All posts by Pierre

Social Media

How Do You Detect B.S. On Social Networks?

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With lots of real news spreading like wildfire over social media, it is inevitable that false news spreads over Twitter too, and it does.

The Huffington Post‘s Mandy Jenkins and Regret the Error‘s Craig Silverman held a session at the Online News Association Conference here on Friday afternoon with the goal of preventing the participants from falling into a trap. (Slides from the presentation are available here.)

Yes, this is a real picture, but no it didn’t happen during Hurricane Irene. It’s a couple of years old.

One of Jenkins and Silverman’s bigge

via How Do You Detect B.S. On Social Networks? – 10,000 Words.

trends

The Art of Hiring Social Media Vendors

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Sometimes you need to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.

The same goes in life and card games as it does for the vendors who are assisting in your company’s social media marketing and content development.

The prevailing sentiment is that any customer-facing social media activity should be done by the in-house marketing team.

While that is great on paper – and desirable for a lot of reasons – it’s not a very realistic world view for a large company that is just getting started in social media and online communities.

With that in mind, selecting the vendor who will be interacting with your customers, and creating content on your behalf, that your customers will be reading, becomes a very important decision.

via The Art of Hiring Social Media Vendors – 10,000 Words.

Infographics

Infographic Overload?

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Grace Dobush at HOW Interactive Design is on a campaign to stop the madness. In her post, Quit it With All the Infographics Already, she points out several good reasons to think before inking an infographic, including:

Most infographics aren’t accessible for the visually impaired.

Most infographics aren’t search-engine optimized.

Those super-long infographics are practically useless on a mobile device.

Of all online infographics, 89% contain statistics of dubious veracity. (Err, percentage is madeup, which is sort of her point.)

Many infographics are just plain bad.

That’s not to say there aren’t reasons to use graphics. There are plenty of awesome graphical stories on news sites and blogs today. 10,000 Words highlights them often. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you need to go graphic goofy.

via Infographic Overload? – 10,000 Words.

SEO

The 21 Greatest SEO Myths of the Modern World

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hey say that ignorance is bliss and knowledge is power but somewhere between these clichés there’s a spot reserved for individuals who possess a little too much knowledge to be blissful but still only enough knowledge to be dangerous.

SEO, as an industry, is known unfortunately for the mass of rumours, myths, mistruths and unscrupulous gurus. This in part stems from the search engines’ unwillingness to discuss their algorithms (this lack of disclosure is completely understandable). This breeds a culture of myths where newbies and veterans alike get caught out by nothing more than hearsay that gains traction.

The aim of this post is to try and dispel some of the more widely held SEO myths

via The 21 Greatest SEO Myths of the Modern World.

Infographics

The Most Popular People And Brands On Twitter, Facebook And Google+

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The Most Popular People And Brands On Twitter, Facebook And Google+ [INFOGRAPHIC] – AllTwitter.

As regular readers of AllTwitter will know, Lady Gagareigns supreme amongst individual users on Twitter, but her little monsters are only good enough to place her third on Facebook, behind fellow music superstars Eminem and Rihanna. Gaga isn’t on Google+ at all, which is still dominated by tech celebrities such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

community management

Bing How to build a social following

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The surest way to develop the right type of followers and friends is to deliver the goods. No shortcuts.

Delivering the goods means impressing people enough that they want to connect with you. Bring people value and they will follow. From the dawn of time this axiom has been true and it remains true in the glare of social’s spotlight as well. As you prove your value to people, they will follow you, friend you, spread your word and recommend others join the crowd as well. If you WOW these people every day, they will remain loyal and help boost your profile online.

via Bing How to build a social following – Webmaster Center blog – Site Blogs – Bing Community.

Facebook

Facebook Launches New Metric: “People Talking About”

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Facebook has overhauled its Pages Insights analytics tool and added a new metric to gauge the health of a page: “People Talking About.”

That statistic, which users will see on Pages below the total number of “Likes,” will be one of four tracked by Pages Insights. The idea is that users will understand a Page with a high People Talking About rating is one that has compelling content. Likewise, content creators will be motivated to make their Pages more comment-worthy.

People Talking About (that might not be the final name for the metric; at press time, Facebook wasn’t sure) will measure user-initiated activity related to a Page, including posting to a Page’s Wall, “liking,” commenting, sharing a Page post or content on the Page, answering a Question posed to fans, mentioning a Page, “liking” or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place.

via Facebook Launches New Metric: “People Talking About”.

blogs

Klout Quietly Adds WordPress to Klout Scores

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When Klout announced in mid-September that Blogger and Tumblr would play a role in determining your Klout score, WordPress users immediately asked, “What about us?”

Klout responded by quietly adding WordPress to its scoring system, which already factors in 11 other services: Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Google+, Instagram, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube. Unlike its integration with those services, Klout didn’t publicly reveal the WordPress addition, but we noticed the WordPress button on the Klout dashboard anyway.

via Klout Quietly Adds WordPress to Klout Scores.

journalism

Computer-Generated Articles Are Gaining Traction – NYTimes.com

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The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

via Computer-Generated Articles Are Gaining Traction – NYTimes.com.