We are addressing the subject on most peoples minds when it comes social media marketing – what is the ROI of social media? It’s a completely valid question and one that no one should shy away from! Companies part with hundreds of thousands of pounds on billboard advertising over a motorway and have virtually no idea of the ROI, even if the billboard company says 60,000 drivers pass under it every day.

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Podcasting is an excellent medium to share content, and is showing signs of resurgence with a number of thought leaders and professional now entering (or re-entering) the Podcast arena.

In a recent interview, Chris Brogan was asked this question — If you had to give up one of your platforms, which one would it be? His answer — I would give up my blog and would keep my podcast and newsletter.

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Feed Tips for the Blogging Community:

Make it easy to subscribe to your feed. Have an RSS logo near the top of your blog (you’ve seen them – the little orange and white squares?

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Super Bowl ads have long become their own kind of spectacle, with viewers ready to be dazzled by what advertisers will air to millions of viewers during the big game. Now, that marketing focus has extended beyond the television set as brands ramp up viewer engagement with tweets and other social campaigns.

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After giving it some thought, and seeking counsel from friends who work for social start-ups in Silicon Valley, I called Luca and told him that he could have a YouTube account, but with one big caveat. We would make his account settings private, so that no one could leave comments.

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n a recent research study, we spoke with dozens of professionals about their use of social media, and were struck by the variety of approaches they are using.

Some professionals, we found, still manage to avoid social media altogether. But most see that as unrealistic in many occupations, and are unwilling to be deprived of the advantages social media affords in terms of connecting to people and collecting information.

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In the early days of search engines, I was not much of a believer in XML sitemaps. But over time, I began to see first hand how they can benefit websites.

XML sitemaps serve as a way to communicate directly with the search engines, alerting them to new or changed content very quickly and helping to ensure that the content is indexed faster.

For content publishers, it has become critical to help Google specifically understand if your site is the original publisher of content. Why? Panda.

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The simple act of having a social profile does not do a thing to help rankings. Anyone can create a profile on a social network, any time. Facebook says anywhere between 5.5 and 11.2% of their monthly active users are fake or duplicate accounts, and considering that represents 67.65 million and 137.76 million fake or duplicate accounts, it is easy to see why social presence does not equate to increased ranking.

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Taking a look at the state of RSS on iOS post Google Reader, it is actually in better shape than it was before Google killed off the popular service. There are variety of sync services out there.

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Whether you want to sell products, gain subscribers, persuade followers to a point or sway the hearts and minds of readers to your cause, they have got to know who you are in the first place.

Your ability to encourage any of these actions comes from your brand’s authority -- and one of the best ways to build that is through the savvy use of social media. In fact, recent research from Econsultancy shows that 71 percent of brands plan to invest more heavily in social media in the coming year to reach new followers and build brand reputation.

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So here are the best choices for the next time you want to catch up on the news while standing in line or lounging on the couch.

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When Anil Chawla built a start-up that uses software to archive social media posts, he never imagined that his biggest clients would be government agencies.

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There is a very easy-to-use workaround that will give you instant access to Twitter RSS feeds, although it may only be a matter of time before Twitter kills that off too.

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The feed now dominates online content consumption, from the news we read on our mobile devices to the social networks we check constantly throughout the day, as well as the ads that integrate onto those platforms.

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Over the past few years, social media has given rise to a number of crazes that have quickly spread across the web; with the likes of Twitter and Facebook, a trend started in Devon can reach Delaware in a matter of minutes. In the past 5 years, social media trends have got bigger and bigger, and in some cases wackier and wackier.

From the more absurd trends like Batmanning and Cinnamon Challenge, to those with an underlying charitable cause like the Ice Bucket Challenge, social media trends spread like wildfire. Chances are you will have had at least a handful of trends pop up on your social media feeds over the years.

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Consumers and businesses alike have something to learn from just about all of your social media interactions. How many people did your post reach? What sort of links do your followers like best? Does anything you do online even matter?

Fortunately, the rise of social media has been accompanied by the creation of tools to that analyze the impact of most of your social media activities.

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I remember saying that if I could ever figure out how a person could be in two places at once I would retire a billionaire.

And then, I figured it out.

Because being in two places or more simultaneously is exactly what social media allows us to appear to do. With a nearly endless supply of apps designed to cross-post anything we can enter into a digital device, you would think the impossible had finally been achieved.

Certainly a lot of innovative people have ensured a comfortable retirement by making that illusion easy to create. But what is it costing entrepreneurs who fall prey to it?

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RSS has taken some big hits recently. Of course, people have been announcing the death of RSS pretty much since it came into existence, but when Google Reader bit the dust on July 1st, 2013, many were ready to place a wreath at the headstone and walk away.

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The 4 well established steps of a social media audit include the following;

Step 1: Review your Social Media profiles

Where are you present?
The first thing to start from is mapping your social media presence. Locate all the social media accounts for your brand and write down the current status and audience size. This is a a great base to evaluate your presence on each platform at a later stage. Here’s an example from a recent social media audit for Twitter Counter.

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The same laws of attraction have never governed the social media marketing scene for too long.

Just as one Tweet changes another, so does user preferences when it comes to consuming online content. New social media rise and fall quickly and this year SnapChat and Periscope already shown a great influence on the marketing landscape. With new players entering the field and old companies rushing to introduce new features and innovations, the rules of social media play hardly ever stay the same.

In 2016 we should expect to see new exciting trends and changes in the social scene and here are the top 4.

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You are definitely not alone in feeling the RSS information overload. As wonderful as it is to be able to tap into all the information in the world, there are only so many hours in the day to spend consuming it all. Not to worry: With a little pruning, filtering and prioritizing, we can turn the deluge of data into a nice, manageable stream of content.

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If you want to have mastery of all the news, information and updates about yourself, your business, your industry and your areas of specialty, then this may be the most important column you will read all year.  I'm going to show you how to build the ultimate information dashboard that will sit on your desktop or live in your mobile app and will update you in real time whenever anything of interest happens anywhere on the Internet.

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The end of the year is drawing near, which means its time for fresh starts and new beginnings. While that does apply to whichever New Year’s resolution you plan to make in 2016 (and, in all likelihood, abandon by February), it applies to social media sites as well.

Unfriend and Unfollow
The new year is the perfect time to go through your friends list with a fine-toothed comb. Here is a quick guide for whether you should be friends with someone online: Do you know who this person is? Have you seen him or her in the last year? Do you honestly think you’ll need to talk to him or her in the future?

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In 2015, we have seen several major changes and improvements to the way we conduct business on social media. We have seen brand new networks rise, while others have fallen. We have watched popular networks pivot, and promising networks not take off as expected.

This years social media ad revenue is estimated to total $23 billion.

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Never again will mankind have to look for RSS info in more than one place...ok, we're kidding, but we've aimed to create a near comprehensive list of all the RSS readers, tools, browser plugins, tips, hacks and directories available on the web.

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One of the first things some people do after a major life incident is to post on social media, and sometimes those life incidents are rather personal for such a public venue. This has repercussions in two different ways.

First, people create their own liability by posting online.

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The greatest change over the last few years in promotion and advertising is the use of the Internet.

Our websites are a platform to blog and promote our business. In addition links to social media are vitally important.

The use of Twitter and Facebook has grown considerably – every business, no matter what size, can enjoy the benefits of social media.

We have focussed on Twitter and Facebook a lot over the last 12 months. Gradually we have increased our activity and developed what we think works best for us.

On Facebook we have a business page. We regularly post technical articles about current accounts and taxation topics. These prove popular and often result in questions and contact from current clients.

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We keep hearing that RSS is dead but is it? No, RSS feed usage is up and those who switch off their feeds are harming their business.

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The more time young adults spend using popular social media, the greater the link to depression, new research suggests.

The finding stems from research—which involved nearly 1,800 men and women between the ages of 19 and 32—that tried to get a handle on how depression and social media habits may interact.

But does greater involvement with social media actually promote depression? Or, are people who are already depressed simply more likely to gravitate to social media? The jury, according to the study authors, is still out.

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Social media is the primary battleground for the most controversial presidential campaign in modern history. Here is what real-time data says about each campaign.

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Since starting the Johnny Bullet comic strip, I’ve begun reading many more web comics than before to the extent that I read more of them than print or digital comics. It has been an interesting transition from one of those comic book store devotee to getting most of my comics from individual creators online. One technology has helped make this transition possible. It is the RSS feed.

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We are a great believer in achieving the widest possible distribution as possible. RSS feeds allow that because they can be easily consumed in many places. RSS was one of the principle ways in which the early bloggers were able to syndicate their content and achieve large scale distribution. To this day, RSS remains one of the best ways to get content onto many people’s screens in as friction free a way as possible.

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John Mueller was asked about RSS feeds in the latest Google Webmaster Hangout, specifically whether there are any SEO benefits to having an RSS feed on the site.

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Get the most out of Facebooks Fan Pages despite Facebook doing its best to limit what posts you see on your timeline
            
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New-age publishers are toying with innovative content models that offer more value to end users and set their cash registers ringing. It does not come as a surprise, when content is evolving as a major source of income for them. By offering high-value content and a trove of inbound links, digital publishers can maximise the profitability of their websites.

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In what has become a heartbreaking routine—employed during the Paris attacks of 2015, as well as after recent terrorist attacks in such places as Belgium and Istanbul — people shared emotional memes in solidarity with the city of Nice, where 84 people were killed by a truck driver barrelling into the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais.

Using the hashtags #PrayForNice or #JeSuisNice, people expressed solidarity over the deaths of at least 84 people, which French President Francois Hollande says was caused by an act of terrorism.

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With Lines IPO, I thought this would be a good time to ask about the role that new social networks will play in the larger social network ecosystem. Will they cannibalize Facebook’s usage? Or can we expect to see the biggest players continue to be dominant in social networking?

For those of you who don’t know, social networking has a special place in my heart. In 1997, I launched the world’s first online social network called sixdegrees. And as part of that, we wrote a patent that defined a social network as the ability to index multiple relationships in a single database. It gives you the ability to see the people you don’t know through the people you do know.

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Maintaining assets used to be considered a necessary evil, but manufacturers now see strategic asset management as an important way of delivering value and achieving competitive advantage.

With the emergence of sensors and novel data collection technologies, we can connect and monitor assets in a way that is light years from the old method of maintenance, which was essentially ‘wait until a machine fails and then fix it’.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled a new paradigm called e-maintenance where assets can be monitored remotely. This enables OEMs to provide innovative maintenance service solutions to their asset users.

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I had never heard of Nextdoor when I lived in New York City. Social media services catering to individual neighborhoods weren’t useful in an apartment building where most tenants lasted a year, and longtime residents kept to themselves.

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For more than 56 years the charity I work for, Bloodwise, has been working to beat blood cancer, the third most fatal form of cancer. In our work, we have had to constantly evolve and adapt to meet the ever-changing needs of our supporters and patients.

Unsurprisingly, the rise of digital channels has been transformational for us, from the delivery of patient information online to communicating with supporters via social media. However, as the importance of digital grew, we knew we needed to use data and insight to understand our online audiences better and measure our performance.

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While you may be tempted to check out a job candidate's social media presence before hiring, doing so might not be worth the risk.

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The Amazon Kindle is a great ereader, but it is not particularly feature-rich. Reabble is a simple little RSS reader optimized to work inside the Kindles experimental browser to make reading articles less of a chore.

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RSS was first invented by Netscape. They wanted to use an XML format to distribute news, stories and information. Netscape refined the version of rss and then dropped it. Userland Software to control of the specficiation and continued to develop it releasing a newer version. A non-commercial group picked up RSS at the same time and based on their interpretation of the Netscapes original concept of RSS they too released a new version. UserLand was not happy with the non-commercial version and continued development of their own version of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), eventually UserLand released RSS v2.

The History of RSS

This question was put to me by Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Derek Mead and I can not stop thinking about it: What is the smallest code?

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The results of an interesting survey by FindLaw came out recently that should have all lawyers paying attention. According to the survey, the majority of consumers, at least 54 percent, say they are more likely to hire an attorney who has an active presence on social media than a lawyer who isn’t. This is especially true for consumers between the ages of 18 and 44 – at least 69 percent said they would hire a lawyer who is active on social media.

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If you want to generate more B2B leads you need to look into how you’re going to make social media work for you. This guide is going to introduce you to how your B2B firm can use social media to its advantage.

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Most people in the tech industry, as well as avid consumers, marketers, and business owners, are always on the lookout for the next big thing.

In the social media world, we have seen a ton of developments over the past decade or so. Apps have become more friendly to mobile devices than desktops, content has become more visual and more immediate, and borderline gimmicky apps have risen to almost inexplicable heights of popularity.

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Good questions. First, here is why you should care.

Unlike getting website updates or ezines by email, RSS feeds give you absolute, 100% complete control over the situation.

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Parents have plenty of reasons to worry about what their kids do online.

Dangers seem to lurk in every corner of connected life, especially for children. Remember that federal regulation prohibits children under the age of 13 from joining most social networking sites. Even so, more than 20,000 kids try to sneak their way onto Facebook — with or without their parents help — every single day.

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Newsletters are not all bad, but getting them in your email can be a bit disruptive. RSS is a good place for them because you are used to a seeing lot of content in that kind of feed and you can look back on it whenever you want. Kill the Newsletter creates a fake email address for you, then creates a RSS feed for any newsletter you send to that email address. It is a super easy to use system that works really well for anyone still holding onto RSS.

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