Social Media Marketing

This is it -- the week every social media investor has been waiting for. Facebook is expected to file for its IPO this week, according to widely circulating rumors, in response to huge demand in the market -- to say nothing of its own employees, many of whom stand to become millionaires overnight. M...

Your online store did record sales this past holiday and you are a happy person at the start of the year. After a few days of rejoicing, it is time to get back to the grind and look at how you can move forward and take your online store to even greater heights. There are a few fallouts of the holida...

Brand graph company 33Across has acquired Tynt, a company that tracks user behavior for publishers. Both companies were mum about the amount of the all-stock deal. Tynt will take 33Across into a new market; the combined companies will reach 1.25 billion users globally, according to 33Across. 33Acros...

On Jan. 1, I found that these Twitter names had hordes of followers: @ladygaga had 17,554,645, @Starbucks had 1,927,255, and @noahkravitz had 24,273. If you have a Twitter account, you can easily see all of who the followers are. Having Twitter followers doesn't mean you get to keep them, though. F...

A lawsuit alleging Facebook violates a California law on commercial endorsements can move forward, a federal judge has ruled. Facebook failed to persuade the court to dismiss the suit altogether, but District Judge Lucy Koh did reject the plaintiff's claim that Facebook had unjustly enriched itself ...

The market for local commerce has been the holy grail for Internet companies since the dawn of the modem. However, that market has been more like "Monty Python And The Holy Grail." Until now. The missing link for local commerce hasn't been the Web, it's been four things: web usage as everyday "utili...

Ask just about any research company that tracks online spending about this holiday season and you will get bombarded with cheer: "good," "strong," "robust," and "surprisingly strong" are among the adjectives used to describe online shopping activity this month and last. The latest indicator is a rep...

Jive Software has made its debut on the Nasdaq, following on the heels of other recent tech company IPOs such as Groupon, LinkedIn and Netflix. Jive, a maker of collaborative social media software for the enterprise, doesn't have the consumer orientation of those three, but it's apparently similar e...

The existing model for daily deals is broken. The biggest issue: It's simply not making merchants money. In just a few quick years, daily deals have shifted the concept of local marketing from traditional advertising to blanket discounts aimed at driving first-time customers en masse. While the new...

Turkey hotlines revolutionized the way home cooks dealt with kitchen emergencies during Thanksgiving. Now, hotlines are being joined by social media, videos, apps and other twenty-first century ways of solving bird problems. The Butterball Turkey Talk-Line women -- and they are all women -- have bee...

Google has introduced Google+ Pages, an element of its Google+ social network that has been much anticipated by corporate brands. Pages provides a public placeholder on the Google+ network for any entity -- not just companies. A sports club like FC Barcelona, for example, could have its own page. Or...

Before it went public, Groupon priced its stock at what turned out to be a highly conservative $20 dollars per share. Ha! was the market's response Friday morning, the day Groupon finally debuted on Nasdaq. Trading immediately pushed the share price up to $27.96. The low of the day was $ 25.90 and t...

Forecasters are trying desperately to get a handle on the pending collision between social, local and mobile media, or SoLoMo. The part that most of them forget is the reality check. It's even better and much bigger than they thought. The challenge for most forecasters is they look at one aspect of ...

The U.S. Department of Labor and Facebook are collaborating on an initiative that they hope will link more unemployed people with potential employers -- a job search page on Facebook. The page also highlights available training programs and educational opportunities. Facebook intends to drive traffi...

Will Skype give Microsoft street cred in social networking? At Web 2.0 on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discussed the company's current and future projects. He touched on Windows Phone, Microsoft Office, Xbox Live, Bing and the recent go-ahead on its Skype acquisition, the buy he characterize...