Latest Social Media News & Articles

No matter how seasoned a social media user you may be, there is still a certain level of glee that you feel after receiving a direct reply from a company about a comment, compliment or complaint posted online. To feel listened to is a powerful emotion, one that makes us more loyal to the person or company listening. As a result, achieving corporate empathy toward customers should be among an organization’s top priorities.

Google is not exactly a fledgling company. But in the social networking business, the search giant is trumped by relative newcomers Facebook and Twitter in terms of popularity and acceptance among users. Google's social networking offering Google+ is constantly evolving, though, and the latest features introduced are reminiscent of some Twitter and Facebook highlights.

Patton Oswalt, comedian and actor of animated film Ratatouille fame, will host the Webby Awards May 21 in New York City, and the nominees for 2012 are in. The 16^th annual awards will feature a new social change award spawned in the aftermath of 2011's Arab Spring uprisings that have forever transformed how social media is portrayed and used. The new award will be chosen by voters and not by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences judges who select the Webby nominees.

All those mobile photos now belong to Facebook as the social networking giant snaps up its rapidly expanding rival, which started as a touch-up and share service, and became a social network in its own right.

This week we look at why DAM started, its role in social media strategy, what you should know before starting a DAM initiative and benefits of DAM software.

Pinterest announced revisions to its Terms of Service, removing its right to sell user-contributed content and releasing simpler tools for copyright infringement reporting.

The iPad has made social magazine apps in fashion, with the likes of Flipboard and Zite. Zite earlier launched a variant of its social reader for smaller iOS devices, and Flipboard now makes its grand launch for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

 The very jumpy Seesmic outfit dumps its enterprise focus and goes hunting in the social space with more work to come on cross-service messaging platform, Seesmic Ping.

If you are looking to increase your digital activity and customer experience, the most important thing you can do is measure engagement to understand your Return on Investment (ROI), which will help justify next year's budget.

It’s an exciting time to be mixing financial and social. While many in the financial industry have been carefully wading into the social waters (and with good reason), more solutions have emerged to help them weather the social storm in an effort to engage with their users online.

In the last flailing act of a wounded beast, Yahoo won't do the decent thing and go quietly into the night, but will throw lawsuits at anyone it can claw some money from. The latest target is Facebook and the weapon of choice, some super-simple patents.

If social media — rightly, on occasion — gets it in the neck for being somewhat of an echo chamber, lost in a battle for hearts and minds or stuck in the contrived toil of crowning content creation versus content curation King, it is perhaps inevitable that the Higgs Boson of social media is the annual pilgrimage of flannel and black-rimmed specs to Austin, Texas for SXSWi.

Big old media comes to have another play in the social media space as CNN is apparently lining up to buy social news site Mashable, with confirmation likely to be announced tomorrow at the SXSW event.

It showed up in a drop-down menu inside the new Facebook Timeline feature, then like a phantom, disappeared from view, but not before reporters spotted it, armed with a screen shot on Burberry's new Timeline page. Now Facebook has come clean with the official introduction of Interest Lists.

Google is in the wars again this week, reinforcing use of its own Wallet product and banging heads with Apple. While on the desktop, it has been busy with the smaller changes, tweaking Gmail and Google+ a little more.

With social measurement companies swarming the trees, HootSuite tries to keep its perch by partnering with Adobe to integrate Digital Marketing Suite for more measurable ROI on those social strategies.

Skype 5.6 for Mac includes automatic updates, an improved user interface, full-screen mode in OS X Lion, the ability to delete conversations and an awesome beta feature that connects Skype users to their Facebook accounts.

Facebook is making quite a few changes to its advertising assets. We reported recently about changes to Facebook ads, now the company has rolled out both Facebook Timelines for brand pages and real-time analytics via Page Insights.

Last week I emptied the contents of my community manager’s toolbox to showcase a few of my favorite tools and apps. Since then, a few other social media management tools crossed my feed, both coming with recommendations from other community managers.

Impressions from a Social Media Week that shook up New York.