Popular Social Networking Websites

May 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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Social networking websites have become popular for both business and personal use. You can use social networking sites in your personal life to keep in touch with family, friends and classmates. Social networking sites allow you to upload pictures, share links, post your status and send messages to other users. Family members who live far away from each other may find social networking an optimal way to feel in touch with loved ones.

Businesses can also benefit from using social networking as part of their marketing efforts. Social networking costs little to no money and allows businesses and target consumers to communicate directly. Companies can use social networking websites to offer coupons and special deals to consumers.

It is important for business owners and marketing professionals to use social networking to its full potential. Unlike a print ads, social networking should not always go after the hard sell. Social networking can also be used to engage in conversations with prospects, make networking connections, follow trends and share industry links.

Social networking can also be used to promote blog posts, find attendees for events and to connect with other people who attend industry tradeshows. Social networking really opens up a directly line of communication between prospects and clients that never existed before the Internet age.

There are hundreds of social media websites out there but Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. In addition to signing up for various social media sites, business owners maybe be interested in using discovery engines such as StumbleUpon as an additional way to share articles and gain a following.

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Friendly Connections: Social Media Monitoring

December 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment
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It is a simple box that is shoved beneath the sag of your mattress, soaked with dust and cobwebs. It has been years since you remembered it, since you dared to even open its lid and peer inside. But curiosity has finally revealed itself as you were trying to scrub away the dirt beneath your bed (a task most impossible, you’ve since discovered). So you push away your broom and toss down your cloths. Hands are offered instead to the box. And, when you open it, you are amazed by what you find: letters and photographs, smears of ink. It’s a collection of mementos you swore you wouldn’t forget.

But you did, and now you wonder where all of your past friends have gone, if they have tossed all reminders of you away as well. You lost them (as you promised you never would).

They can be found again, however. You merely need social networking.

The online world can be used for more than simple games and pleasures. It can instead be utilized for searches. Take advantage of the endless blogs, forums, and social pages (each specifically tailored for forming new connections and revitalizing old ones). Look for those you once offered all of your secrets to. A simple engine will provide names, websites, and messaging information. You can seek out the relationships life forced you to abandon.

And through careful social media monitoring (taking note of all of the most popular networks and communities) you can explore the internet and find your companions. It is the convenience you never thought possible. It is the past brought about by sudden relevancy.

You deserve more than a box of faded treasures. You instead deserve hours filled by renewed friendships.

Use virtual technology to rediscover the days you had to ignore. Use social media to establish yourself as a modern presence.

It’s easy. It’s quick. It works.

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Are Parents and Teenagers at War Over the Internet?

November 18, 2010 by Leave a Comment
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Various expert sources have reported that the typical U.S. citizen now spends more time online than watching TV, and it’s getting easier and easier to access the Internet thanks to all the smart toys available. Teens can use their smartphones to do everything from taking photos and posting them on Facebook to updating their Twitter accounts from their home screens.

At home, kids may pop on the computer, or they may stick to their phone. After all, these have become the lifelines to the "real" world for many teenagers. With all the love kids have for technology, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to find out whether the Internet is worse than TV.

Many parents think yes, especially when they get high phone bills as a result of their kids going over media package plans. There’s nothing like an outrageous phone bill to kick off a battle. Parents may be looking to experts to give them another reason why they should confiscate the phone and the computer and the netbook and the iPad…

Unfortunately for parents, Douglas Gentile has presented evidence that the Internet is no better or worse than TV. Gentile is a child psychologist who works at Iowa State University as an associate professor. According to his research, the main risk in using the Internet is exposure to inappropriate things, such as pornography or cyber bullying.

In response to Gentile’s point of view, critics are pointing out that there is a correlation between screen time and poor grades. One would wonder how a kid who can send 9,000 texts and prefers to read words over talking could do poorly in school; however, this correlation does exist.

For now, each parent will have to determine where he or she stands on the Internet issue and pick the battles wisely.

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Social Networking and Divorce

October 24, 2010 by Leave a Comment
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Social Networks and Divorce

Legal experts advise their clients in cases of divorce to go on a social networking blackout. If you’re in a divorce, stay away from sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Linkedin; there has been a strong – and bad – precedent of people going on those sites during divorces, and giving up information that is then used by the spouse or partner they are divorcing. Divorcing parties have a bad habit of sharing their bad news with others, which can estrange friends and family, as well as motivate third parties to supply the opponents’ legal teams with dirt to help them in their divorce case. In one instance, a spiteful woman made a Facebook post in which she bragged about her ability to make her husband spend money by bringing up frivolous – and devastating – false accusations of child abuse. After ‘lol-ing’ about her criminal intent, the divorce court reversed custody of her children back to the father, giving her only visitation. Just desserts, as some might say.

Facebook Causing Divorce?

Some people have used sites like Facebook to find evidence for ending a relationship or initiating a divorce. A woman in Florida recently saw that her new husband was a bigamist; via his Facebook friends, she discovered that he had a second wife and an entire second family in a state he regularly visited for business trips. Facebook is so efficient at tracking friends and activities that people are often unconscious about how their postings will be broadcasted to the world at large. But some people say that if the way in which social networking sites strip bare a person’s secrets, that it will force them to be more honest in their dealings with others. Another view is that a social networking profile can be maintained strictly to give a false impression of that person’s ‘candid’ life.

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Social Networking

March 24, 2010 by Leave a Comment

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Social networking services are one of the largest and most influential categories of sites on the Internet. They connect people based on interests, activities, or real world relationships. Beginning with chat rooms and forums in the formative years of the Web, online networking evolved by the 1990′s to a form more resembling modern social networking websites. In the early 2000′s a number of companies created a whole new genre of digital networking. Websites became based around user profiles, in which users could express themselves and display friend lists. Friendster was launched in 2002, MySpace in 2003, LinkIn in 2003, and Facebook in 2004; this marked the real rise of social networking as a part of the mainstream Internet and pop culture. People used the sites to keep in touch with old friends and make new ones. As of July 2010 Facebook, the most popular networking service by far, has more than 500 million active users.

In the second half of the decade digital networking was taken to new heights with the introduction of real time, such as Twitter in 2006, and location-based, such as Foursquare in 2009, services. Twitter in a microblogging service, in which users post 140-characters or less “tweets” to their profiles, which other users are instantly updated on if they are followers of that user. Besides its use as a tool of broadcasting a regular user’s activities, Twitter has a notable presence of celebrities. Fans follow their favorite writers, actors, and politicians in order to get up to the minute news about their lives or careers. It has also been used for political means, such as during the 2008 US presidential campaign and 2009 Iranian election protests. Foursquare is a geosocial networking service, which enables users to update their location online via their cell phone. Users geotag locations in their area, giving information and ratings for other users to see. It combines the real time service of Twitter in order to update friends with the business reviews of Yelp. Online networking has progressed from simply keeping in touch with friends to the ability to broadcast a person’s location and activities at any time.

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