Websites bore me. There, I said it. This includes the many bloated social networks that pop up on an hourly basis. I'm a minimalist. Even my sentences are short. I just want my web applications that do exactly what I need them to do—nothing...

YouTube just rolled out some new toys. Right now you can see them by going to the YouTube homepage. They include an address book of your YouTube friends, an updated Inbox, and YouTubeMobile. But two of the new features, YouTube Annotations and YouTube Insight, are...

As social media changes the way companies communicate with their audiences, there is one thing that we shouldn't forget—Social media marketing is still marketing. The difference is, social media marketing targets audiences online where there is more noise, more competition, and more skepticism as...

Other members of the Ignite Social Media team laugh when I rant about Google. "Great technology. Ugly user interface." Google Reader is a great example of that, but now there's a solution to get your RSS feeds served up with some design consideration and...

Jim_headshot2 Ok, we're in the home stretch. Today we'll talk about the fifth mistake in our top 5 mistakes in social media marketing series. And, you might think that would be the last one, right? But wait, there's more! We'll close the series shortly with a...

I think the hardest thing for a blogger is the moment that the initial newness and excitement wears off. You are faced with what is perhaps one of the hardest realizations: and that is, "I have to keep this going"....

Social media is all about sharing, and of course, about conversation. We share ideas, information and tools with like-minded individuals to engage in these conversations. But what are we talking about? Once you enter an online society, you enter a global environment, where you can choose...

Our continuing series on social media marketing mistakes moves onto "mistake #4" today. Today's mistake is using social media as a channel instead of a conversation. Since social media tools give us the power to publish, and social networks give us more places to publish, some...

In college and high school, I used flash cards, vocabulary lists, and even audio programs on tapes to learn new languages (Spanish in high school, German in college). Each of those tools is helpful in some capacity, but in the end, the quickest way to...

I got an email on Friday from Christina at the Advance Guard pitching "Coke Tags" as a new social media marketing effort from the Coca-Cola Company. The whole experience, from pitch to this blog post, provides lessons in social media marketing that all large brands...

Plurk is the hot social media property of the last couple weeks. People are joining quickly, writing reviews and debating the relative merits of Twitter (follow me on Twitter here) versus Plurk (follow me on Plurk here). Here's the general summary so far, to save...