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Just over a week ago the Knoxville Convention Center was the hottest spot for social media discussion in the continental United States. Mark Schaefer and the Social Media Club Knoxville assembled an amazingly strong and deeply talented cast of social media experts to expound on their experiences, opinions and practices at Social Slam 2012. Read the rest of this entry »
Instagram has had quite the month. Earlier this month (after a much anticipated release), it launched on Android and quickly added 20 million new users.
Then Instagram announced it was being acquired by Facebook for $1 billion dollars - huge! So you’ve heard about Instagram, but maybe you are thinking, what is Instagram? Simply put, Instagram is a mobile photo sharing social network that allows users to share their lives via photos. Some people share photos of themselves, others only show photos of friends and some only share photos of where they are. It’s completely up to you as the user to determine how you want to make use of it.
Its key feature is that its apps allow you to easily modify the photo with different filters before posting, making it not just about sharing the photo but capturing something emotional and interesting. There are 17 filter options on the Android app that allow you tweak the shot until the photo you get it as you want. My favorite part is that with the right filter, a relatively mundane photo can turn into quite the artistic photo.
Instagram allows you to capture an event or activity in a manner that words sometimes just can’t describe. I tend to capture photos of places that I find interesting. For a few examples, I was walking downtown this week and shot this photo of an interesting window, and a few weeks ago I took this photo of a bulldog while visiting my family.
Gavin Baker - Instagram - "Downtown"
Facebook Timeline rolled out last week, and as suggested you’ve added a cover photo. But now what? The Facebook page update had so much more to it than just the photo. Facebook also included a number of new features for page content including:
Pinterest is the hottest social network right now and is growing so fast in users that you would think they are giving out $100 bills for signing up. (New to Pinterest? Watch this video to learn more.) The numbers: 11.8 million monthly unique visitors, 429% growth from October 2011 to December 2011. The visitors are 97% female aging 25-34. Users are spending over an hour and a half of time on the site per visit. These are massive numbers, all of which are pointing toward a gold mine. Read the rest of this entry »
The Superbowl is always an interesting experience. Some years, the game is horrible, and the commercials are the MVPs. Others, the game is captivating, but the commercials leave us scratching our heads. Thankfully, this year’s game had good commercials and a great final few minutes.
Because the game ended in such a fashion, the Superbowl broke the record of Tweets Per Second (TPS) at a sporting event with an average of 10,000 tweets per second in the last three minutes. This is double last year’s TPS high, at 4,064 during the Superbowl. That’s a lot of Tweets! Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Timeline. You’ve heard whispers and rumors about the changes that are happening and now the updates are here. Timeline is a new format for how your personal profile information is displayed. Facebook released a video that shows it in more detail here, and if you’re a Mad Men fan, here is a spoof video of Don Draper pitching Timeline. Read the rest of this entry »
When I tell people what I do for a living, I commonly get questions about blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and, of late, Pinterest. The questions range from basic to advanced, and they show that people are interested in social media but want to make sure they are making the best use of their accounts. In my conversations, it’s rare to be able to tackle every topic at once. Fortunately over the next two months, there are four workshops that we’re doing on social media that will get your questions answered. Read the rest of this entry »
I made three predictions of what would happen in social media in 2011, and the forecasts came true. Let’s take a look at what I predict in 2012, and we’ll see how I fare in the coming year. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re officially in the heart of the 12 Days of Christmas and if you’re stuck on your final gift ideas, Shopycat might be the help you need.
Shopycat is a Facebook application that launched earlier this month which analyzes the data from your friends profiles on Facebook and then makes gift recommendations based on the information it collects. The app was created and built by Walmart, so gifts come from their inventory, but it will also give you gift ideas from other sites like RedEnvelope, which features unique gifts; ThinkGeek, a site featuring gifts for geeks, and Barnes & Noble. Read the rest of this entry »
These stats in the headline shaped my trip to Chattanooga last weekend. I headed down to contribute to 48Hour Launch hosted by The Company Lab (CO.LAB) at CreateHere.
48Hour Launch is an event founded in 2008 by Sheldon Grizzle and Alex Lavidge in which individuals form teams around ideas and turn them into products in 48 hours, as written in the Times Free Press, “Chattanooga’s 48-hour launch propelled moneymaking ideas from concept to creation over the weekend.” 48Hour Launch was hosted by The Company Lab’s (CO.LAB) and described in its blog post “What You Need to Know About 48Hour Launch.” The event itself is organized chaos - as each group is camped out at their table turning their vision to reality using whiteboards, computers and conversation to refine their product ideas. Read the rest of this entry »
