This is a guest post by Geoff Livingston. The ongoing conversation about the ills of the A-List produces the opposite effect than desired. Instead of creating a correction, it builds a stratosphere of influence, and creates a perception of unworthiness for the rest of the social web. This demeans the value of everyone else — literally everyone who is not a top ranked “A-Lister,&# a crying shame consider that the rest of the population has as much of a chance of becoming truly useful and influential. This type of influence is popularity driven. Influence and Individualism. MORE >>

Photo by Ken Lund, Creative Commons. Interesting question, isn’t it? Generally speaking, I’d say the answer is yes, but the REASONS you should care might surprise you. Here’s some different ways of looking at it: The care and feeding of followers and fans. I’m not a believer in checking my followers to see what they can do for me. My question is “what can I do for them&#. Ultimately, I think this attitude pays big dividends, but it is the long road and the high road. This school of thinking is my typical default for personal accounts, soloprenuers and consultants. MORE >>

I’ve spent the past four days in Google+ , trying to figure out if it’s a Facebook killer , a Twitter killer, or just one more social network we have to use. can say with certainty it’s none of the above, but I haven’t yet figured out what the heck it is. Problem is, it’ll be hard to do so until a good number of my friends are in there and using it. As John Falchetto said, “We’re just the crash test dummies&# right now. don’t think it’s a tool everyone will use. Jay Baer thinks there are business applications (I don’t agree…yet). MORE >>

On 13th July Facebook will be launching new Pages and Places functionality to enhance the existing parent-child Page structure. Facebook will be adding mass management features to help businesses, in particular global brands, establish a more localized presence on Facebook, making it easier to manage multiple locations in a more scalable way. The new features will appear automatically in all existing parent-child set ups, and the admin functionality will be available via the Pages API. The 5 new changes to Facebook Pages and Places are as follows: 1. Locations tab. Parent-child linking. MORE >>

When he was pre-planning Nintendo Wii video game  Disney Epic Mickey , gaming legend  Warren Spector  (creator of classic games  System Shock  and  Deus Ex ) took a slightly different approach to how the game would pan out. Instead of having his best designers, scripters, coders and creatives brainstorming ideas, Spector got a bunch of interns together from the Disney Interactive Studios intern group. He then let them have free range over coming up with ideas on the game’s look, feel and plot. Now think how your business can transfer a video game’s approach to your overall one. MORE >>