-and-pasted they summarize. They add their own take.
**They frame content in such a way that calls out its relevancy to their audience.
**If they’re smart they cross-reference related content the reader can access, as well. Get Active
**Once your curated content has gone live, then the real work begins — promoting it and engaging with your audience.
**Reaching out to them via social media and providing them with a comments section (that you actively respond to) is a must.
**After all, curating is all about connecting.
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"
Read full article here" [http://bit.ly/HG4CWd] Via janlgordon |
Robin Good: FlashIssue is a web app which allows you to easily assemble a professional-looking newsletter, by bringing together your best content as well as any article available online.
You can search for any topic via an integrated Google Search or provide the URL of a specific web page you want to integrate.
N.B.: A Google Chrome plugin also allows you to easily clip and grab any content directly from any web page and easily integrate it inside your curated newsletter.
See how it works: http://www.flashissue.com/gmail-newsletters/ ;
Read more about it: http://www.flashissue.com/curated-newsletters-flashissue-launches-for-mailchimp-gmail ;
Chrome plugin: http://www.flashissue.com/gmail-newsletters/ ;
Try it out: http://www.flashissue.com/ ; Via Robin Good 
How you dress your website says a great deal about your personality and the type of person you want to attract. Like people, your website’s various colors, layout and functionality can have drastically different appeal. A study by Jamy Li and Mark Chignell of the University of Toronto reveals how readers are more attracted to authors they judge to be similar to themselves. The language you use and how it is delivered are your strongest cues to personality, but what if you want to attract an audience you don’t necessarily fit in? As identity designer David Airey puts it, “Your website opens doors to contacts you’d never imagine you’d meet. Now more than ever, millions of people have access to your online presence, and whether you like it or not, they’ll immediately judge you upon your site design.” 
In a world where “every brand is a publisher,” giving away audience-focused content is cheaper, more inspiring, and better for the world than interruptive marketing. The companies that win friends and influence fans are the ones that give us content we want and unique experiences focused on us. For free. And those that do it well make a killing in business. Birchbox, for example, grew its beauty sample service from zero to more than 100,000 subscribers (each paying $10 a month) in the past two years, according to MarketWatch. The New York-based startup drew attention in the noisy beauty products space in large part by producing a blog and magazine about grooming and makeup. Like Allure or Glamour or any traditional beauty mag, Birchbox talks about what its audience wants, and not about Birchbox itself.
"This means that the overall proportion of U.S. adults who get location-based information has almost doubled over that time period, from 23 percent in May 2011 to 41 percent in February 2012," Pew found. Via Gary Hayes 
Robin Good: Cisco Jabber is a multi-platform and multi-device collaboration and communication platform which provides text chat/instant messaging, video-conferencing, telephony and voicemail and which can escalate to full-blown web-conferencing and collaboration sessions. Cisco Jabber utilizes the XMPP protocol allowing interoperability with other instant messaging systems. Ciso Jabber is available for Windows, Mac, Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry and Nokia devices. Download for Windows: http://bit.ly/CiscoJabberWin ; Download for Mac: http://bit.ly/CiscoJabberMac ; Video intro: http://bit.ly/CiscoJabberGettingStartedVideo ; Find out more: http://www.cisco.com/web/products/voice/jabber.html ; Via Robin Good 
Excerpted from article: "While Spotify now has a rich seam of third-party apps built for its platform, ShareMyPlaylists has been around almost as long as the music streaming service itself, helping users curate collections of music for each other.
Now with its completely rewritten iOS app, it’s taking the experience mobile, letting you discover and listen to Spotify music in a fresh way.
The app opens up to a choice of featured playlists. Digging deeper, you can find the most played playlists, the current top 50 playlists, and the latest lists added on the ShareMyPlaylists website. If you have an idea of the type of music you’re looking for, you can browse playlists by genre or do a free text search.
Once you find a playlist that appeals to you, it will be played in-app from Spotify’s library using the LibSpotify API. Playlists can be shared from the app via Twitter, Facebook, email and even SMS.
This is essentially an alternative interface for Spotify that emphasises social curation..."
Read full article:
Check out the app here: http://sharemyplaylists.com
Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
Billed as the world's tallest water ride, the $26-million Divertical at Italy's Mirabilandia theme park will combine a shoot-the-chutes flume and a roller coaster track with an offshore powerboat racing theme. PHOTOS: Divertical water coaster at Mirabilandia Debuting in mid- to late June, the Divertical water coaster will feature an innovative elevator lift system that carries the 10-person boats to the top of the 197-foot-tall ride. From there, riders will descend a 45-degree water flume at speeds topping 65 mph. 
The social-media landscape gets more crowded every year. CMO's third annual interactive Infographic will help you determine which ones to use for maximum impact in terms of customer communication, brand exposure, traffic, and SEO.
The latest Social Media Interactive Infographic welcomes five new members to the roster. Time will tell whether they give heavyweights such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn a run for brands' advertising dollars, but incumbents including Pinterest and Google+ have certainly grabbed their share of the headlines.
This Social Landscape Chart is an Interactive Infographic. Click on any one of the four column labels--Customer Communication, Brand Exposure, Traffic To Your Site, and SEO--and the chart will automatically reorder so that the platforms most effective for that function are at the top of the list.
Or download pdf version here: http://bit.ly/JaOaf1 ; Via maxOz 
"Using games for purposes other than entertainment is nothing new. There are war games, educational games, throne games. But a new class of games has sprung up in recent years, designed to create awareness and raise support for a variety of global issues. Such serious games seek to harness the power of competition and/or novelty to attract players and get the word out for a good cause. Here are 15 games you can play and be a better person for it." Via Beth Dichter 
edX is a 'transformational partnership in online education'…Harvard and MIT ‘will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners…(edX) courses (will) feature video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories, and student paced learning’ and it will be open source. Via Beth Dichter 
For social media professionals, it is quite an undertaking to stay current on news and headlines that affect the role. Think about it:
Social media is an Internet-based vehicle that exists in a 24/7/365 world and evolves as fast as people can type or speak their thoughts. No matter what area of social media one might be involved in, they constantly need to be up on a wide range of news and trends. Yes — On local, national, and world headlines so there is an awareness of what will be social. But also on each relevant social network – for various demographics – And any tools or applications that connect with those platforms. Not to mention the frequently rolled-out start-ups hoping to move the needle in the social space. 
Blog post at Internet Billboards : Sarah Nurse Tulum Source: Uploaded by user via Sarah on Pinterest Eva Pan wow :) location: Kjeragbolten,[..]... |
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Marty, thank you so much for your always quirky point of view. I love it!!!
Also, these numbers on scoop.it are not what I consider a benchmark.
It's nice but I think it's about positioning you and you brand as an authority in relation to the category you have and show your expertise.
Enough, Keep that wonderful sense of humor xxx
Great minds appreciate the same inforgraphics my amazing curating friend :). Amazing how fast social is moving now. Seems like yesterday I couldn't get phone calls returned when I started any conversation with "Facebook this..." or "Twitter that....". My funny Michele story is the other day I was feeling pretty good about breaking 11K so I got up enough gumption to see where your views were - approaching 60K is SICK but well deserved my friend, well deserved and about the accurate description of our relative positions (you being 6x me LOL). Keep rockin' Marty