Shazam, Twitter, tablets and polar bears had our attention during the Super Bowl 2012, a social TV breakthrough.
On Sunday, even having two screens didn’t seem enough, as people watched the game on their TVs, while having Shazam open on their smartphones, tweeting from tablets and watching Coke’s Polar Bowl on their laptops all at the [...]

Many companies are often afraid of getting into social media because it seems uncontrollable.
Social media gives your business an opportunity to increase interaction and be closer to your every-day consumer, but those conversations can be tough to control sometimes. The big challenge is crisis management: responding to negative feedback quickly and turn your customers into [...]

Great communities inspire great conversations. Online communities are no different.
Fred Wilson once said in his blog, “modern [online] community building isn’t easy, but if there is one thing the Internet has taught me over the past 15 years, large engaged communities are incredibly powerful things, both commercially and socially. Building them is important and ultimately [...]

Does Facebook still feel threatened by Google+?
The social media giant is in the process of releasing new updates that make it more similar to the social broadcasting feel of Twitter and Google+.
The new Subscriptions feature, introduced by the social network this week, allows users to send updates to a larger audience without creating a Fan [...]

How much is in your trust bank?
In a post for the Harvard Business Review blog, John Sviokla coins the term “trust bank” in talking about how Coca-Cola and Pepsi have built reserves of customer goodwill.
How’d they build up these banks? By embracing their customers through social media.
Citing Pepsi’s triumphant Refresh campaign and Coke’s embracing of [...]

To many casual Facebook users — your aunt who’s annoyingly addicted to Farmville, your buddy the determinedly exhibitionistic public drunk — the headline-grabbing struggle between the World’s Largest Social Network and the users and pundits fired up about its seemingly cavalier attitude toward individual privacy has been so much technobabble.
If the privacy debate has [...]

We’ve talked before about three screeners. You know, that plugged-in, slightly undead segment of society that talks about what they’re watching on TV live with their friends online and via text. Heck, we’re part of it.
Marketers are looking to get a piece of that sweet chatter pie, and I haven’t seen an attempt more creative [...]

A recent TV campaign for a new Motorola smartphone satirizes both the pervading silliness in new media messages (the category of communication that brought us OMG and LMFAO) and traditional media’s struggle to get hip to it.
A “serious” anchorman reads inane new media messages, such as, “This just in via text message and wall post: [...]

We could gaze at things like this all day.
Information Architects, the web design group known for its famous Web Trend Maps — compelling visualizations of the most influential websites — has turned to social media for its latest infographic.
Called Cosmic 140 and resembling a star chart, the map shows the 140 most influential Twitter [...]

Yesterday, we wrote about a guy who had taken a vow of silence except on social media. Today, we’re looking at how those media are being silenced in an entire part of the world.
In case you haven’t heard, the government of Pakistan is in the process of blocking social media sites to all Internet users [...]