Earlier today, Google officially announced Google Instant- a real-time search experience that predicts search results as you type. As with most announcements, the long-term impacts are not yet known, but let’s look into the important parts.
LSB creative director Ryan turned 25 yesterday, so we celebrated the only way we know how- cupcakes and shenanigans. Our office buddy Lisa Bun from Collision Labs baked up some very tasty, homemade cupcakes which were consumed faster than burritos at a burrito eating contest (which happened yesterday, as well). Afterwards, we headed to English for dinner and drinks. Check out some more pics and stories from the night at Cooler by the Lake.
Chris and Ryan are in the ‘Silicon Prairie’ this weekend for the annual Big Omaha conference. I’ve never been, so I’ll borrow from the Big Omaha site to help explain just what their conference is all about:
Big Omaha is a culmination of the amazing entrepreneurial energy taking place within the Midwest.
While Twitter, and more recently Foursquare, have been the darlings of the social media world in recent memory, an outstanding and arguably more practical service has been quietly kicking butt. That service is Posterous. What is Posterous? At its simplest, Posterous is another blogging platform. But unlike most blogging platforms, the primary method of posting is done via email, not in a custom backend platform (note: Posterous has recently improved their post editing tools). But Posterous is so much more. Let’s look at some of the best features and how you can get some value out of using it. Autopost Arguably the coolest feature of Posterous is autopost. A majority of people (and businesses) have multiple social networking presences, be it a Twitter account, Facebook page, blog(s), Flickr account, etc. With Posterous, you can set up your posts to be shared across a number of social sites. For example, you just took some nice photos of a company event, and – Read the full article
Attention small business owners who think social networking is silly: knock it off. We know you’re just afraid, or confused, but you can’t hide behind those excuses any longer. With the recent announcements of Bing and Twitter integration, and Google’s Social Search, your business can’t hide any longer. Those angry tweets about your poor quality that you ignore? Yep, those are appearing in searches right next to your latest press-release. Photos of your day-old looking food you served up are not only on Flickr, but now they’re in any searches people may perform who are friends with those folks. Bottom line: you’re bad service and poor products are going to be exposed faster, to a wider audience, and with lasting impact. So get involved; interact with your customers, make them feel welcome, make them feel something. Have a great product? Good. Lots of people are no doubt talking about it. Let them know you’re listening. Encourage them to make those – Read the full article
When I come across articles like the one posted on TheStreet.com last week, I can’t help but get excited. Titled “Business Owners Question Social Networking” the article quotes some research that finds that a majority of small business owners haven’t seen value from social media, and that most don’t even use it themselves. A key section of the article reads: Among the 500 small-business executives surveyed, 76% said social networking hasn’t help them generate leads or expand their companies in the past year. And 86% said they don’t turn to these Web sites for business advice or other information. The majority, 61%, depend on big search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, for business advice and information. Only 13% use social networking sites and only 10% rely on expert blogs. So why on earth would I be excited that small businesses don’t use social media and haven’t seen value from it yet? Opportunity. Plain and simple. For me, there is – Read the full article
For as simple as twitter is, the complexity of using it is nothing short of astounding. Many people strictly update twitter via the web with nothing more than an account of their daily activities. Some “power users” have people that tweet for them, and some even have bots set up that removes the human aspect altogether. Then there’s the issue of the auto-dm. Many users rely on scripted messages to be sent when someone new follows them. Often impersonal and down right cheesy, the auto-dm makes many of us cringe upon receiving them. An extension of this inhuman activity is the use of TwitterFeed, a service that connects RSS feeds to twitter accounts. Users can pull feeds related to their interests and audience and auto-post them on Twitter. TwitterFeed is great when used to pull in your company’s blog posts or entries from your personal site. The problem is that many users rely on this entirely too much and will – Read the full article
Monday kicked off with a bang as it was announced social network giant Facebook acquired social aggregating site FriendFeed. If you’re unfamiliar with FriendFeed, the free service allows users to add their activity from across the social web and aggregates the activity into one stream. You can follow other people’s streams, much like Twitter. You can also create custom groups to better follow those you care about. So what does this mean? For one, FriendFeed had already influenced changes in Facebook. Likes, anyone? The importance of Facebook making this move is obvious; the stream is king. It will also solidify Facebook as a true center for user’s social activities- not just a place to see what friends are up to. This is good for marketers, small and large alike. With Facebook integrating these features, more and more people will be introduced to these social features who currently don’t use them. The more people sharing their activities, the more we can – Read the full article
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