The education system has its flaws. You do not have to be a researcher to know that. Am I biased? Of course I am, but so is everyone else who has ever been to school.

The education we have in this country is incredible compared to some countries that do not. I am not disregarding them; I have the perspective of a student who has had the luxury of going to school my entire life and a pretty good one at that. Schools all over the world have flaws. Some are small but some are quite substantial.

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Now that folks are posting and tweeting and retweeting - complaints and grievances around the clock, is every negative experience a possible class action? If someone has a bad experience with a bank or someone gets food poisoning at a restaurant or someone has a problem with a prescribed medicine, he can immediately find others with similar outrages. Are social media making it easier for plaintiffs to band together?

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Buffer, the social media scheduling and analytics tool, is introducing a useful new feature today the ability to pull RSS feeds into its dashboard.

It will allow users of Buffers paid product to have an automatically populated queue of content to share on their connected social media accounts. It other words, it could be a godsend for people juggling multiple social channels.

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Interesting:

I do not use social media. Some of my friends keep asking me to join social media and interact with them that way. I tell them I consider social media to be a waste of time and that I have more important things to do. Yet they continue bugging me to join social media. What can I tell them to convince them it is better for me not to be on social media?

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Within corporates, social media is no longer simply the domain of the marketing department. And directors on big boards are putting their management teams through the hoops, demanding to know their strategic response to the phenomenon that has changed the world.

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For Twitter and Facebook, the two principal combatants in the world of social media, e-commerce is emerging as the newest battleground.

Twitter announced in a blog post on Thursday that it had agreed to acquire CardSpring, a mobile payments infrastructure company that allows merchants to offer deals to consumers that can be loaded onto to their credit cards. When the card is used to pay at the store, the coupon is automatically applied.

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Experts say the case of a mother accused of poisoning her 5-year-old son to death with salt appears be an example of how social media feeds into Munchausen by proxy, a disorder in which caretakers purposely harm children and then bask in the attention and sympathy.

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Some pretty high-profile CEOs have jumped on the social media train, but most are only occasional users of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or other tools. The pace of adoption is picking up, however, and those CEOs that do have social media accounts are using them more.

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Having a good, or great, social media presence can help your business grow like wildflowers. But, this will only happen after you develop a large following and learn how to give them what they really want. Here are some great ways any business owner or marketer can increase their social media presence and help their business grow.

1. Identify Goals and Objectives
The first step in growing your social media presence is to identify your goals and objectives. This means make sure you know what you are going after – before you start posting. Ensure you know how each platform works, what audiences you can reach where, and what your objectives are and you will be off to a great start.

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In our increasingly competitive world -- one in which we clamor for the right kind of attention for our companies -- the pursuit of likes can become an obsession.

While experts work to define the return on investment, or ROI, of social-media attention and quantify the financial value of social media-fans and followers, entrepreneurs have an innate sense that there is power in gathering a following of likes for our brands.

If being liked is an important goal, and if we measure our likeability by what our social-media fans are saying, how can we effectively gather that evidence of our likeability?

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Many small businesses recognize the benefits of having a social media presence for customer service and long-term marketing purposes. However, many are slow to recognize social medias security issues and how employees own social presence can add to the companys security issues.

Some companies restrict internal access. Others may prevent employees from having any corporate association outside of work on their own social platforms. This is due to the fact that whatever an employee says outside of work publicly can have a significant impact on the organization.

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The marketing world is on an absolute tear automating menial, mundane, yet necessary tasks.

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Looking to give your Etsy Shop a boost? Want a fast and easy way to showcase your products to your Twitter and Facebook audience? Promoting your Etsy items across social media is simple.

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When was the last time a social media campaign made you really feel something, whether it was happiness, hope or fear?

Below are five of the most successful social media campaigns of 2014, each of which was able to tap into genuine emotion to make a lasting impact on consumers.

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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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Recently, Copyblogger made a shocking announcement: they were killing their Facebook page, even though they had 38,000 fans. Interestingly, this follows their decision earlier this year to close comments on their blog as well.

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What is social media doing to us? Is it stressing us out with its never-ending pings announcing new baby pictures, engagements, and unimportant messages to respond to? Or is it keeping us connected to people, and therefore happier? These are tricky and loaded questions, but a new survey from Pew adds a bit of evidence to the social media reduces stress side of the ledger. At least if you are a lady.

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In our increasingly connected society, building a social media presence is as commonplace as getting a driver’s license. Personal Facebook profiles, LinkedIn accounts, and Twitter handles are common among students and professionals alike. However, frequently updating your Pinterest boards does not necessarily equip you with the tools and experience that you need when crafting a social media strategy for your budding business.

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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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According to a recent social-media engagement study, Americans now spend more time on social media than any other Internet activity, including email. Social media is not going anywhere and businesses, small and large, are now recognizing their online presence is an essential part of their marketing strategy. Eight out of 10 small to medium-sized businesses now use social media to drive growth for their business, and three out of five say they have gained new customers through social media marketing.

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The power of social media is indisputable; what you say on line creates a lasting impact.

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These days, prospects and customers have more information thrown at them than ever before. From phone calls and snail mail to emails and social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, each new way for a person to initiate contact makes it harder for companies to break through all the noise.

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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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How did you end up learning the unwritten rules for social media etiquette?

For me, it was a lot of watching and waiting, a bit of experimenting, and tons of trial and error. When I first started out on social media, I had just the most basic rules and intuitions. Even now, I feel like I learn a new quirk or quibble on a near-daily basis.

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One of the interesting qualities of freelancing work is that you may never meet your clients in real life. Perhaps more than any other job market, freelancers rely heavily on their online image- an aggregate of their resume, portfolio and personality to set themselves apart and attract new clients who may very well be located on the other side of the world.

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When I ran a Facebook ad recently for a nonprofit where I volunteer, I was surprised how specific you could get in targeting potential customers. If I wanted to advertise the event I was promoting to women between the ages of 24 and 26 in my city who were unmarried and educated, who watched Girls, owned a dog and liked designer purses — I could do that.

Being able to target ads to a specific market can help a seller reach the people who want or need their products and services. Unfortunately, that means buyers may also be encouraged to spend more than they should if they are not mindful.

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Long gone are the days when social media was a giant question mark in terms of measurement and ROI.

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When standardized tests are shared nationwide—as they now are, under the Common Core system that's been adopted in 46 states—cheating suddenly becomes a whole lot easier. Especially since teenagers now share just about everything on social media.

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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 2014, consumer shopping behavior evolved rapidly. Shopping online and through mobile devices is the new norm, and the experience has become increasingly more social with platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. These platforms, in turn, have launched new commerce capabilities like the buy button.

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What if there was a way to spend minimal amount of time finding and sharing the latest and greatest content produced by some of the biggest experts in your industry?

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The new launch landscape levels the playing field for brands of all sizes and industries when reaching consumers–yet the ability for consumers to share their opinions freely on social media can provide huge hurdles for brand messaging. Consumers can quickly activate other like-minded consumers to rev up the online discussion to a level anywhere from highly positive to tanking a brand.

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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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According to the Electronic Transactions Development Agency , a public organisation, Thais usually spend around seven hours a day online and most of that is spent on social media.

This phenomenon has had an impact on many businesses due to the time people are forced to spend on social media, especially content businesses, like news providers, bloggers and websites.

It has also affected the way people get news and other information, with rumours sometimes mistaken for genuine news reports.

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We see it happen every day. But here are some tips that will help keep your social media life from ruining your career.

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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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Social media may make you happy -- or not. Like almost all human interaction, it is what you make of it.

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A trio of social media stocks is getting pummeled this week, a sign that Wall Street may be unwilling to overlook missteps at some of its Internet darlings.

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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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Visual marketing is an integral part of reaching customers today. For brands concerned with SEO, however, it brings a wide variety of challenges. Search engine algorithms look for specific words, which makes it difficult to challenge competitors by coming up with better photos and videos to dominate search rankings.

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With more than 84% of brands carrying out social media marketing, the greatest challenge is to rise above all the clutter and establish your brands credibility. The effectiveness of social media marketing is highlighted by the fact that it is100 times more effective in sealing the lead-to-closure rate. Hence brands are vehemently using this channel to attain multiple business goals.

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The most significant marketing change in the past decade was brought about by social media. Before Facebook or Twitter, brands could not dream of building such close connections with their audiences or

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Chances are your small business has used social media in one way or another. There are the big guns like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And other familiar names like Instagram, Pinterest, and Vine.  However, these are just a drop in the bucket when it comes to all of the social media channels out there.

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With the widespread use of major social media platforms, it can be hard to understand why new ones keep being created. Could this be because each social network actually only fills one or two specific niches for users?

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The Federal Trade Commission rolled out its latest truth in advertising guidelines. The last time the FTC updated its guidelines for truth in advertising was back in 2010. The new guidelines may precede a crackdown for social media marketing.

Their effect on social media marketing includes how marketers handle the use of celebrity endorsements. The FTC recommends that marketers have a proper disclosure check up to make sure that their social media marketing campaigns fall within FTC guidelines.

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Despite being difficult to measure, the growing impact of social media on brands is undeniable.

In fact, analysts from Social@Ogilvy recently surveyed more than 5,500 social media users across 11 countries in an attempt to find out how brands should be using social to make a true impact on shoppers.

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Decide how you intend to use social media and to whom you will allow access, especially on Facebook. You do not necessarily need to completely sanitise all your social media profiles — because companies want to hire real people, and some companies specifically look for creativity and personality.

However, if you want to ensure a potential employer does not reject you on those grounds, make sure your online social profile depicts the type of employee a company would want to hire.

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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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A national diaper company is on the defense after a mothers video on social media went viral, claiming glass shards were in a bag of wipes. Other angry parents also took to social media to attack Huggies, showing how claims, founded or baseless, can reach thousands, even millions in just a few hours or days.

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Consider your brand across all visual touchpoints, suggests WebDAM. Include logos, typography, press kit, photography, and icons.

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