When the Patriots of New England take on the Giants of New York—a game that could be decided by kicking a oblong ball made of pigskin through a giant “H” for a most ripping victory—thousands of football fans will converge on Lucas Oil Field and the surrounding areas for Super Bowl XLVI. The vast majority of attendees are sure to use mobile devices to disclose various details of their fun during a full week of events. An unprepared city could experience a social media logjam, but the city of Indianapolis has taken all of this into consideration.

We all know about the importance of the commercials during this annual event. Advertisers who are able to pay the price for any multiple of 30 seconds in between the hard-hitting action gladly do so in order to communicate their messages to a captive audience of millions. Additionally, recent history has shown that viewers have used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and different blogs to vote on, share and otherwise interact with these spots. As important as that is to these advertisers, this is not the only proof of social media’s importance today. When the Patriots of New England take on the Giants of New York—a game that could be decided by kicking a oblong ball made of pigskin through a giant “H” for a most ripping victory—the thousands fans will converge on the Lucas Oil Stadium” the most wired stadium in the country.

Social Media at Your Command

Since social media is the medium by which so many people communicate nowadays, a digital team will be monitoring the Super Bowl Week conversation via numerous platforms from the day after the Pro Bowl through Sunday, February 5^th. This team of strategists, analysts and other techies will also tweet directions to fans in search of parking, direct visitors to Indianapolis’s best attractions, and stand by to provide information in case of a disaster.

The digital marketing company, Raidious, will be in charge of handling all of this as well as measuring all of the analytics making a great study of how to prepare for and handle major events of like this as well as how many people have checked into the Super Bowl on Foursquare.

Can You Tweet Me Now?

Verizon has joined in on the fun reinforcing their own network from 3G to 4G LTE to WiFi by adding:

• 9 Antennas that are part of a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) outside the stadium to handle increased downtown traffic.
• 400 Antenna Internal DAS to handle 3G and 4G LTE voice and data inside the stadium.
• 600 Antenna WiFi system capable of handling 28,000 simultaneous connected users. Free for Super Bowl XLVI.
• 3 Cell on Wheels (COWs). Stand alone generator powered cell towers to handle the extremely high demand areas.

While these additions vastly help those lucky enough to watch the game live and in person, there could easily be a time when someone int the stands needs to chat with their friend at home about whether or not the previous play should be challenged as they both watch the television coverage up close and personal. #humblebrag

Why is This Important?

Believe it or not, it’s 2012 and somehow there are still people out there who don’t think social media is an important part of a marketing mix. Because the Super Bowl is one of, if not the most important day of the year to advertisers, paying attention to how customers receive information is imperative. The statistics collected here will determine how they reach out and touch those who they are trying to influence to buy. Plus, a few extra shares never hurt anybody.

For most people and most pictures, sharing it on Facebook or Twitter is enough. It may be a quick snapshot of you and your friends out on the town or a cool sunset from a mountaintop and sharing it with our friends and family is enough. Other times, we’re able to capture something amazing, stunning, hilarious, or otherwise important enough to want to expose it to the rest of the world.

With those, we want to go viral. Here’s a (relatively) quick way to maximize the exposure of your perfectly-timed, once-in-a-lifetime shot.

To do this, you’ll need to be on several different social networks. It may seem like a large list but once you’re signed up the actual posting of this and future pics is a breeze.

You’ll need accounts here:

• Chime
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Buzzfeed
• Digg
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• Twitter

Wow! That’s a lot, right? Not really. If you’re into social media at all these are all sites that you should be frequenting monthly, weekly, or even daily. They’re the only social sites you’ll need if you’re into photography, laughs, tech, offbeat, or just about anything else.

There are some notable exclusions, here, for those who have been in social photo sharing for a while. Flickr comes to mind as the first place that many people think of when wanting to share images, but there are challenges. First, it breaks frames, an announcing on sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon where sharing is often done from with a toolbar. The results for those who click on a Flickr link is that it will not display the image but rather an obnoxious message telling you they don’t support frames.

Okay, once you have your accounts created, it’s time to start exposing it to the world.

My Unfortunate Choice of Pictures

As fate would have it, I’m not in a position to go take an amazing picture (it’s 2am right now) and this is the only thing on my camera with even a remote chance of going viral. It’s a picture I took while at the mall with my family and the sign struck me as being funny because of the wording of the message. In retrospect, it wasn’t that funny, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.

No matter – I love a challenge. If I can make this particular image go viral, your masterful piece of photography should be able to use the same techniques to spread around the world.

Once you have it on your computer, it’s time to get to work…

Chime It

Our first destination is Chime.in. The social network that was formerly Mixx before being grabbed up (and dramatically improved) by Uber Media hit the scene last year and is making a big splash. It’s the place we start for several reasons:

• It resizes large pictures for you automatically. in the world of sharing pics, it’s great to have a 10mb 2500px-wide image from your iPhone, but it’s hard to share. Uploading to Chime reduces the size to make it manageable and sharable.
• You can easily upload multiple images into a single gallery. Be sure that the primary image you want visible is the one that is uploaded last.
• The domain does well on the social sharing sites (discussed below).
• Unlike many of the photo sites, it allows you to write long descriptions with line breaks and links.

Again, I’m working with a challenging image to make viral, so I chose a headline that I thought would draw attention. It’s borderline offensive (the concept of eating kids is, well, sick and takes a depraved mind to think of it) but hopefully won’t be so bad that people won’t get the joke.

Be sure to use descriptive tags; you can post up to 7.

Pin It

Once you have it on Chime, use your “Pin It” bookmarklet to pin the image to a Pinterest board.

Don’t upload the original image. Using the bookmarklet will allow you to grab the image directly from your Chime. This links it back to the original Chime while making a separate instance of the image available on Pinterest.

The site is growing just like Chime and is getting plenty of positive press, so getting started early on these two sites will give you geek cred – like a hipster, you were on Chime and Pinterest before they went mainstream.

Pinterest does not allow you to title images per se, but you’ll be able to put in a short description. Unlike Chime, Pinterest does not do long descriptions very well and does not allow line breaks or links, so you’ll want to keep it short.

Tumbl It

Tumblr is a hybrid of many social functions. It’s decent for blogging, good for microblogging, and great for sharing image and videos.

It’s a bit more complicated than Chime or Pinterest, but it’s much bigger as well and gives you a nice venue for more than just pictures if you choose to use it or such things.

If you aren’t already on Tumblr, you can skip this step if you don’t want to invest the time into personalizing your blog with a theme, URL, etc.

As with Chime, tags are extremely important on Tumblr. Without them or a lot of followers, you won’t get natural views of your image. Don’t forget to set your click-thru link to either your Pin or your Chime.

Buzz It

Buzzfeed is one of the best-operated social networks out there right now from a sheer business perspective. They are aggressive and have a very clear understanding of how to drive traffic to their own site, reward their users, and get advertising dollars in ways that Twitter and others have failed at thus far. If they were as large as Facebook, they’d be making as much money as Google.

Unfortunately for you, it can be challenging to get to the front page. If you aren’t on the front page, you’re not going to get views from Buzzfeed itself which is why quality of content and promotion of your image is extremely important.

The good news is that Buzzfeed does very well on the social sharing sites, so even if you don’t make the front page of Buzzfeed initially, you’ll still be able to get visitors to it through the other networks, particularly StumbleUpon.

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How can something so harmless in sound and form be so devastatingly bad for our world. Despite the cute little bird mascots and harmless-sounding name, Twitter can actually be tracked back to be the cause of nearly everything that is going wrong in the world.

Everything.

If you torture the numbers long enough, you can make them say anything. That’s the case here in this amazing and entertaining infographic that clearly demonstrates how every Tweet is destroying us and the world around us a little at a time. Did you know that for every Tweet, 128 tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere? How about this one: we use 3 barrels of oil per tweet! At this rate, we only have 3.58 trillion tweets left before we’ve exhausted our supply of oil.

For everything going wrong in the world, we blame Twitter. If we can find it within ourselves to stop tweeting altogether, perhaps we can make the world a better place one less tweet at a time.

Via: CableTV.com

As the fallout from the sex scandal at Penn State University continues to be a topic for both the college football world and the social media universe it is public knowledge that a well-known actor is pulling back on his initial Twitter comment regarding the matter.

As reported in numerous media outlets, “Two and a Half Men” star Ashton Kutcher, an advocate in fighting child sexual abuse, has publically apologized for his first tweet on Wednesday (Nov. 9) regarding the firing of legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno.

Paterno, although not implicated first-hand in the scandal, is viewed by many as not having done enough when allegations first surfaced years ago regarding alleged sexual abuse by Jerry Sandusky, a coach on Paterno’s squad at the time.

So, when Kutcher, who has some 8 million followers on Twitter took to tweeting Wednesday, he fired off, “How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste.”

Kutcher Punts and Regroups

In turn, Kutcher, a well-versed social media individual, eventually got wind of the full story involving Paterno’s dismissal, along with that of the school’s president. He then followed up the first tweet with, “Heard Joe was fired, fully recant previous tweet! Didn’t have full story.”

The initial tweet and Kutcher’s acknowledgment of tweeting before knowing all of the details involving the dismissal of Paterno in Happy Valley were later deleted from his account, especially given the fact he was called an idiot and several expletives by his followers.

Kutcher did tell the public “As an advocate in the fight against child sexual exploitation, I could not be more remorseful for all involved in the Penn St. case. As of immediately I will stop tweeting until I find a way to properly manage this feed. I feel awful about this error. Won’t happen again.”

Something else that changed with Kutcher’s Twitter account as of Nov. 10 is that he is reportedly taking a siesta from overseeing his Twitter account by himself, even going so far as to have his management team, Katalyst, manage his account for him going forward.

Are we to assume that Kutcher is either?

• A. Incapable of thinking on his own and tweeting or
• B. Trying to cover his fanny so that he does not lose a portion of his fan base and potentially tons of money if fans turn their backs on him.

As Kutcher went on to tell the media, he first heard of Paterno’s ouster as head coach, a position the game’s coaching victories leader held since 1966, after returning from work. Kutcher claims he simply made an assumption that Paterno was fired due to his performance as a coach. That sounds a tad strange given that Penn State is 8-1 this season and unbeaten in conference play to date.

In a tweet that appears on Kutcher’s timeline for Thursday (Nov. 10), a portion of it notes during a long message, “Up until today, I have posted virtually every one of my tweets on my own, but clearly the platform has become to (sic) big to be managed by a single individual. I truly am sorry if I offended anyone and more over am going to take action to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

What Can We Draw from Kutcher?

In looking at the Kutcher tweeting issue, I come to several conclusions:

• He is obviously concerned about the backlash he was initially getting, so he reacted. I’m not saying he is not genuine in his convictions to fight child sexual abuse, but this is also a PR move to keep his image from suffering more following the recent allegations of infidelity in his marriage to Demi Moore;
• Tweeting takes all of seconds or a minute or two at most. Kutcher not wanting to tweet moving forward is certainly not a time issue. The time issue becomes when he has to circle the wagons and explain himself;
• While a number of well-known individuals have taken to Twitter in the last 24 hours both supporting and opposing Paterno’s dismissal, it is folks like Kutcher who lose some credibility when they then turn to others to essentially manage their communications efforts.

No matter what comes of the Penn State sex scandal, one thing is for sure, the social media world has certainly been engrossed with it from the kick off.

Dave Thomas, who covers among other subjects’ background checks, writes extensively for Business.com, an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

Poor Governor Sam Brownback from Kansas. He thought he was doing the right thing. He was told to pay attention to social media, so he put together a staff to do just that (or instructed his current staff to pay attention). They were out there, watching the Twittersphere as they were told. The only bad part is that they didn’t know what to do when they found something.

ot wanting to rehash, but here’s the backstory from NPR.

Before going straight into the moral of the story, I want to highlight an error in reasoning that prevented this article from being written earlier. When I first heard about the story, I assumed that it was another case of a mishandled social media post, that the Governor’s office saw a perceived threat and made the choice to go to the organization with whom the girl was associated rather than dealing with it publicly. It’s a judgment call when dealing with social media. Sometimes going head-on via the social media outlet is the right thing to do and sometimes working behind the scenes is better.

My error was in not looking closely enough. I made the terrible assumption that the girl had a following and was sparking discussion around her Tweet. Today, I discovered that she had 65 followers at the time of the Tweet. 65. The Tweet was, for all intents and purposes, completely invisible. It wasn’t a threat. It basically didn’t exist.

Now, it does. Dozens of mainstream media publications, national television, and talk show hosts are discussing it because someone in Brownback’s office thought it was a brilliant idea to take an invisible Tweet and turn it into something. They made it tangible by addressing it at all.

This wasn’t a case of a bad call between addressing it publicly versus addressing it behind the scenes. This is a case of someone working in a politician’s office who was tasked with monitoring social media who didn’t have the slightest idea what social media really was. This isn’t the fault of the staff member or the staff in general. This is Governor Brownback’s fault for entrusting something as important as social media to someone who wasn’t qualified.

Within the first day of training, our social media interns are made aware of what’s important and what isn’t. They are taught to recognize when something “doesn’t exist” in the realm of social media. Many times, if a person has less than 5,000 Twitter followers and they don’t get retweets or responses within 24 hours of posting something negative, we choose to ignore it. It’s the “tree falling in a forest with nobody around” circumstance.

Even with local social media monitoring and management, someone needs 1,000 Twitter followers to be on our radar. This girl had 65.

Politicians are especially vulnerable to attacks even more so than businesses. If you are a politician or work in political office, be sure to hire someone on staff who has a clear understanding of social media. The results of poor decisions are amplified in social media more than any other medium.

What’s that old saying? Live by the sword, die by the sword. If anyone is experiencing that right now, it is Ashton Kutcher. Amidst the insanity that has been the Penn State University scandal, Kutcher sent out this Tweet that he regrets greatly.

This wasn’t Kutcher’s first blunder on Twitter either.

Despite his slip-ups, the one-time Twitter “King” usually recovers well by owning up to his mistakes, which he did last night following 30 minutes of ridicule from the Twitter universe. Ashton responded to much of the criticism with great humility and remorse. I applauded him greatly for the way he handled the situation; until today that is.

I was very upset when I heard that Ashton (whom I greatly admire for his business prowess and activism) had officially given the reigns of his Twitter account to his PR team at Katalyst Media. Given the nature of social media, I completely disagree with that decision.

Going away from Kutcher, we all make mistakes in business, on social media, wherever. The beautiful thing about making mistakes is that you always have a chance to learn and adjust as long as you approach the situations with humility.

Even Rick Perry understands that!

In social media, silence is never the answer. Not addressing issues or shying away from the medium all together in fear of another slip up takes the conversation out of your hands. Social media has given individuals, celebrities, and brands to listen and create conversation – the silent treatment in the face of a mistake or crisis, gives the outside voices an opportunity to mold the conversation to their liking. If anyone understood this, I thought it was Ashton Kutcher.

Now, Kutcher’s Tweets will be calculated and message driven, rather than the authenticity that made him the first user to reach one million followers. Something makes me think that approach won’t be too successful.

Transparency is everything in social media and that is nothing new. As social media managers, users, or however you may use these mediums, we should take a lesson from Kutcher’s recent slip ups.

When recovering from a mistake, the best and sometimes only thing you can do is understand what you did wrong and apologize. Most of the time, if you address the issue with authenticity, your critics will move on since there’s no more story to feast on. Going silent or making an unwarranted change rarely works out. Right, Reed Hastings?

Ashton Kutcher has lived by the sword for a long time, as many of us have as well – unfortunately for @aplusk, he just turned the sword on himself.

Nobody.

If you check your analytics, you’ll find that an extremely small portion of your website visitors are pushing the buttons you worked so hard to position on your website’s homepage. A recent batch of data that I saw (that I, unfortunately, cannot reference yet) shows that those Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social buttons are being completely overlooked by most of your visitors.

By most, you might as well call it “all” of your visitors because it’s an activity that occurs normally after someone has already submitted a lead.

Moreover, it’s a sign of the “kiss of death” — once they click away, the chances of them visiting your site again drop dramatically.

Logic, not Alarms

Before anyone freaks out and starts removing those dreaded buttons, think about why this is happening and what it means. People who have purchased a product or submitted a lead are more likely to push those buttons than those who have not filled out a form simply because they have accomplished their mission. They found what they were looking for and are now wanting to see who they may be dealing with in the near future.

People who have not submitted a lead or bought something are still on their mission. They’ve moved on to a competitor’s website or back to search. They’re not in social-media-mode yet, so there is no reason to click on them.

Does this make the buttons worthless? Absolutely not.

Warm and Fuzzy

This data tells us that the people visiting your site and putting in a lead are looking for humanity. They’re looking for the warm and fuzzy that they hope to find on the other end of the click.

Social media is about driving traffic and forming engagements. The sheer fact that they are not going from your website to the social sites isn’t a bad thing. It simply means that the gut-instinct many of us have had for a while is correct, that social media happens away from your website and the value can be found there, not through buttons. People have seen the buttons so often on nearly every site they visit that they’ve become immune to them. The people who click on them are wanting to find them (and you) and as a result, they hope that they’re getting cuddly social stuff once they leave your site and go to the magical realms of Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Keep The Buttons, then Do More

When they want to find you on social media, they will. To be proactive, you have to give them a reason to go to your social presence, like/follow/subscribe to it, and still venture back to your site for more. Banners describing events or other benefits of liking/following/subscribing can be very effective – just make sure they open a new tab and do not take the visitors completely away from your site.

There is a book waiting to be written about the roles of social, search, and website marketing and specifically how they are an integrated function of each other rather than separate activities, but that book will not be written today. In lieu, think about how your buttons are positioned and think of new ways to be more aggressive with your social promotions on and OFF of your website.

We take pride in coming up with solutions to some of the biggest problems facing social media users and businesses alike as we all traverse the murky but potentially-lucrative waters of Web 2.0. Every now and then, we come across things that make us wonder why we didn’t think of it.

A friend had asked me if I knew of a good app or workaround to make Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant on the iPhone 4s, post to Twitter and Facebook. The program is very useful in many ways but is notably obtuse when it comes to updating social media sites. For anyone other than Apple, I would call it a gross oversight, but you have to believe they have something up their sleeve (which they always do even when they don’t, but that’s not important).

Instead of a hack, app, or complicated reprogramming of the device, I came across the Schmittastic solution. It embarrassed me that I didn’t think of something as elegantly obvious as this. My hat is tipped to @schmittastic for reminding me that I’m not as clever as I should be sometimes.

Some people love their jobs and for good reason.

In Silicon Valley, high-valued tech employees are offered luxuries that would make many believe they live like rock stars. In many cases, they do, or at least they’re treated like rock stars by their employees such as Google, Tagged.com, and Linkedin.

This infographic by ResumeBear takes a look at 7 of the most sought-after jobs in Silicon Valley. It’s not just a matter of being sought-after – they’re actively seeking out talent like a 19th century gold rush. With the need to keep the best people in place and not have them wooed over to a competitor, it’s important to treat your people right, even if it means onsite massages.

Click to enlarge.

The wonderful promise that once was Twitter has faded in recent months for many businesses. There are several causes for this and only one reason why businesses who are abandoning the site are not really thinking it through.

For starters, Twitter has been overrun by spam. Despite their best efforts, there is a good chance that a link posted on Twitter is spam. Users realize this and are clicking less. There was a time when I could Tweet something and get thousands, even tens of thousands of visitors to the link. Those days are well behind us and even prominent Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers are lucky to break 1000 views to a link (other than breaking news, of course).

The noise levels continue to rise. There are Twitter accounts that post dozens, even hundreds of times a day filling people’s feeds. Of course, they can be unfollowed, but every time an account falls victim to following one of these accounts inadvertently, they are overwhelmed by the bulk of noise coming from one abusively active person (bot?). It brings cynicism towards the site and makes people less interested in returning.

Intent is another concern. Right now, businesses want to use Twitter and other social media sites as broadcasting tools. It amazes me that as we approach 2012 so few are using it as an engagement and/or listening tool (which fits it much better for business), but that still seems to be the case. Create-an-account-and-start-talking-about-my-business is still the dominant strategy used by businesses on Twitter.

Finally, there’s the buzz. At the Driving Sales Executive Summit in Vegas, I spoke to many business people. They were all hip on Facebook and interested in the future of Google+ but most viewed Twitter as “been there, done that” or “everyone in my 20-group says Twitter has no value to us.” When the businesses within a niche start heading towards a site, others follow. When they leave, the same thing happens.

Why This is Silly

There’s a bottom line about Twitter. Return on investment. ROI. The money and time spent on can be minimal. A business today can have an active and extremely effective Twitter account by monitoring and managing it for less than 10 minutes a day. In the time it takes to grab a cup of coffee from the break room, a social media person at a business can check Twitter, reply to people, post something interesting, and move on until the next day. It could be done literally while they’re walking to the break room by using their mobile device (as long as they don’t run into things or people on the way).

Twitter has a ton to offer businesses as a communication tool. A proper Twitter strategy takes more than 10 minutes a day as it requires searching, pro-active engagement, and properly-planned initiatives, but those who do not want to put in that kind of time shouldn’t abandon the site altogether. The 10-minute-a-day approach will yield greater results than 10 minutes spent on nearly any other activity.