''Part of the beauty of such a system is that people are going to write stuff other people don't agree with.''

Medium was largely talked about a couple of months ago. Another social network, which is a kind of compilation of Blogger and Twitter, is a baby product of Evan Williams and Biz Stone, former employees from Blogger and Twitter. The service was  opened in beta version for some early subscribers about 2 weeks ago.

And I happened to be one of them. Woohoo!  I haven't been excited about the idea itself that much since Pinterest launched. While Pinterest compelled to my consumption-self (come on, it's not really about lofty matters), Medium compels to my high-quality-self.

Overview

Basically it's a writing and reading platform with nothing extra.  It's as simple as Twitter is but with a new format. While Twitter limits you and makes you think carefully about what you want to say, Medium gives you freedom to express your thoughts just the way you like.

Everything which is simple easily becomes addictive for Social Media maniacs. It's not a sensational thought but you might keep it in your mind before investigating Medium deeper and being caught in his powerful network of simplicity and information richness.

When you log in with your Twitter account (quite an easy way, ha?) if you hover your mouse to the letter “M” on the top of the page you can see a brief menu where each point is logical and quite understandable.  However, some may turn to be key points for personal and professional use. Read more »

Do you remember how scared you were when you first learned how to swim? Do you remember how exactly your body attempted to move and react to a changing surrounding? First you were probably panicking, and then you were trying to move just as if you were touching the ground. Finally you gave up and learned to do it quite the other way round. You developed a new muscle memory and realized that swimming and walking have very little in common but both activities can be equally fun.

Practically any social media strategy has a resembling life circle. Firstly you don't have a clue what's this all Twitter/Facebook/Google+ is about and want to run away to cold-calling, constant spam emails and sales pitches like my-name-is-Jeff-and-we-guarantee-you-number-one-position-in-Google-in-two-weeks-or-your-money-back. Then you're trying to do Social Media just as if it were any other old traditional type of Marketing, but the problem is that it's not old, it's not traditional and it's not straight-forward. Eventually you learn how to do, what I personally call, the right thing and become more or less decent in Social Media, but that's not what I am going to talk about.
The transition from each phase is painful, scary and soaked with sweat. The goal of this article is trying to understand what we are or were all doing wrong on the second base (I mean SMM, not love affairs).

Read more »

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

                                                                       Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Social Media has made a lot of buzz this year. It has proved its power, its unpredictability and a plethora of hidden opportunities. While marketers scream out loud about the undiscovered gems of Social Media, only a minority learnt how to control masses and even a smaller percentage managed to use the viral character of Social Media phenomenon for the sake of good.

Managing your reputation on the web is like managing your reputation at high school: you can be whoever you want to be if you have guts to make the right impression and turn even disadvantages to your advantages. We are who people think we are.

Like it or not, but Social Media will continue to be a hot trembling topic in 2013 and learning from somebody else’s experience can help you save your time, money, healthy psyche and your brand/personal reputation.

Today we'd like to talk about the five most interesting examples of social media success in 2012. Read more »

Although BuzzBundle Beta has been out for less than a month, we're excited about how warmly it is received by the community. Here's what some of our recent reviewers say:

"Everything you need to know and do with your social networks can be seen from this single interface, compressing it all into columns. This is great for monitoring conversations and for replying using the right account at the right time in the right place. You don’t need to keep logging in and out of the sites to respond.

It is also possible to use BuzzBundle to schedule your status updates and replies. This comes in remarkably handy when you start looking at the ability to manage multiple accounts too."

By John Chow

"BuzzBundle is a management tool for social media network accounts, currently having one of the most extensive coverage of the world's social sites. It can help you gain the widest outreach for your social networking efforts." 

By  Francisco Perez

In the meanwhile, Link-Assistant.Com office's is humming: we passionately work round the clock to make the software even better for you. Recently we've added Google+, and now the software lets you post replies and find discussions in Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Now BuzzBundle's new look-n-feel is on the way. Here's pilot design of how your BuzzBundle stream will look like in just about 10 days:

Read more »

Earlier this week, Tom Webster’s readings got me thinking of spam.

Huge bags of digital trash get dumped on us with annoying regularity. Sometimes the bags are closed, and we simply discard them all with a click - something I practice daily with email junk.

But in some cases it's hard to spot trash. Take Twitter, a hotbed for gullible social media explorers and intricate spam networks, as an example. If you don't get good at spotting spammers, and spotting them quickly, they will get the better of you. You may leave Twitter altogether, disillusioned, confused and humiliated.

To not let that happen, let's examine most glaring signs of Twitter spam.

Read more »

Take 3 social media dudes – A, B and C. Dude A has got 1,000 followers, dude B has around 3000 and dude named C has a whopping 35,000 followers. Who is more important? Surely it's the cool mister C?

Photo credit: Garry Knight via Flickr

Read more »

guest post by Jess Spate

The biggest and most common mistake people make when evaluating the success of Twitter activities is to rely on number of fans or number of followers as a key indicator.

When search professionals count links they know that it's quality that's important. Huge quantities of low value links do very little.

We should keep the same things in mind when evaluating social media activity.

Consider two Twitter accounts.

User A has 1000 Twitter followers. One of them, a popular tweeter with 3000 followers of their own, really likes what user A has to say and frequently retweets for them. Instead of reaching 100 people the message reaches 4000. Some of those might also retweet, spreading it even further.

On the other hand User B has 2500 Twitter followers, but most of them don't use the service regularly and the only regular retweeters have just a few followers each. A tweet from User B might be seen by 2000-3000 people.

Which account would you prefer? Read more »