Ning, the network of social networks that boasted 20 million visitors a month, is making massive staff cutbacks and has announced a complete end to free services for its users. Those who pay for premium services will be asked to pay more, and those who are getting their social networks free of charge will be asked to fork over or phase off the Ning platform.
For a while now, we’ve been seeing Ning through rose-colored glasses. One year ago to the day, the company announced it had attained 1 million …

As a mostly virtual team with offices spread across three countries in two hemispheres, the entire WooThemes.com staff only gets together twice per year. During their first biannual corporate retreat of 2010, the company, which specializes in premium WordPress themes, saw a unique opportunity to use social media to connect with their customers and “eat their own dogfood,” so to speak, by testing out their own products in a real-world, and very public environment.
This year, the team met for a week-long, working ski trip in the Austrian Alps, which …

On the campus of Penn State University, a rivalry between a rogue campus blog and the official newspaper has become a fascinating mirror of the strife between old and new media. In only a matter of months, the unofficial campus blog Onward State, has marshaled the power of social media to compete with the award winning 112-year-old campus paper The Daily Collegian. With one-tenth of the Collegian’s staff size, Onward State has constructed a virtual newsroom that collaborates in real-time with Google Wave, outsourced its tip-line to Twitter, and …

There will be lots of news leaking about Facebook’s product announcements at their upcoming F8 Developer Conference in April. That’s because they’re already starting to test out a lot of the new stuff with third party developers, and once two people know a secret, it isn’t really a secret any more.
One of the new features we’ve been hearing about is the extension of Facebook Connect and the Facebook API to allow publishers to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on their site.
Sound trivial? It isn’t. This …

I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.
During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, …

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 …

Here’s how it works:

We’re asking our readers to submit their best pro-social digital ideas to us by Sunday, March 7, at 11:59 p.m. ET. For an idea of what we mean by “pro-social,” check out some of the submissions already on the Refresh Project site.
We’ll select our favorite, and work with the winning team to formalize an application to Pepsi. Because this is Mashable, our criteria will focus both on the idea and its proposed social media strategy.
We’ll be competing against other “digital influencers” to win the $50,000 in …

With over 9 million posts and comments in two days, Google Buzz (Google Buzz) has stormed the web like a swarm of locusts. An array of strong features, integration with Gmail (Gmail), and lots of press have turned Buzz into an overnight phenomenon.
If you’re like a lot of us, you’ve suddenly found yourself using your Gmail even more than you already were. Spending so much time in Gmail and Buzz though inevitably takes away from your Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter), and who wants to sacrifice their tweeting and …

An overnight success ten years in the making, social media is as transformative as it is evolutionary. At last, 2010 is expected to be the year that social media goes mainstream for business. In speaking with many executives and entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that the path towards new media enlightenment often hinges on corporate culture and specific marketplace conditions. Full social media integration often happens in stages — it’s an evolutionary process for companies and consumers alike.
Here are the ten most common stages that businesses experience as they travel the …

Vitrue’s Social Media Index (SMI) assigns brands and products a score based on overall buzz from status updates, videos, photos and blog posts. The company has tallied its results for 2009 and released its top 100 social brands based on index scoring, with last year’s winner — the iPhone — reigning supreme once again.

Although the index focuses on consumer mentions and reactions — as opposed to indexing brand engagement via social media — the list is still a veritable powerhouse of information in terms of consumer buzz and word-of-mouth …

Over the past few months, we’ve talked about whether you should have a social media policy and what should be included in that policy. It only seems logical to discuss the next step in the process, which is what to consider when implementing a social media strategy in your workplace.
Just having a policy isn’t good enough — you need a plan to put it in place. Here are five areas to discuss when implementing a social media strategy.
Read more at: Mashable
____________
{Photography by geoftheref}

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.
GeoAPI will …

http://Discuss2010.com

. . . . This would be a far cry from e-mails from folks in some faraway country telling me a long lost relative with the same last name has died and the money could be mine soon. All I have to do is send them some money. Clearly they don’t understand social networking, venture capital and the new marketing order at all. It’s not about the money, it’s about the network!
A few days later, I was forced to face reality. My friends and followers just weren’t doing the …

Social Media and Identity
We are witnessing a profound change in the media and advertising industries due to the emergence of social media. Companies that did not exist ten years ago, like Facebook and Twitter, have captured significant share of the attention economy from traditional publishers. Underscoring this trend is the fact that at the same time that Businessweek was selling for less than $5 million  (plus assumption of debts) to Bloomberg, Foursquare’s pretty cousin Gowalla drove up Sand Hill road and collected $8.4 million for a minority stake.
Amidst this disruption, …

The Interwebs are buzzing, and by now you’ve probably heard about a social network called Foursquare that’s apparently a big deal. So you cracked open your smartphone (or at least, gingerly removed it from its dock) and downloaded the Foursquare app. After signing up, you scrolled through the tabs and figured out how to “check in” at whatever restaurant, bar, store, or train station you happened to be at. And then you said, “Now what?”
Just like Twitter, at first glance Foursquare may seem a bit inert. To really understand …

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
___________
{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 …

Hordes of marketing “experts” are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools

For business, the rising popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media Web sites presents a tantalizing opportunity. As millions of people flock to these online services to chat, flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in to billions of digital conversations. They can pitch a product, listen to customer feedback, or ask for ideas. If they work …

The Daily Mail has uncovered an orangutan at the Vienna Tiergarten Zoo that uses a modified Samsung ST 1000 digital camera to automatically post photos to Facebook.
Nonja, the 33-year-old orangutan, has more than 10,000 fans on her Facebook page, which was created on Tuesday by the zoo. The page currently boasts 20 photos taken by Nonja . . .
Read more at: Mashable
___________
{Photography by itshears}