Guest post by Nate Riggs, owner of Social Media Strategies.

Recently I was sitting on a panel at a SMC Columbus event watching another panelist speak about social search. Halfway through, my friend Rocky leans over to me and says:

“Google buys up the technologies they want. Facebook just builds them.”

Huh. If you think about it, that’s a fairly accurate statement. Facebook has always been in the game of looking at new ideas for technology, finding the holes, and then figuring out how to make it better, faster, and stronger inside their own system. Continue Reading »

Guest post by Elena Verlee, founder of Cross Border Communications.

If you’ve been on Twitter a while, you’re probably stuck in a rut. We all know we’re supposed to engage, share links to valuable information, and re-tweet others. What else is there?

If you want to spice up your Twitter feed, here are 15 ideas to get you going.

1. Twitpic something – Photos of you and other Twitter friends, a painting you like, almost anything will do. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in Twitter’s case, 140 characters. Continue Reading »

Guest post by Tim Jahn of Beyond The Pedway.

I’m a new dad and an entrepreneur, so I’m familiar with the idea of failure. I have a hunch you are too. We’ve all experienced failure from time to time. The key is to harness that failure into useful lessons.

My son is only about two months old. He has yet to attempt standing up, crawling, walking, talking, swimming, biking, or algebra. But in a matter of months, he’ll try to start crawling. Once he conquers that, he’ll attempt to start standing up and walking around like his parents do.

He’ll fail. I can say with almost certainty that my son will fail at his first attempts to walk.

Why? Continue Reading »

We’re on day three of the Livefyre commenting system and I think I’m in love. I may want to marry it, but first I want to hear from you. Do you like it? Do you like how you can @ reply someone and bring them into the conversation? Do you like how it sends one email with a bunch of comments in it instead of 16 different emails?

Or, is it sending you too many updates when people have conversations that have nothing to do with you? I get all of the emails so I don’t know it works for you. Please let me know! If you love it as much as I do, we’ll have a wedding ceremony.

If you’ve not testing it out, try it! Let me know what you think. And, in return, here are the top five stories for week ending Oct. 8, 2010. Continue Reading »

Guest post by Mike Schaffer, social media and online marketing manager at Iostudio.

Despite the incessant buzz in the marketing industry surrounding Foursquare and Facebook Places, I see four major challenges facing location-based services.

For all the hype, only four percent of adults are using these services (not to mention the 84 percent of adults who have no idea what they are). Clearly, not a ton of folks are taking advantage of them, so let’s investigate the main reasons why they haven’t caught fire…yet. Continue Reading »

Now that Facebook Places (a location-based tool that is likely going to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla) has been in full force for a few days, have you tried it? It’s kind of a fun little tool, from a personal perspective, and we’ll talk here about the business implications, but I say be cautiously curious.

Several weeks ago, Facebook opened the platform to search engines, which means a few things:

* When someone tags you or your business on Facebook and you don’t already have a page, it creates one for you. Continue Reading »

Guest post by Barry Graubart, vice president, product strategy & business development for Alacra, a leading content technology company.

Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Places, its long-awaited solution for location sharing, a space that’s been driven by upstarts Foursquare and Gowalla.

In its announcement, Facebook indicated that Places was built on three tenets:

Continue Reading »

Guest post by Martin Waxman, co-founder and managing partner of energi PR, Communications, Digital in Toronto.

My name is Martin W., and I am…addicted to social media.

It started innocently enough with my first BlackBerry. I think I would call that my gateway connection.

Or maybe it happened earlier. With webmail and the email inbox I had to check at all hours of the day and night – and respond, of course. We’re talking ‘90s instantaneous here. Continue Reading »

Last week Mashable did a story on how few people are using Foursquare and that, perhaps, business owners should wait to do any marketing through the location-based program. At the time, I was in a hurry and tweeted it with, “Not sure I agree with @mashable on waiting until later to do location based marketing.”

I’ve had some time to think about it and now I’m really sure I don’t agree with the story…or rather, the study that prompted the story. The study was conducted by Forrester to show that only 4 percent of Internet-using adults use Foursquare and, of those people, only 1 percent check in to a location at least once a week.

Let’s put this into perspective.

Worldwide, nearly 2 billion people use the Internet and, in North America, there are more than 265 million. If 4 percent use Foursquare, that’s 80 million people worldwide and nearly 11 million people in North America. If you break it down even further and say you only want to reach the 1 percent who check in at least once a week, that’s still 800,000 worldwide and 106,000 people in North America. Continue Reading »

Guest post by Danny Brown, the social sensei at Bonsai Interactive

Ah, geo-location marketing. It’s getting a huge amount of buzz at the minute, as Twitter apps connect location tweets to its service, Foursquare is credited with Domino’s Pizza’s UK success and smartphone users get ready for augmented reality to guide their leisure time.

All good stuff. And yet… Continue Reading »