Social Blogging

Merry Christmas to you, indeed! …and even though this must have been my worst Xmas of all (sick in bed with nausea and my intestines grumbling), I am really glad I have found the time this morning to prepare a few little video gems as a big thanks to you for being my reader.

Photo credit: Robin Good

Please find in this two-section video compilation, a few, memorable short video clips, I would like to share with you as my personal Christmas present.

In the first group are a few video pearls I have run into by accident during 2009 and which have really inspired and motivated me a great deal. You can use them yourself as motivation and spirit-boosters as the individuals in those videos show to be really special, moving individuals.

In the second one, which is much more personal, I am sharing a few video clips I have personally shot and to which, I am very dearly attached. They represent funny, loving, curious and unexpected memorable moments of my life which I like to share with you at this time: me singing, my wonderful parrot rapping on the music, the Italian “bersaglieri” (the military corp that is characterized by the fact that they always run), or the Indian cab driver in Rome, to whom I asked “what is a blog?”.

I hope you will enjoy these video clips as much as I do. They should be enjoyable and spirit-lifting.
See if they have on you the same positive effect they have on me!

With my very best wishes of a wonderful Christmas!

In Iran, any sexual relation outside marriage is strictly prohibited and married offenders could even face stoning to death TEHRAN, IRAN: The judiciary commission of the Iranian parliament threatened on Wednesday providers of dating websites in the Islamic state with harsh penalties, Fars news agency reported.

This year will end with major shifts in social network advertising spending. Facebook, with 350 million users overall, is the premier destination for marketers in the U.S. and many worldwide markets.

Starting 12 a.m. Christmas Eve, NORAD will begin posting preflight preparations for Santa’s big trip.

A Lynchburg judge Tuesday denied a request by a professor accused of sexually assaulting one of his students to access the woman’s Facebook records in an attempt to discredit her at trial.

A widespread service outage affected BlackBerry users across North and South America Tuesday evening.

Facebook claimed it was doing the world a favor when it updated how the site handles privacy settings earlier this month, but the change has done nothing but get the company in even more hot water.

Alabaster officials recently began offering city residents two more ways to keep up with news and events throughout the city.

The U.N. climate conference has ended after two weeks of intense wrangling, accepting a new U.S.-brokered deal that offered billions to help poorer nations adjust to global warming but did little to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.

What is social media ROI? Is it possible to measure your success with social media? In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best articles and reports to understand and calculate the return on investment from your social media campaigns.

Photo credit: Kirsty Pargeter

Social media marketing campaigns are a completely different animal than any other marketing campaign. The main problem with social media is that you have no tangible elements to measure the return out of the initial investment you make.

If you spend money on advertising, you get money in return. But when you invest in social media, there is no money involved. Social media is free and you are dealing with non-tangible goods like human interactions and conversations, which are all resources that are not easily quantifiable.

Specifically there are three main types of resources you put to use when marketing with social media:

1. People: The workforce you employ. It may be only you or your team.
2. Technology: The social media you use to accomplish your goals.
3. Time: The amount of the day you dedicate to social media marketing.

As you can see, it is very hard to state something like: “I have four people working twice a week on Facebook, so I can expect to get “x” ” There are no guarantees that the response you get from your audience will lead to the exact results you need.

Do not despair though, because with the appropriate strategy you can indeed attempt to make sense of your social media campaign and evaluate the results in the long run.

There is a five-step procedure you can follow to calculate whether your social media investment is producing relevant results:

1. Analyze: Your first step is to understand your presence, limits and areas of improvements you have when using social media
2. Plan: Secondly, you need to establish a clear goal, something tangible you want to accomplish that is based on your analysis. Brand awareness, buzz, inbound links, you name it.
3. Accomplish: Third, you need to take action and employ the resources you possess to achieve the specific goal you have set.
4. Evaluate: Fourth, after some time spent on your campaign, you need to measure your performance to make sense of what went wrong (eventually) and what is leading you to the right direction.
5. Repeat: Finally, when you have achieved some good results, start over and focus your efforts on another goal.

It is indeed challenging to measure your social media ROI and, as stated before, nobody can assure you will get the results you expect. But social media has subverted the rules of marketing. Conversations are the way people want to be engaged these days and they are not willing to go back to the old days of institutional brochures or brands that do not listen to their customers.

If you want to be successful, you do need to jump on the social media bandwagon and this guide is a good place to understand how to leverage in a very practical way the power of social media for your own business needs.

Here all the details:

HOLLYWOOD star Brittany Murphy has died of cardiac arrest in Los Angeles aged just 32 after reportedly being found unconscious in the shower.

A Facebook user edits privacy settings in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Beginning Dec.

What does Google want with the raucous online reviews posted on Yelp ? On the surface, Yelp doesn’t seem like anything special: The San Francisco -based Web startup offers a collection of user-written reviews of local restaurants, retailers, and services, combined with some basic search functions.

Hunting for a home or apartment on the go seems to get easier with every new mobile phone application.

What is cloud computing? Will “the cloud” really have that huge impact on the way you and I use the Internet? In this MasterNewMedia compilation of George Siemens‘ reports and discoveries, you can find the insight and ideas that may help you to make greater sense of what cloud computing really is all about.

Photo credit: Saporob

Here is Wikipedia definition of cloud computing:

[…] a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer needs knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them. It typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.

What this means for common Internet users like you and I, is that all of our data will increasingly reside on online services and not a local physical hardware storage device like a hard disk, a CD-ROM or a USB key.

Microsoft, for example, has launched this year a version of their Microsoft Office 2010 suite which allows you not to buy anything from the store, and to access the full application directly online.

Adobe has also released a web version of Photoshop that does not force you to install anything on your machine.

And these are just a few examples of the direction that the big software houses are following to shape the market in the next few years.

In this MasterNewMedia collection you will find the top key trends and highlights on cloud computing as selected and reported by George Siemens during this past 2009.

Here all the details: