If you’ve already searched for some Fan Page inspiration and undertaken the task of building a custom landing page for your business’s Facebook presence, you may now be in the market for some features that will further engage your fans.
A nice feature of the modern social web is that it’s modular. You can plug in and customize pre-made pieces of software (often created by other users or companies), and mix and match what works best for you without a lot of technical know-how. Facebook works the same way with …

I’m hardly qualified to dash off authoritative articles on the theological bona fides of African critters. But one recent evening, I made $15 for writing tips on hard-disc data recovery, another $15 for telling people how to repair burnt carpet and $7.50 for teasing out the answer to that most pressing of questions: Is a giraffe sacred?
The reason for my nighttime writing adventure was to see what life is like on a massive content farm. I was working for Demand Media, the content-provider start-up that has quickly become the …

Collaboration and crowdsourcing are the realities of today’s public Internet, and the trend is now gaining real traction in the workplace. Smart companies increasingly understand that their richest source of insight, ideas, data, and information is within their own employees. They are the ones whose talent, work, and daily interactions with the product make the business what it is.
Just as so many of us look to the Yelp community to figure out where to make our dinner reservations, companies are increasingly looking to the employee crowd for the knowledge …

It seems as though the first era of digital music may have come to an end. Napster died, P2P lived in some black market twilight zone, streaming services on ad-supported revenue were suffocated by unsustainably high licensing fees, and subscription services sputtered along, never quite capturing the imaginations of music fans. 2009 ended in a flurry of acquisitions (LaLa, iLike), launches (Vevo) and shutdowns (iMeem), which dramatically rearranged the digital music landscape. When the dust finally settles, expect digital music to begin anew.
With that in mind, here are my …

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.
But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become …

Mashable is proud to announce the winners of the 3rd annual Open Web Awards: Social Media Edition! The Open Web Awards is our international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology and achievements in Social Media. Previous winners include Facebook, Pandora, iGoogle, Google Maps, Digg, Mahalo, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, ShareThis and Evernote.
This year, we received over 440,000 nominations with over 70,000 nominees and over 780,000 final votes. Readers voted in 50 categories including new themes to reflect the evolution of web culture since 2008.
Read more, including …

Let’s face it: It’s holiday shopping crunch time. With less than 10 days until Christmas, every lapsed second is a second lost in online shipping guarantees.
If you’re still hoping to find a few last-minute web deals and actually get those gifts before Christmas day, have no fear. Tomorrow, December, 17, 2009, is Free Shipping Day and there are currently 698 participating merchants (and counting) offering pro bono shipping with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve.
Read more at: Mashable
Related links: http://www.freeshipping.org
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Getting people to interact with others and upload content to a community-driven site enough may sound easy, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically. It takes time and work, and much of the right formula is deduced through trial and error.
Here are 10 tips for increasing user engagement that work for news community web sites, but can apply to all types of online user-engagement communities.
Read more at: Mashable
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{Photography by lulugaia}

Last time we featured CURB (the natural media agency) they were promoting the London Aquarium by stenciling its logo on city surfaces using seawater. Now, just in time for Christmas, CURB has launched its latest low-impact innovation. GlowFungi, also known as DiscoFungi, is a marketing tool that uses glow-in-the-dark bacteria. The harmless bacteria’s glow is a natural reaction, requiring no chemicals, and can last up to a week. To create a glowing piece of work, CURB adds bio-luminescent bacteria to petri-dishes, a bed of mushrooms, or a writeable gel …

“You need a business plan” is the mantra of MBA types.
As they say, businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan! Who could argue with such a clever turn of phrase?
Let’s do some quotes:

“Without a business plan, how will you know whether you can make a profit?” (source)
“A complete business plan should include five-year financial projections. These projections will assist investors with making decisions about your business and help you to know how much funding you will need to get things rolling.” (source)
“Many businesses fail due to poor …

Let’s call it the “Paranormal Effect” initiative.
Clearly dazzled by the fact that it could gross more than $100 million on a movie that barely cost $15,000 to make, Paramount Pictures is set to launch a new production wing devoted to films budgeted at less than $100,000. As my colleague John Horn reported today:

“The as-yet-unnamed division’s initial plan is to finance as many as 20 ‘micro-budget’ movies annually starting in 2010… Funds for the movies — about $1 million annually — will be part of Paramount’s existing production budget….Some of …

2009’s crop of top viral video advertisements show us that people are willing to embrace a host of creative approaches on the social video Web, from beguiling mini-films, to user-generated advocacy, to YouTube () celebrity endorsers, to elaborate commercial-grade productions. That’s good news for creators.
Regardless of the approach, the key for marketers is a solid understanding of what a brand is, who is the brand’s audience, and what moves them. Strangely enough, this formula sounds like traditional advertising. This year’s Top 10 is certainly a glimpse of how the …

There are many times or reasons that a small business will receive an influx of new customers — such as around the holidays for retail stores, during a new product or service launch or after a local advertising campaign. While new customers are great, returning customers are even better. Social media offers a number of opportunities to turn your new and existing customers into repeat customers and fans.
Read more at: Mashable
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{Photography by Zemllinki!}

With holiday shopping in full swing, social shopping is already making a big impact. Data from Hitwise shows that downstream traffic to the Retail 500 coming from both Facebook and Twitter increased 36% and 15% respectively on Thanksgiving from the previous day. Downstream traffic to retailers grew again on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as many retailers promoted sales through fan pages and tweets.
This data is very encouraging for marketers, but a social media campaign must still be managed correctly for maximum ROI. Here are some tips on how …

A buzz technology right now, augmented reality apps are quickly gaining momentum on the iPhone. So to add to the quick overview of six AR apps we brought you earlier, we sort the digital wheat from the pixellated chaff to bring you ten AR apps for the iPhone that vary from functional, to educational, to just plain fun.
Read more (including the list and links) at: Mashable
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{Photography by Brett L.}

Over the past year, Mashable has written extensively on the value of social media to small businesses. We have also contributed regularly on this topic to the American Express Open Forum.
From the fundamentals of Twitter () branding, to the importance of blogging, to getting work done with some great online tools, small businesses face many challenges when trying to understand how to use social media. However, taking the time to learn how to leverage social media and technology to benefit your business will pay big dividends in the long …

Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, so it may come as a surprise to some that up until early 2008, it didn’t offer any localized versions of the site at all. The company managed to jumpstart its international presence with an application fittingly called Translations, which took the time-consuming and costly task of translating the site and crowd-sourced it, asking the network’s millions of users to lend a hand. The process proved to be very efficient: Facebook launched a Spanish site in Feburary 2008, only a …

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From: NetflixPrize.com

This is Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix.
To everyone who participated in the Netflix Prize: You’ve made this a truly remarkable contest and you’ve brought great innovation to the field. We applaud you for your contributions and we hope you’ve enjoyed the journey. We look forward to announcing a winner of the $1M Grand Prize in late September.
And, like so many great movies, there will be a sequel.
The advances spurred by the Netflix Prize have so impressed us that we’re planning …

customAdart.com reinvents the business model of photography market, reversing the model and crowdsourcing it.
A MUSt try for any innovative business and free agent.
http://www.customadart.com/
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{Image © 2009 by Toscana Enterprises Corporation, all rights reserved}