Press releases, social media education and strategy were the topics of a lively discussion Social Media arrived in LA yesterday. Chris Heuer set the scene for the meeting with the aims of the SMC – education about social media, teaching social media literacy to kids and adults alike, setting ethics and standards and facilitating discussions and unconferences [...]

Join us in Boston as we honor excellence in new communications and social media initiatives and celebrate our first anniversary! The Society for New Communication Research has put together a great program for their first annual Symposium.  If you are on the East Coast (and even if you aren’t!) you should be heading to Boston [...]

Google number one but social media sites are gaining ground If you were wondering whether all the fuss about Social Media Optimization is worth the effort, take a look at these figures from Hitwise. Google drives the most online retail visits- 14.93% – but there is a rapidly growing pool of traffic to be had [...]

Is there life beyond Del.icio.us? An excellent post this week from Read/Write Web compares the social bookmarking sites and concludes that there are two dominant players – del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The rest of the pack, including Yahoo MyWeb, appears to be substantially behind. Note: This comparison does not include social news sites like digg.  Watch [...]

Their FUSE find, use, share, extend philosophy expands If you are a small local business and you think that online reviews and comments don’t affect you, think again.   Yahoo Local has just become more personal and more social. A number of new features have been integrated into the site that allow people to create customized [...]

Creating an RSS Strategy Acc ording to the Jupiter Research study "Feed Marketing: Use of RSS as an Alternate Messaging Medium” content syndication is gaining popularity with the public. 30% of marketers surveyed said that they have implemented RSS feeds because of customer demand. "Marketers must begin to plan their RSS strategies now," says the [...]

More than one third say the Web is the most influential medium in their decision to see a movie No big surprise here.  Movies, like pretty much everything these days, is influenced by web content. One third of moviegoers turn to the Internet to learn more about a movie release after first hearing about it [...]

Content syndication and social media becoming an integral part of SEO Matt Cutts`of Google said it best in the interview with Mike Grehan titled "The Future of Search and Outdated SEO Methods." "There’s no point in doing textbook (SEO) stuff unless you have enough great content and the reputation within your community to be a [...]

The recently released Hitwise Industry Report for Travel shows the top 30 travel sites in various categories: Visits Pages Session Duration The usual suspects are in the pages and visits section, but there are some surprises in the session duration list. Holland America is now at #10 on this list.  They have been syndicating their content [...]

Standards for news releases Chris Heuer is on his ‘walkabout’ and attended the XPRL meeting in London this week. The other question we were striving to answer was “Who would be the most valuable supporters of XPRL that would get us to the point of broader adoption in the industry?” One path considered was to create demand from [...]