How to Find Influential People With Social Media Do you want to build relationships with key influencers in your niche? Are you looking for an easy way to identify and connect with industry thought leaders? If so, keep reading for a simple system you can immediately deploy. Why Focus on Influencers? Social media is a great way to develop strategic partnerships with key influencers and stay informed about what’s happening in your industry. But you must focus your efforts to ensure that time spent in social media packs a punch. A study from Forrester Research confirms that 13.4% of U.S. adults online create 80% of the content that influences people. This Forrester Research study illustrates the power of connecting with the right people. How can you monitor and create relationships with the influencers relevant to your business? Create a Short List of Key Influencers Fortunately, there are tools and processes to help you reduce the amount of noise in social media. Here is the 4-step process to develop your list. The first tool is Google Reader.
How To Make an Infographic in 5 Easy Steps Infographics are relatively new; new enough for the word "infographic" not to be recognized by my spellchecker. As with all things "new" on the interwebs their comes a near obsessive, cult-like following that insists that this phenomenal new thing will be the massive change to overtake the online world and alter the way we computer forever. So here's a very blatant attempt at trying to capture some of that traffic. If you've been reading our blogs (and I know you have) you've been seeing our infographics cropping up. Before we get started you're going to want an infographic creator of some sort. I'm assuming for the sake of our exercise that you already have the "idea" for your infographic or are capable of conjuring one up when the time comes. Step 1: Breaking it up Infographics are valuable because they take high value information and deliver it in a way that allows users to focus on the primary take-aways without having to do something as boring as, say, read a blog.
Pinterest breaks through to the top 50 websites - Minneapolis Social Media The internet research marketing company, comScore, released its monthly analysis for the most visited websites for September 2012. In its findings using the company’s Media Metrix Service, education websites ranked as the most important in the United States (U.S), but newcomer Pinterest broke through in the top 50 in the rankings. Pinterest attracted approximately 25.3 million visitors for the month alone and continued its surge in the social media sphere. In comparison to other larger and older websites the numbers were dwarfed, yet the accomplishment signals a growing interest in its platform. Nevertheless, search giant Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, ESPN and others surpassed Pinterest. Google sites were classified as the top ranking website with 187 million visitors while Microsoft managed 167 million. In a separate report by MediaBistro found that Pinterest had close to 12 million users back in May and the time spent on the website equaled to Facebook.
Responsive Web Design: An Ultimate Guide 2012 is known to be the year of smartphones. As per a recent survey the share of smartphones has reached around 50% in US. This is indeed a great time to invest in mobile user experience. Responsive web design Before anything else, it is important to understand what responsive web design actually is. Substitute to Responsive Design Advertisement Ever since the mobiles have become an alternative for desktop browsing, responsive web design has gained immense popularity. - A completely separate mobile version of your website If you think that responsive web designing cannot be implemented on your current web design, you can get a new mobile version designed of your website. - Mobile App Developing a mobile App is the best way to go if you do not want to get into the hassle of designing a responsive website. Tip : 7 Tips to Create The Mobile Version of a Website Advantages and disadvantages of Responsive Web Design Advantages of Responsive web design User Friendly Mobile Segment Accumulated Sharing
Hackers threaten fresh wave of anti-capitalist web rioting Protecting your mid-size business from today’s security threats A new activist group is drumming up recruits for a cyberwar campaign against corporate giants due to launch on Friday, 25 May. TheWikiBoat intends to hit a high profile list of more than 40 multinationals - including BT, Best Buy, Tesco, McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Apple - with denial of service attacks as well as attempts to raid corporate systems for intelligence. The precise motivations behind OpNewSon, which was announced around a month ago, remain unclear but the overall flavour is part anti-capitalist and part general devilment, a characteristic found in many Anonymous-style hacktivist protests. "While attacking the major companies of this planet may seem lulzy, we also wish that this operation make a difference," the group said in a manifesto for OpNewSon. Previous pre-announced activist operations to take down Facebook or launch assaults against the internet's DNS structure have turned out to be damp squibs.
Want To Broadcast Live On YouTube? You’ll Need A Google+ Account For That This morning, Google officially rolled out Google+ Hangouts On Air to all users worldwide, following the feature’s limited introduction back in September. At the time of its initial release, this live broadcasting feature allowed top Google+ users (like celebs) to stream live video feeds directly to their Google+ fan base. The service kicked off with a Google+ Hangouts stream from will.i.am, but soon saw a number of notable participants, even including the President of the United States, Barack Obama, at one point. The worldwide rollout of Hangouts On Air, announced today via the official Google Blog, represents an interesting shift for the feature, which before was more about public figures and other types of broadcasters, like news orgs, reaching a large audience of viewers via the social platform. According to the Google blog post, users can broadcast their live hangout to their Google+ stream…but also to their YouTube channel or their website.
Google Play Working on Carrier Billing in Latin America Google Play will soon offer e-books and music in Brazil, the Brazilian blog Google Discovery reports. The recent announcement was made by the company’s product management director for Android, Hugo Barra. According to Barra, who was talking to the Latin American press during Google Press Summit in Santiago, Chile (GPS 5.0), “Google Play is a market for digital content.” “We will launch all types of content. Books will arrive in Brazil in a few months. To make this carrier billing a reality later this year, Google is currently negotiating with mobile operators across Latin America, the company declared on its corporate blog. Latin America is an important market for Android – and a growing one for smartphones. Despite (or maybe due to) this lower penetration, Brazil remains very attractive for Android.
Is This Censorship? Facebook Stops You From Posting ‘Irrelevant Or Inappropriate’ Comments Updated. Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today’s tech blogging scene. Scoble’s comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course — generally agreeing with Woolf’s sentiments and adding in his own two cents. But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message: “This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.” Now, Facebook makes no apologies for working to create a safe and clean environment on its corner of the web by shutting down abusive or harassing behavior, content such as pornography, or general spamming of the system. But even so, this instance seems to be a very strange enactment of any kind of Facebook policy.
Facebook Grabs Glancee: Get Ready For More 'Friends,' Everywhere Facebook has snapped up Glancee, a social discovery app that shows users when Facebook friends, friends-of-Facebook-friends and people with similar interests are nearby. Like Instagram, the photo-sharing app Facebook is acquiring for $1 billion, Glancee promises to supplement Facebook's mobile offerings and suggests an effort by the social network to boost its smartphone experience. Glancee uses Facebook to help users forge connections with people around them in the real world, putting the social graph to work in order to reveal that the stranger in the Starbucks line is actually your cousin's best friend, or a fellow fashionista obsessed with The Sartorialist. This ability to link people together offline -- with help from the web -- lines up nicely with Facebook's mission to make the world a more "open and connected" place. Unlike Instagram, however, Glancee isn't bringing aboard millions of new users.
Study Says Facebook Privacy Concerns Are on the Rise - Is It Accurate? [STUDY] Consumer Report's annual State of the Net study found that people are increasingly concerned with their privacy on Facebook. The report breaks down social privacy into a handful of categories: over-sharing by users, underuse of privacy controls, over-collection of data, over-sharing of data by apps and cyberbullying or harassment. 2,002 online households were surveyed, including 1,340 Facebook users. Based on those numbers, Consumer Reports extrapolated its results upon the rest of Facebook's 188 million North American users. The study raises alarms about Facebook's privacy practices — but does the author do enough to back up his or her claims? Over-Sharing 4.8 million Facebook users have posted their plans for the day on the site, according to the report's extrapolation. The report was unclear about how many of those 4.8 million users set their location sharing to "friends only," which would drastically reduce the threat of theft. Underuse of Privacy Controls Over-Collection of Data