Google is pushing its huge advertising business empire. The company has just announced that it is set to take over a social media marketing entity, for an undisclosed amount. Founded about four years ago, Wildfire works in the domain of helping brands manage their ambitious social campaigns across networks like Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. It has, for record, roughly 16,000 customers. They include Spotify, Amazon, Unilever and Virgin. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a resource that sells precise data sets to independent software developers and corporations on a sliding scale, depending on the actual usage of information. Contracts with its top customers carry the million dollar tags. Sometimes, it trades data with other entities, to boost its own resources. Funded by a constellation of known Silicon Valley luminaries, Factual boasts thousands of customers – CitySearch, AT&T, Facebook, Newsweek and a host of other businesses seek its services for information-based intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »

With the iPhone now accounting for about 58 percent of its revenue in the latest quarter, Apple is constantly looking to upgrade its operating system in order to overpower the devices running Android that made for almost 60 percent of smartphone shipments globally in the first financial quarter, compared with 23 percent of the iPhone, according to IDC. Read the rest of this entry »

Those intermittent dashes of deft market analysis served on social sites like Twitter and Facebook betting on a bullish phase or next wave of bear market are not impromptu thoughts from uninformed investors. Many are now in the form a prewritten post drawn from a comprehensive library of customized messages dispatched by financial advisers at leading Wall Street firms tapping into the fast-paced realm of social media. Read the rest of this entry »

With early signs of the stuttering economy slightly but surely improving, a large number of wary self-employed professionals are looking to get back to the chores of day-today work. To help boost their nascent visibility and credibility in the fragile job market, some of them returned to the basics to develop skills and expertise in social media. Read the rest of this entry »

Google+, Twitter and Facebook offer a great scope to form meaningful professional contacts, to help connect with top companies, enhance your professional reputation, gain exposure to job market, know about vacancies, and ultimately, fulfill your ambitious career dreams. In this post, we shall discuss ways and means of  leveraging the various social media channels to propel your career graph. Read the rest of this entry »

Would you really be worried if your mobile number or other sensitive private data on the Web was becoming accessible to any site you had just visited? And, imagine if someone from us had happened to put a sort of embarrassing photo or video online, a few months ago, which had been forgotten by now, suddenly resurfaces! Would you not want to remove all traces of it forever? Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine a situation in which we’re assigned and identified with a particular number, which suggest how influential we are or are not. It would help decide whether one receives a job, a guest-room upgrade or some free samples at a high-profile supermarket. In case your influence score happens to be low, you wouldn’t get the promotion, the swanky suite of your choice or the complimentary offers. If you think this is science fiction, pause for a moment; it’s actually the case with millions of online social network users. Read the rest of this entry »

What has the new year in store for marketers on SEO landscape that has undergone a dramatic change with the rising stature, power and reach of the social media. The search engine optimization techniques and strategies are bound to witness a further churning in 2012. What can one expect on this count? Are there any definitive trends to give us a clue? Let us try to find out as part of an academic exercise, which can also be handy in practical terms in setting the SEO agenda: Read the rest of this entry »

The algorithms, which surface content for users on sites like Facebook and Google, are made possible by modern programming. But then a section of experts have their concerns. Why so? Here’s the reason: As users increasingly fetch news updates and information from curated or refined social channels, the trend of filtering at times isolates us and leaves our world view incomplete. Read the rest of this entry »