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B2B Marketers Say Twitter is Now but Google+ Is the Future [Infographic]

posted on April 16, 2013

social media benchmark infographicIf all of the business to business marketers could come up to the front of the room please? Now, could you raise your hand if you think Twitter is the number one social platform for business?

Hmm…wow, B2B Marketing is right. 85% of you chose Twitter as your number one social platform. LinkedIn? A close second with 82%. YouTube and Facebook? 77% and 71%. Finally, Google+? (Quick count) Yep, 36%. That’s actually higher than I expected so go Google.

The numbers come from the Social Media Benchmarking Report summary and infographic produced by B2B Marketing in association with Circle Research.  Unfortunately, I can’t see the full results or the data on how many people they polled so I’m going by the data they presented on their site which includes this:

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Bing Adds Pinterest Button to Image Search

posted on April 16, 2013

Pinterest isn’t exactly a household name. . . yet. . . but the photo bookmarking site is slowly creeping in to our consciousness from all directions. This week, Pinterest made inroads at Bing and Barnes & Noble.

On the Bing side, you’ll now find a Pinterest “Pin It” button on every image that appears when you do a search. I tested it by searching for Lemurs. I picked my favorite photo of the bunch then almost fell out of my chair when I read the caption.

lemurs

The lemur’s name is Boris!? (Check my byline) To the right, you see the new “Pin It” button. One click and you’re Pinterest bound.

Here’s the important part:

Bing automatically links and gives proper attribution to the original, high-resolution source, saving you the hassle of tracking it down yourself.

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LinkedIn Jumps on the Feed Reader Craze, Buys Pulse

posted on April 12, 2013

pulseEvery since Google announced that they were shutting down Google Reader, a dozen others have popped up with plans to fill the void.

Today’s entry comes from LinkedIn. Instead of reinventing the wheel, they bought one – Pulse: Your News, Blog, Magazine and Social Reader. The app was designed as a class project by two Standford boys who were looking for a better way to keep up with their favorite blogs and newspapers.

Now, 20 million people use Pulse to keep up with their favorite content streams in 190 countries. Pulse says they consume more 10 million stories a day and that’s music to this writer’s ears.

LinkedIn bought Pulse because well-written content is slowly pushing random blurbs off the page.  Here’s a quote from their announcement post.

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Tumblr Shuts Down Their One Attempt to Rise Above the Noise

posted on April 11, 2013

storyboardSocial media has a higher than average noise to signal ratio. For every truly creative or informative blip, there are thousands of useless blurbs, nasty retorts, misinformed mentions and lots and lots of spam. Tumblr is like this. You can skim through page after page of duplicate celebrity photos, bad manips and overused pictures of animals making funny faces. If you keep digging, you will find a few gems like Restaurant-Restaurant (a man who turns restaurant stationary into art) and Last Book I Loved. These are the kinds of Tumblrs that made it to the Storyboard and now Tumblr is shutting it down.

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[Infographic] Social Media Hostility on the Rise?

posted on April 11, 2013

Hostility Rising on Social PreviewNetworksBe honest here. Have you ever been in an altercation with someone, including a friend, on social media? Have you ever ceased being in contact with that person or even lost a friendship over social media activities?

On some level, I bet that most people would feel that they have at least strained relationships or become disenchanted with a friendship as a result of social media interaction. Having a healthy mix of people on both sides of the political aisle among my own friends, I can attest to the trouble that gets stirred up in the online space. Having learned my own hard lessons I am more likely to step back or simply write something and erase it before posting. The reason? It can get ugly and I don’t have room nor the time for that.

According to a recent survey by Vital Smarts people on social media are getting more rude and it has a cost. Reuters reports

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Foursquare Gets $41M Investment

posted on April 11, 2013

iPhone FoursquareNo matter who you are $41 million is nothing to sneeze at. I am not a friend of Foursquare’s founder Dennis Crowley but I wonder if he checked in at the bank recently with a smiley face.

Foursquare has been falling off the radar a bit as has the entire check-in model. There is value in certain areas but as far as a universal activity that everyone on the Internet seems to have the urge to do, it’s safe to say ‘not so much’.

Businessweek reports on the investment and gives a feeling of the sentiment around the company

When Dennis Crowley debuted Foursquare, his location-based social media app, at South by Southwest in 2009, he got rave reviews. The tech blog Mashable called Foursquare the “breakout mobile app” of the event. VentureBeat called it “the next Twitter.” At this year’s SXSW, Crowley, 36, had to remind people his company still exists.

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Facebook’s Partner Categories Link Ad Targeting to Offline Purchases

posted on April 10, 2013

Did you buy cereal at the grocery store this week? If you used a store loyalty card at check-out, then you might start seeing cereal ads when you log in to Facebook.

Facebook is now using both online and offline shopping data from “select third parties including Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon” to group Facebook users into very specific buckets. They call the new tool Partner Categories and for marketers, it’s pretty nifty.PartnerCategories1

In this example, an advertiser can pick not only people who bought cereal, but people who bought children’s cereal verses fiber cereal. If I’m selling toys, I want to hop on that first train. If I’m in the fitness biz, that second grouping looks good to me.