Social Blogging

Local businesses are starting to use social networking programs to market their products and services.

A man selling iPhone accessories waits for customers in his shop in Shanghai in August.

A majority of medical schools surveyed report they have experienced incidents of students posting unprofessional content online, including incidents involving violation of patient confidentiality, with few schools having policies to address these types of postings, according to a study in the September 23/30 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical …

Is social media good for business? How do organizations use social media to improve their marketing effectiveness and boost their sales?

Photo credit: Stephen VanHorn

Social media is making strong inroads in the business world, but understanding how to leverage social media properly remains one of the greatest marketing challenges to overcome.

While there is no secret formula with which your business can benefit from social media, there are a number of facts that do point clearly at the increasing relevance of using social media to improve their business opportunities:

• The use of social media is growing rapidly. eMarketer predicts that in just four years more than 50% of Internet users are going to be regular social media visitors.
• Traditional marketing channels have become tricky venues to promote your product. Consumers are suspicious of marketing and relationships created ad hoc to sell a product do not work anymore.
• Social media is focused on engagement, community and authority. Your marketing approach in the attention economy, should be to create a community of loyal visitors and “evangelists” for your brand, willingly spreading the word about what you do.
• Social media is emerging as a reliable indicator of online advertising performances.

“OK” - you may say now - “I am starting to understand the value of social media for my business, but what type of social media should my company use?”

Linkedin and Facebook seem now the preferred venues for businessmen, while blogs are the most popular form of social media that organizations are starting to use.

How do I know all this?

Josh Gordon, marketing consultant and president of Selling 2.0, has prepared an extremely useful social media report providing interesting insight about the use and adoption of social media inside the business and corporate world.

Part one of this report provides an overview on how much organizations are familiar with social media and why their usage is predicted to grow exponentially in the next few years.

Here all the details:

I’m sure geeks have many dreams. Make love to Princess Leia. Meet a hot girlfriend while playing “World of Warcraft.” Have mom realize that it’s not just a game! Among the hundreds of dreams that I’m sure you can come up with, I bet at least one of them is to have Justin Timberlake play them in a screen adaptation of their life.

Some Chicago public school students will be getting a lesson in Internet safety.

Adobe Systems is hosting Flash Platform Services to distribute Flash-based applications to social networks, desktops and mobile devices.

Recently, we have seen a few stories questioning how the Presidential Records Act intersects with Americans’ use of modern social media, like Facebook and Twitter , to communicate with the White House.

Chef Rocco DiSpirito preparing food on set for a recipe shoot. Twitter and Facebook are helping Rocco DiSpirito write his new cookbook.

Internet users spend the majority of their online time on content sites, according to the Online Publishers Association in its Internet Activity Index, released September 17.

Facebook’s refusal to grant Playboy model Anissa Holmes access to her own pictures or delete them from its servers after shutting down her profile is a possible violation of Canadian privacy laws, experts said.

Movie mogul HARVEY WEINSTEIN’s first online venture has taken a hit - the website was cracked by hackers.

In this weekly Media Literacy Digest, open education advocate George Siemens, explores and reports about emergent media, learning, education and on the future impact that new technologies may have on society.

Photo credit: rgbspace

Inside this Media Literacy Digest:

• Untangling The Web - Why do two people share information with each other? What impact does a connection (social or conceptual) have on a learner’s level of understanding a subject?
• Microsoft and Google - For most of the late 80’s and into early 2000, innovation on the desktop seemed slow or even non-existent. Microsoft dominated the personal computer experience. That has changed.
• Identity, Memory, Death and The Internet - Dave Cormier offers an insightful (and touching) post on how identity and memory are preserved online.
• Taming Digital Distractions - It is always been easy to find distractions (going for coffee with a colleague, chats around the water cooler), but even then, a bit of effort was required. I actually had to leave my office.
• The Future of Work - Britannica is getting sloppy with their blog postings. Most posts - even ones I disagree with - are usually fairly well thought-out. Then, they post this: The Future World of Work: Flexible and Decentralized.
• Thoughts On New Learning - Is connective learning naturally self-reinforcing? Is the building of community a means to an end (learning), an end in and of itself, or both?
• Immediacy - The implications of immediacy is particularly interesting. What used to be an off the record comment can now be broadcast immediately.
• Why Studies About Multitasking Are Missing The Point - If you judge a juggler by how many times the balls hit the floor and contrast that with someone throwing and catching one ball at a time, the juggler will always lose.
• Information Rich… and Attention Poor - What changes in how we access information? How we process it? What types of tools do we need to cope?
• Liberating Data From Google - The DataLiberation initiative by Google is a huge step in the right direction.

Here all the details:

The campaign has been launched to coincide with the start of the new academic year for colleges and universities.

Aspiring lawyers in the state of Florida already have to pass a thorough background check to become a licensed attorney.