As the dust settles over the debate about whether social media is indeed worth all the hype, the medical fraternity has been slowly pointing the needle (pun intended) towards a yes.
The lure of social media notwithstanding, the medical community has been apprehensive about using it. Lack of clear knowledge of usage and value, skeptical response and industry regulations have combined to turn social media into a Pandora’s Box in the minds of many who have taken the Hippocratic Oath.
Times have [...]

Hello again from Hamburg! Much has happened during the week—Facebook is again one of the social networks that has released new features. From now on it’ll be easier for admins to filter spam from their Facebook pages. This should be a really helpful tool to provide high quality content.
This week you could hear rumors about another new feature on Facebook: “Social check-in deals.” The Next Web released a blog post that contains an e-mail [...]

Walking into the Time Warner Center for Adweek’s Social Media Strategies Conference recently (the conference was held Oct. 13-14) was a lot like entering a professional sporting event. I put my bag through a metal detector, got my ticket and then entered a room with several large projection screens—though instead of jumbotrons displaying fans in the stadium, we were seeing live streams of tweets.
And, really, it was fitting, considering that this was the Olympics of social media, with key [...]

Where You Shop
Retailers are leveraging ever-popular location-sharing apps, and some are even turning them inside out

Stores are jumping on the location-sharing bandwagon—no surprise there. Why would retailers not want to take advantage of mobile and social apps that make their stores a desired destination? Electronics and appliance chain Best Buy (already a social media early adopter) is experimenting by teaming up with the Shopkick iPhone app to send offers to consumers as they walk in the door. Macy’s has [...]

“It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.” –Henri Poincare (French mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, 1854-1912)
As announced last week, Facebook has now reached 500 millions users. If it were a country, it would be the third largest, behind China and India. Beyond [...]

“Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.” – Denis Diderot (French philosopher, 1713-1784)
Among all social media platforms, Facebook is clearly the one that currently leads the game. Despite privacy concerns, the popularity of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation is constantly growing, with a movie about him and the beginnings of Facebook coming up next October. Let’s first take [...]

It’s a truism that hardly bears repeating that technology and the infinite choice it has fostered have turned the old one-to-many communications model on its head. That’s a fact for advertising, where it’s laughable to imagine businesses being able to survive simply by broadcasting their brand messages to captive audiences. It’s a fact for pop culture, as a generation that all grew up watching “Seinfeld” and “Friends” together realizes that their children will have no such shared, universal touchstones.
And it’s [...]

“Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.” –Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (economic thinker, 1911-1977)
What is totally new with the digital era is that we are freeing a part of ourselves from material consumption. I’m not saying that virtual consumption will replace its material counterpart, but it’s obvious that a part of what we used to do offline is now moving online, completely virtual—like news, music, books, videos, games, applications, virtual goods, etc. Losing a part of the contact [...]

When I think of the phrase “The Beautiful People,” the popular, catchy song from a few years ago by Marilyn Manson comes to mind, but ask some of my single New York City girlfriends and they will sing an entirely different tune that is virtual, attractive and now very controversial.
In fact, I couldn’t believe my ears when they told me about Beautifulpeople.com, a dating website where admittance is based on your level of attractiveness. Yet it wasn’t the site, launched [...]

“A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man … His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.” – Niccolo Machiavelli (Italian philosopher and writer, 1469-1527)
No matter times or places, “influence” has always been the Holy Grail. The social media revolution raised this notion to a new level: Almost everything [...]