Social Networks

The Best foursquare Lists to Help You Unlock Your City

I’m a man of many lists. Whether they are to prioritize my work day, go grocery shopping or plan for a trip, I like to make sure whatever is important is not forgotten. A list, however, doesn’t need to be limited to the practical. If you watch as much TV as I do, you know you see your favorite characters wining and dining in New York or living it up in Las Vegas and think to yourself “I’m definitely going there next time I’m in the city!” Inevitably though, once you make it to “the city” you end up wandering the streets without a clue of what that place was called, just that they had a really cool fountain at the entrance.

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2011: The Year I Abandoned My Facebook Friends

Since the F8 Developers Conference in September, where Mark Zuckerberg announced major design updates to the Facebook platform, the way I participate on the popular social network has changed.  While the main headlines coming out of F8 focused on a significant overhaul for the profile format called Timeline, the most significant improvement involved the Facebook News Feed. These changes to the News Feed have slowly caused me to leave my Facebook friends behind. And I don’t really miss them.

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2012 Social Media Trends to Watch

The future of social media marketing is in digital storytelling; the ability to humanize a brand in ways with which people identify and are closely engaged, thus feeling invested in its future. The brand becomes an extension of the fan and they are its most compelling ambassador. Social media is more than water cooler chat and exceeds the benefits of traditional word of mouth marketing. While it provides immensely useful data about our habits in real-time, the new frontier of social media is chronicling lifestyle. When viewed not at the scale of minute by minute updates, social media provides a holistic picture of who we are and how we live. It begins to speak to customers as whole people.

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Just Pin It

If you’re anything like me, then you have emailed yourself a recipe, torn out a particularly cute outfit or inspirational pattern from a magazine, or sent a funny meme to your friend at least once (okay dozens of times). Then, you lose it to cyberspace or the hideous stack of paper on your desk, under your bed, in your closet, etc. Not to worry. The web gods have come up with a solution for all collectors of good photos, good food, and, yes, good wedding ideas – Pinterest.

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The Verdict: Should Your Brand Pursue a Presence on Google+?

Google+ is in many ways Google's final opportunity to capture a substantial share of consumers’ social media activity, and Google is betting the farm on it.  This company is in the midst of pulling apart their array of web products – including Blogger, Gmail and YouTube – and is slowly but steadily rebuilding each with Google+ functionality baked in. For brands, Google+ pages represent one piece of this larger puzzle, but they have limited functionality right now, and the audience is small and niche-focused.  This scale makes Google+ certainly worth continued observation from the sidelines, but in deciding on whether to set up shop with a page right now, brand teams should answer the following questions.

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Changes To Google Reader Drag Us Kicking and Screaming Into The Google+ Era

Until recently, it’s been easy to dismiss Google+. Frequent discussions have occurred in the hallways at the @NMSosphere weighing the viability of Google’s upstart social network and whether it has the long-term capabilities for competing with the sacred social media cows that are Facebook and Twitter. “No,” people cried – there’s no time for another social network largely made up of tech-savvy millennials with dubious extensions for brands and products. “Yes,” others argued, noting that Plus’ easy-to-use interface would allow for better segmentation (with Circles) and could potentially be a haven for application development, free of the strict guidelines and rules of the Facebook platform.

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How To Trick Your Friends Into Thinking You Are A Professional Photographer

I come from a family of professional photographers. My grandfather had his own photography business in the 1970s, and soon enough my mom was helping out at weddings and other events. My dad and sister are also avid photographers – my sister used to be the assistant photographer to the Supreme Court. Suffice to say, I have been surrounded by intimidating Nikons and Canons for as long as I can remember. Do I know how to shoot a striking photo? Not so much.

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Eye on Innovation: A Mid-Year Update

The NMS team has been on tour the past several weeks, visiting clients to brief them on spanking new social media developments – from the smallest emerging platforms to the elephants throwing their weight around. And while everyone is curious about what’s up with Google+, a multitude of movers and shakers warrant an update to our social media watch list.  

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Google 360: How Google+ Can Win the Web

Google’s long-rumored, awe-inspiring Facebook-killing social network behemoth was revealed on Tuesday: Google+. And it’s pretty OK. Good even. The suite of tools forms the building blocks by which Google hopes to stitch together a social graph to compete with Facebook’s. Google has managed expectations admirably, and Facebook still existed as of Friday afternoon. But Google+ is more than it seems. The foundation Google is laying has potential to merge the social and static web until they are practically synonymous.

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