Hello from Chicago! It is time again for “The Week in Social Media,” by Baptiste Limb and me—this time from Chicago because I’m on vacation in this amazing city. So let’s face the latest social media news and trends.
Social media is becoming even more popular than e-mail—at least on mobile devices. A recent study by research company TNS shows that mobile users spend 1.4 times as many hours using social networking sites than reading and responding to e-mail. Read more [...]

Consider the facts: Your staff, your clients, your competitors, your investors, your advocates and your detractors are all socially engaged. They all have voices.
Some have created a “personal brand.” Others are speaking with association to a company’s brand. This rise of the unofficial spokesperson has significant potential repercussions.
These voices, in the physical world, are mostly weak. In the social world, they can be powerful and influential. In the social world, there is noise and signal. Noise is retweeted, thoughtless, unconnected [...]

By now most of you have seen the truly epic slide show of a young woman quitting her job through a series of messages on a dry-erase board. If you haven’t, you can find it here.
She quit on Monday. On Tuesday morning, the resignation photo essay hit the Internet. By lunchtime, the link to it had been tweeted and retweeted thousands of times. Nearing the end of the business day on Tuesday, the link was still being tweeted at a [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

Social media isn’t just a way for friends to stay in touch—smart PR professionals and marketers know that SoMe can be the answer to their prayers. Though beauty is the rare—and lucky—industry that may have bucked the trend of dwindling budgets (because women want to look good no matter how much the economy is suffering!), it still benefits resourceful pros to understand how employing social media in their strategies can have a great impact with a small budget.
We at Euro [...]

As marketers work around the clock to leverage the newest social media platform, I can’t help but reflect on my first uses of social media. I’m a firm believer that you can’t evolve or grow without knowing your roots and learning from your past—and I realize now that in my past, I was engaged in social media before there was such a thing as “social media.”
It was about 13 years ago when I created my first site—a “Power Rangers” fan [...]

The newest internet celebrity isn’t a smoking baby, nor is it middle-aged mousy woman with an incredible singing voice. Meet Zach Anner, a self-described “wheelchair-bound lady magnet,” who is winning hearts as he competes for a chance to host his own talk show on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
Zach’s contest entry gives his own personal hilarious take on his disability, calling cerebral palsy the “sexiest of the palsies” and discusses his dream to host a travel show for people who [...]

The golden ticket in the advertising world may just be the one to the prestigious Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, the “Oscars” of advertising. This year the festival runs from June 21 to 26.
Meet David Perez, a creative recruiter at Chicago advertising agency Leo Burnett. Not surprisingly, Perez was very much interested in attending Cannes, but unlikely to beat out those ahead of him at the agency for a spot.
He secured his place at this year’s 57th annual festival by [...]

“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 [...]