It’s hard to believe we’re about to tick over to another calendar year. So, as usual, I got to thinking about the shifts I think companies need to make in their social media activities in the next year. These aren’t necessarily trends that are already happening (although I’d like to say they are), but they’re certainly where my head is at and hopefully where others are, too. Here are six shifts I hope to see in social media use by business in 2012. Better objective-setting. My hope is that this will continue in 2012. More effective measurement. MORE >>

Tweet On our blog, we have several times written about how to create a viral success. Through a guest blog post called “ Tips for Viral Marketing Success: Channels, Stories and People ”, our posts “ Viral Campaigns: Do’s & Dont’s ” and How to Create Viral Success: Top 10 Viral Campaigns. However, here I will attempt to gather some of our earlier mentioned tips and try to include some new ones with a help of an infographic put together by ProBlogger and Voltier Digital. Also, we will look at why and what kind of content goes viral. Why should you opt for viral content marketing? MORE >>

Hello, and welcome to the most disruptive post I believe I have ever written. am making some changes here shortly. In addition to the new theme ( thanks for all of your feedback!! which is easier to navigate and glean information from, I have: Changed the feed to full from summary. have updated some of the Social widgets in the sidebar, it now includes a link to my Amazon Kindle profile so that you can join in on discussing books that I am reading. Reading and writing and creating some new kinds of content (new for me) next year has taken up a lot of my thinking over the past few weeks. Do it. MORE >>

There are sectors of Social Media and Social Networking that may have reason to place importance on such matters as: Do they Follow Me? Did they Unfriend Me? Am I in their Circles? But people in my Tribe don’t like her … Stop it. We’re in business now, so let’s graduate from that thought process, hmm? There are plenty of people who write some brilliant content. Maybe their content helps my intended audience get smarter and grow stronger. And so I curate it and share the content in various places – even if they don’t follow me. And why not. MORE >>

Remember the movie “Tin Men” ?  Ernest Tilley and Bill “BB” Babowsky are “tin men” — door-to-door aluminum siding salesmen in Baltimore in 1963. The movie reflects an era in our history where a salesperson was very much depicted as someone who practiced deception to get a sale. Marketing and advertising practices followed similar games of deception. The public was gullible because it was an era of mass production and mass media as the new frontiers of commerce.  Tin Men didn’t need a heart or a brain because neither were required to make a sale. MORE >>