Social Media Marketing

IBM is promising to deliver a solution that will enable companies to include information from social media platforms in their regulatory compliance reports. Compliance capability is "fundamental to reducing a barrier that many companies have encountered as they look more closely at using social medi...

Marshall McLuhan's old adage, "the medium is the message," has never been more true than it is today. Companies wanting to showcase their cutting-edge products and services are increasingly turning to new and innovative marketing techniques that express the spirit of what they're selling. Video pres...

Like a lot of people, I was bit stunned to see headlines early this week proclaiming Facebook is losing members. In many cases, those reporting this story also were asking whether it means Facebook is heading toward a decline. My take is that Facebook is in no more danger of going under today than i...

Facebook is still on its way to 700 millions users, with 687 million actives at the start of June, according to a report by Inside Facebook, which provides analysis of the social networking giant. The trend in the last year shows a new-user influx from countries in the early stages of Facebook adopt...

Many firms are not properly prepared for the response to a daily deal offering. "These offers can be wonderful if they are analyzed correctly by the company," said Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence. "If they are not, then it can easily be a disaster." The daily deal sites are ...

Spending on online advertising is expected to jump 20.2 percent over last year's spending, according to new figures from eMarketer. If this category of ad spend does indeed reach $31.3 billion, as the company has projected, it will return to pre-recession growth levels and be accompanied by steady i...

On a single day in March earlier this year, The Orange County Register's website generated $188,000, mainly by selling nearly 5,457 customers on its daily deal: a Catalina Flyer catamaran round-trip ticket for $34. A portion of the revenue was generated by a side deal. For an industry poised to reac...

Once upon a time there was an online group called "The Point." It was a nebulous organization with the vague goal of using the power of social media to to do such things as crowdsource a design for the Chicago Stadium or launch a petition. One day, one of its members got the bright idea to use its n...

Pop star Lady Gaga is reportedly joining with Google's Eric Schmidt to produce a new social media site called "Backplane." Tony Carter, Gaga's manager, is at the helm of the operation and is attracting capital from important backers. So far, the company has raised more than $1 million from a group o...

LinkedIn has been a public company for roughly two weeks, but its brief history on Wall Street should give the people running other social media companies a lot to think about. The biggest question to ponder is whether they should go public now -- or as soon as they can convince an investment bank t...

I have a love-hate relationship with social media. I love platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn that let me keep up with people I truly value as friends and colleagues, even as we move on to new stages in our lives. I hate social media's potential for baring intimate details of your life with people y...

After much rumor and speculation, Twitter and TweetDeck announced what many had already concluded: the popular third-party client has been acquired by Twitter. The terms of the deal were undisclosed but various news reports put it between $40 million and $50 million. Of perhaps greater interest, at ...

LinkedIn's doubled stock price after its IPO on Thursday has many wondering if this could be the start of another tech bubble. LinkedIn initially offered 7.84 million shares at $45 each. Within minutes, the shares doubled in price and eventually peaked at $122.70 each. The price lingered around $100...

With more than 600 million members and counting, Facebook is the world's largest social networking community. Lately, however, a lot of people have concluded that this community is too large for their tastes. That has created an opportunity for a number of startups that are promising users a much mo...

Looks like Facebook wanted to mount a dirty tricks campaign against Google, but so far all the mud is clinging to the social network and its PR goons. Burson-Marsteller was hired to run a negative campaign against Google's Social Circle, aka Social Search, according to reports. Facebook confirmed it...