Facebook’s head of brand design shares strategies for social apps + MORE 10/16/2012

Since search and social have had more of a convergence, the idea of the “hub” has become stronger, providing one main place to drive your existing audience and capture their attention. Most marketers or brands make the mistake of having social media be their “go to” place and they neglect any…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Twitter is starting to look a bit like Facebook.Twitter changed their account profiles so you can visually tell the story of your business.With a little thought and planning, you can now create a Twitter page that performs like a business welcome page for existing and potential customers.And you can instantly publish your story to desktop and mobile Twitter users.What’s New With TwitterTwitter recently announced changes to Twitter account profiles and headers…

Have you found yourself spending more time than usual on LinkedIn within the last couple of months?  I know I have.  Much of that has to do with the recent changes that the company has rolled out which has improved usability and is encouraging users to spend more time actively participating within the platform.
LinkedIn should be viewed as a tool for marketers to connect with other professionals or companies in a meaningful way, not a platform for shouting your marketing message at unsuspecting victims…

A better question is: What is a lead worth to you? For the last few weeks we’ve been sharing the results of our Inbound Marketing and Social Media survey. I hadn’t looked at the complete survey in awhile so yesterday morning I took another peek and something jumped right out at me: The charts for time spent per week and the number of leads generated per month are nearly identical. Thinking it was a coincidence, I dug into the verbatim responses…

Facebook Global Head of Brand Design Paul Adams offered marketers at Pivot Conference in New York City recommendations for applying Facebook’s product development principles to their own apps and social campaigns on the platform. These include “Build many lightweight interactions” and “Design, build and ship in six weeks.”

Adams, who leads the creative solutions team at Facebook, says brands and agencies often mistakenly build apps that are too “heavy” and “immersive,” when they should be enabling people to take many lightweight interactions over time…

You’re invited to join us for a live stream of our Press event introducing the new LinkedIn. Our Product team will be showcasing the biggest enhancements we’ve made to the LinkedIn experience in the company’s history and showing off some new products too. Join us live at 10:10am Pacific to meet the new LinkedIn.

About 18 months ago I wrote in Embrace Chaos, that I think the outer edge will be where almost all high value work gets done in organizations. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced and these will be managed by very few internal staff. Change and complexity will be the norm in our work and any work where complexity is not the norm will be of of diminishing value.
Riitta Raesmaa picked up on this in Embracing chaos with a little help from my friends: “Changes in the organizational culture, more open attitudes and behavior, together with social media tools and services, are altering the landscape of human connectedness and the ways of value creation…

Microsoft is now accepting pre-orders for its new Surface tablet. It starts at $499 and if you order today you can get it by launch day, October 26. The Surface comes in three configurations right now: 32 GB without keyboard cover ($499), 32 GB with keyboard cover ($599), and 64 GB with keyboard cover ($699).  You can also buy the keyboard cover separately for $120 for the “touch” version or $130 for the “type” version. Click here to pre-order > Please follow SAI: Tools on Twitter and Facebook…

With just hours to go before today’s huge Presidential debate, a new Gallup tracking poll is coming out at 1 PM ET. Among likely voters, Romney has held a 49%-47% lead for the last few days. We’ll have the number here LIVE when it is released. Please follow Politics on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

There are lots of different ways to promote content. This week, I’m continuing my series on the topic by looking at some of the best outbound communication channels you can use to do so.Outbound communication can take many forms, including e-mail campaigns, direct mail, and social media to name just a few. When your goal is to promote content, however, some tactics work better than others. In this post, I’ll look at six of the best outbound communication tactics that you can use to support your content promotion efforts…

Editor’s Note: This blog post is also available in Portugese, naturally.
Today, I’m proud to share that we now have more than 10 million LinkedIn members in Brazil. Our growth in this market has been truly incredible to witness. When we made LinkedIn available in Portuguese in April 2010, we had just over one million members. And when I joined LinkedIn as country manager in November 2011, we had already leapt to six million members.

With this milestone, we are now the third largest member market on LinkedIn alongside the UK, which just passed the 10 million member mark last month…

Visual artists and businesses of all kinds invest a great amount of time, talent and money into creating graphics that market their appeal. Whether it’s an infographic, illustration, humorous de-motivational or creative photograph, reaching out to consumers may not be the hardest part. Sharing enticing graphics is one thing, but spawning leads back from these works is another.So what can we do to improve our business’ fortune in photo sharing via social media and beyond? And how might we track its success?Watermarking initiativesWe’ve all seen and heard the worst about digital watermarks on images: amateur photographers creating their very own logos and showcasing them through the most obnoxious and aesthetically-hindering translucent signatures…