Stealing mySpace by Julia Angwinn is an interesting look behind the scenes at the history of MySpace. While Facebook gets all the media attention MySpace is still by far the second largest social networking site in the world. The book looks at the astounding rise of MySpace, which went from a Friendster competitor designed to save a flagging department at eUniverse, an Internet company best known for hawking dubious diet pills and downloadable cursors packaged with spy ware, to being sold for close to one billion dollars to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.  Read more... (450 words, 2 images, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)

I read this book a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to write a review of it. The official title of the book is The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff by Clara Shih.

Clara works for Salesforce.com and while the book at times reads like a sales manual for Salesforce.com that does not detract from the useful information in the book.  Read more... (197 words, 2 images, estimated 47 secs reading time)

I always love reading future projections where people take a little bit of information and then extrapolate that into the future. Remember the stock market analyst who projected that the Dow was going to hit 36,000?

Well eMarketer has  a new report where they predict that there will be 18.1 million Twitter users in the U.S. in 2010 (that is next year), up from approximately 6 million Twitter users in the U.S. in 2008. To give that 18 million Twitter users some perspective, that would mean that almost 11% of all US internet users would be on Twitter.

 Read more... (231 words, 2 images, estimated 55 secs reading time)

This is not a social media post.I was in NYC for the TGL Classic which is a race to not only to raise money but to also promote the awareness of lung cancer. The Labrecque family do an fantastic job putting on the race and their were over 10,000 runners this year. This was the 6th year that ‘Team Tammi” has competed. Lung Cancer is a disease that hit home to be in 2001 when my wife, a non-smoker, was diagnosed with it. Her story can be found on her Time For Living web site.

 Read more... (137 words, 1 image, estimated 33 secs reading time)

Some more social marketing posts that have caught my attention

MySpace CEO Bullish On Mobile
After unveiling a revamped MySpace Mobile earlier this week, MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe said Thursday that the social network is looking into further mobile initiatives including portable playlists, location-based applications and mobile commerce.

U.S. Social Network Users To Grow 44% By 2013
The number of people in the U.S. who use social networks at least once a month will increase 44% to 115 million in 2013 from 79 million in 2008, according to a new eMarketer report.  Read more... (519 words, 1 image, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)

I was off the grid last week, but as I work my way through my RSS reader here are some of the things that caught my attention

Building Your Own Reputation Management Dashboard 

Marty Weintraub of AIMClear Blog has written up a one-of-a-kind tutorial explaining how to monitor your online reputation from a central dashboard, deploying various free services, data stream providers, etc. What makes this article so good is that Marty includes step-by-step instructions with plenty of screenshots.  Read more... (334 words, 1 image, estimated 1:20 mins reading time)

Some of the social marketing stories and posts that caught my eye recently.

Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing
A list of social media best practices and things to avoid

Debunking Six Social Media Myths
While tools such as Twitter, Digg.com and Facebook are free to use, leveraging them for marketing purposes takes time, expertise and money, according to Whatsnextonline.com President B.L. Ochman. Despite the proliferation of self-styled social-media consultants, Ochman notes, there are not too many people out there with a proven record of crafting successful social-media campaigns  Read more... (317 words, 1 image, estimated 1:16 mins reading time)

I was watching something on television last week when this ad from Kaplan University came on and I was struck by how similar education and social media is becoming.

When Rohit Bhargava developed the 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) back in 2006, one of his rules was:

Help your content travel – Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.  Read more... (318 words, 1 image, estimated 1:16 mins reading time)

More than four out of 10 women in their 40s surveyed in October by SheSpeaks  had a social networking profile. And over 70% of women with children ages 13 to 17 had talked about products on social networks, compared with 62% of all responding women.

“40-somethings are active users and members of online social networks,” said Aliza Freud, CEO of SheSpeaks, in a statement. “These women have started to use the Web and social networks in ways that mirror the rest of their lives—from finding out about a product to shopping or monitoring their children’s activities.”  Read more... (209 words, 2 images, estimated 50 secs reading time)

Here are some of the social media stories that have caught my attention recently.  Read more... (293 words, 1 image, estimated 1:10 mins reading time)

1. Looks like Twitter has decided that selling ads will not be one of their revenue streams. Source: LA Times
2. Facebook Still Valued At $15 Billion? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sits down with TechCrunch and reveals that the social networking giant is looking for more funding in the $15 billion valuation range, a price that was set when Microsoft purchased a 1.6% stake in the company for $240 million in the Fall of 2007. “We’re not actively going around trying to raise money from a lot of different people. It’s more just a follow on to that (previous round),” Zuckerberg said. Source: TechCrunch/Silicon Alley Insider