The Great Outdoors
Social coupon sites head for adventure as more offer daily deals to encourage users to try something new and exciting

Getting outside is good: Outdoor workouts offer benefits that can’t be found by exercising inside. More businesses are taking advantage of renewed interest in outside activity—from New York City bike touring companies to apps that track distance and speed on your runs to free yoga (like the class offered weekly at a Baltimore park by the fitness apparel [...]

How to Prevent a Click-On Follow from Turning Hollow for a Celebrity Brand
The following article was originally published on ClickZ.asia.
There isn’t a day that goes by when one doesn’t read of brands (and their agencies) achieving yet another follower (and fan) milestone. Sounds great. Perhaps it is.
Or perhaps not always.
Certainly not, if one looks at the Twitter following Beyoncé (@Beyonce) has garnered—a million-plus followers.
Which one might say is par for the course for a global star who’s probably sold many [...]

All last week, the news and the Internet were buzzing with stories about the end of the world. The media blitz included thousands of billboards and millions of pamphlets announcing in no uncertain terms that May 21, 2011, would be Judgment Day. (“Have you heard the awesome news?” read one ad. “The End of the World Is Almost Here!”) All of this because of the premonition and calculations of Harold Camping, an eccentric Christian radio broadcaster who briefly went into [...]

Technical Fouls
As the prevalence of SoMe and constant communications increases, so does the potential for gaffes, errors and missteps

Sure, the Internet is rife with tales of mistakes that affect substantial groups of people—Sony’s massive security breach instantly comes to mind. But with the saturation of technology into lives across the globe, it’s becoming easier to witness individual misdeeds that would have been blips in a pre-digital world, now magnified for an always-connected audience. Of course, sexting is a newsmaker [...]

Smells Like Entrepreneurial Spirit
A new business model is on the rise, but you might be surprised by the movers and shakers most likely to make a go of it

Whether it’s a wave of technological innovation or the beginning of a bubble, new technologies—coupled with disillusion with “traditional” career paths—are sparking a rise in entrepreneurship. Graduates from business schools all over the United States are looking to start-ups as an alternative to entering the corporate world. The newly bustling apps [...]

Credit Where It’s Due
Is Facebook—with a user base larger than some countries—developing its own economy?

If you thought Facebook was popular with its members, just wait till you see how it’s catching on with marketers. And because the space is getting so crowded, brands and agencies are increasingly looking beyond the tried and true in order to come up with new and compelling ways to reach consumers—both singer Cheryl Cole and jeans-and-chinos pro Gap, for instance, leveraged Facebook Places for [...]

We’ll start this week’s post with some very big news: Microsoft has bought Skype for $8.5 billion. The question is: Why? Well, Skype is an innovative service that has seen exponential growth since its launch. The company rules the roost in online video calling—when your brand name becomes the word people use to describe your service, you know you’re on to something (many people say they’re going to “Skype” when they mean they’re going to video chat). So it seems [...]

Resistance Persistence
Even as social media envelops us in most aspects of our lives, there are those who still haven’t totally embraced it

In this day and age, it’s hard to believe there are still social media holdouts—but there are. To some brands, updating a blog, Facebook or Twitter account on top of everything else can seem daunting and time-consuming (and what’s the ROI?). Listen up, holdouts: Don’t believe that myth. Even if you don’t understand the why of social media [...]

Our Safety Net
As our social media connections grow deeper and stronger, it’s getting easier to extend a helping hand

As social networks play an increasingly integral role in all our lives, we’re learning how to use them not just to communicate with friends and family but also to help one another. Sometimes it can be for fun—like aiding a fellow linguist in learning a new language through a networking site. Or it can be life-changing: One man in South Korea [...]

High School Social
With blogging down among today’s youth and social networking up, some new sites are trying to allay parents’ worries

It’s apparent that blogging has dropped out of favor with kids today: Among those in the 12-to-17 age range, blogging fell by half from 2006 to 2009. Young people prefer sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but social networking sites bring concerns for parents. Surveys in both the U.S. and Britain reveal that a majority of parents of teens [...]