Twitter & China, Google+ & Journalism, and Social Media + Screwups: The Social 6
Lots of fun news & views yesterday while I was wallowing away in synagogue for Yom Kippur. Yesterday we had a great set of pieces clicked on & shared by you guys, including Twitter's interesting strength within China, potential good news for the iPad Mini, and G+'s effect on journalism. Here's your Social 6:
#6: Teenagers urged to create social media campaigns promoting healthy lifestyles (Scottish Daily Record)
#5: Why Eyeballs No Longer Matter For Startups (ReadWriteWeb)
#4: Social Media’s Biggest Screw-Ups [INFOGRAPHIC] (Mashable)
#3: How Journalists Are Using Google+ (ReadWriteWeb)
#2: Study says half of Americans are unimpressed with Kindle Fire HD, more interested in iPad mini (Borneo Post)
#1: Report: Twitter’s most active country is China (where it is blocked) (The Next Web)

Facebook Stats, Hyperlocal, & Video Games: Today's Social 6
A pretty mixed bag of news from the last day were clicked on by you guys yesterday, including a link towards my attempts to enlist more help for the upcoming Going Social companion site.
Without further ago, here's your Social 6 for September 25, 2012:
#6: Gyft Brings Gift Cards From Over 200 Retailers To Apple’s Passbook (TechCrunch)
#5: 7 Reporting Tools for Hyperlocal Journalists (Streetfight)
#4: Want to Join Team Going Social? Write for Us! (jeremygoldman.com)
#3: The Social Era Is More Than Social Media (Fast Company)
#2: DeathWatch: Video Game Consoles (ReadWriteWeb)
#1: 50% of Consumers Value a Brand’s Facebook Page More Than Its Website [INFOGRAPHIC] (Mashable)
Want to Join Team Going Social? Write for Us!
Hi guys. If you're reading this, you may know that I have a book coming out: Going Social: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media. I'm pretty excited!
Even though I'm psyched, I'm always pretty overworked, to be honest. I'd love to find some help on the writing side. If you can help me develop content for the upcoming goingsoci.al companion site, in exchange, I'd love to mentor you professionally and pay you back with advice and direction. Or give you cookies.
Interested? Contact me using the Contact form on the horizontal nav above. I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks!
Klout, iPad Mini, and Facebook Top the Weekend's Social 6 Roundup
I'd be lying if I said this was the most action-packed weekend on the Interwebz ever. It wasn't. In fact, a few of the stories I shared over the weekend (and you guys clicked on, shared, repinned, etc.) were published on Friday. Still, I think there are some gems in here - two apiece for Facebook and gamification, for those of you interested in those topics. I'll let the news & views speak for themselves:
#6: Facebook Kills Photo-Tagging Suggestions for EU Users (Mashable)
#5: Ten ways to gamify your grid (Hypergrid Business)
#4: Facebook to curb frictionless sharing (CBS News)
#3: Klout's recent updates get a thumbs-up from many marketers (BostInno)
#2: Gamification of the enterprise (Computer World)
#1: iPad Mini Rumors: Apple's Manufacturers Confirm Redesigned, Smaller Tablet (iDesignTimes.com)
Facebook Plugins, Animated GIFs, and Social Media Myths: Today's Social 6

I got flack from some of you guys for being excited about Twitter blocking animated GIFs in profile pictures, but sorry; I hate them. That was clearly one of the bigger stories of the last 24 hours, but Napkin Labs and my post on Facebook's Shared Activity plugin made waves too.
Here's your Social 6:
#6: iPhone 5 and iPad Mini To Have Exchangeable Batteries? (Tapscape)
#5: 8 Social Media Myths Busted (Business 2 Community)
#4: Why Health Care Needs Social Media (Huffington Post)
#3: Napkin Labs launches Facebook ‘Fan Center’ to give brands more qualitative customer relationships (The Next Web)
#2: Twitter Blocks Animated GIFs in Profile Pics (Mashable)
#1: Mixing sharing with privacy: Facebook debuts its Shared Activity plugin (jeremygoldman.com)
Twitter Profiles, Social Highlights, iPad Mini: the Social 6 roundup

Trying to streamline the Social 6 by only providing you guys with the links and publications of the articles that attracted the most clicks, shares, retweets, and so on over the last day or so. Today we've got an interesting mix, from social highlights to Twitter's new profiles to -- shocker -- more Apple news (this time it's the iPad Mini). Here's your Social 6 news roundup for 9/19/12:
#6: How Social Media Made Us Narcissists (EBONY.com)
#5: Buying Followers On Social Media Sites (San Francisco Chronicle)
#4: The Designers Who Got The Most Social Media Buzz During Fashion Week (Business Insider)
#3: iPad Mini Release Date, Price: Why Screen Size, Retina Display Crucial to Compete with Apps on Kindle Fire 2, HD (Books & Review)
#2: How to change your Twitter header image (Mashable)
#1: Why Book Highlights Are Anti-Social (ReadWriteWeb)
Mixer, NYFW, and Twitter's new API : The Social 6 for 9/7/12
I knew New York Fashion Week would be a pretty big point of discussion yesterday, but Twitter's API news was pretty major too. Here's the rundown:
Is Mixer The Mobile Social Location-Based App We’ve Been Looking For? Maybe…
"Mixer is a new social mobile application for iPhone that lets you converse with people on a location...users can post text and photos to the local feed and others can comment. Via a nice visual interface you can zoom out from your locality to join conversations far away or zoom back in to your neighbourhood. But when you leave a location where a conversation happened you can continue to converse with those people."
Fashion Week Dieting Spreads On Twitter, Surprising No One
"Search #NYFW and the word “diet” right now on the social media site and you’ll find lots of tweets linking back to the CNN article mentioned above. But if you go back a bit further, you’ll find women tweeting about their actual diets. Just yesterday, fashion stylist Elizabeth Tran tweeted “So my one-cube-of-cheese-every-hour diet starts tomorrow. Well, I think it will…#lesigh #NYFW“ Let’s not forget this shockingly sad picture tweeted out almost a month ago by PR rep Keisha McCotry. Yep, you read that right: a bowl of broccoli and a glass of water is her dinner. She told CNN she began her fashion week diet in July, and that, 'Perception is reality in this industry, and unfortunately, you have to look the look to get the clients.'"
The #NYFW diet: Part of the job?
"New York Fashion Week is one of the fashion industry's biggest events of the year, the culmination of months of planning, organizing, schmoozing ... and dieting? When it comes to the biannual fashion shows, which kick off Thursday, models aren't the only ones looking to drop a few pounds before hitting the tents. Some publicists, bloggers and fashion editors have been counting calories for weeks in anticipation of the week-long event, where to some, networking and being seen are just as important as the collections debuting on the runways."
The relationship between Case Studies & Social Link Bait
"These are a few of the many benefits offered to you for taking your precious time and creating a great piece of content, such as a case study. One of the benefits I’d like to discuss in much more depth is the social link bait benefit. But before I get into it, I want to just make sure everyone understands what social link bait is."
Twitter officially launches v1.1 Of its API
"...today, the company officially unveiled the newest version of its API, v1.1, and updated its “Developer Rules of the Road” and display requirements.One of the more notable changes we’ve seen so far, brought to our attention by Steve Streza’s tweet, is that developers will have until March 5, 2013 to switch over to the new version of the API. After that, v1.0 will be “kaput” — to use the technical term."
More on Twitter's new API, which drops support for RSS
While it was easy to see the loss of XML coming — Twitter has slowly dropped support for XML in favor of JSON over the last year and a half — dropping support for RSS and Atom is a major shift. RSS and Atom are the two major formats for serving up web feeds. These feeds can include text, audio, video and other types of media. While most users use RSS as a way to subscribe to web content from a blog or podcast — the format can also be used as a way to subscribe to tweets. Since its inception, Twitter has allowed developers to access Twitter timelines and search queries using RSS. As a result, lots of social aggregators have used RSS as an easy way to pull in tweets alongside messages for other services.
Quora, Chain.ly, Coca-Cola, The Walking Dead: The Social 6 News Roundup for 9/6/12
The last 24 hours saw a nice mix of news, from Coca-Cola and The Walking Dead's major milestones to a hot new startup, a great piece on how to best leverage Google+ to make connections, and more. Let's get to it:
#6: Chain.ly Is the Craigslist for Finding People Who Can Help Out
"Chain.ly is a community board that wants to impact the world by making Internet-driven connections less serendipitous. While Twitter hashtags or Reddit campaigns can sometimes lead to success, Chain.ly hopes it will be a go-to platform for people to find the help they need...co-founder Bruno Ligutti added, 'We want to position Chain.ly as the Craigslist meets Kickstarter — not a fundraising website but a social platform for asking for help.'"
#5: Quora Arrives on Android, Complete With Voice Search, Widgets And A Deep Search Integration
"After a long wait, Quora just arrived on Android today...Quora is launching the Android app simultaneously in Google’s Play store and Amazon’s appstore. The app allows you to do almost everything you can on the site."
#4: What my Google Plus “About” Page Does for Me
"The untouched missing element in LinkedIn is the lack of any means of real-time communication...contrast this with Google+: people search terms and tags, come upon content-sharers whom they may not already be following and Circle us or comment on our posts."
#3: ‘The Walking Dead’ Celebrates Facebook Milestone With Awesome Poster
"AMC’s The Walking Dead just passed the 10 million fan mark on Facebook. That’s a big number — especially for a television show on cable TV.To celebrate the event, AMC created an awesome graphic to thank fans of the show. A pitch-perfect homage to the movie poster from 2009′s The Social Network, the graphic even has its own tagline: 'You don’t get 10 million fans without eating a few.'"
#2: With Embeddable Timelines, Twitter Widgets Become More Interactive
"Twitter announced a new feature today that’s supposed to make it easier for publishers to embed a timeline of relevant tweets — the company describes it as a way for 'publishers, writers, developers, and any Twitter user to drop a rich, interactive piece of Twitter into their websites.'”
#1: Coca-Cola Is First Retail Brand to Pass 50 Million Facebook Fans
"Coca-Cola passed 50 million fans on Facebook shortly after 9 a.m. Tuesday...[it] is the first retail brand to hit this milestone. Disney, Converse and Starbucks, three of the other most popular retail brands, each have fewer than 40 million fans on Facebook at the moment."
The Social 6: Stories You Missed This Past (Long) Weekend, 9/4/12
Welcome back to work, guys! Not surprisingly, there wasn't a tremendous wealth of news & views out there to curate from the long weekend, but here are some of the highlights you may have missed:
#6: My1Login’s test page is a nifty way to see exactly how weak your password choices are
"The password management service My1Login offers a smart way to remember all of those passwords and key phrases by literally boiling them all down to one. Now it is also offering a Web page where visitors can find out why they might need a password manager and measure the strength of passwords they might consider to be safe."
#5: 6 Tips For Using Instagram In Your Social Media Marketing
"Marketo released an infographic recently with 5 steps to success using Instagram in your marketing. They are...Curate…Snap…#Hashtag…Engage…Repeat…[and one more,] Measure and Improve."
#4: 5 tools for managing your contacts and boosting your network
"In a lot of ways, a contact manager can incorporate new, innovative services to not only help users take a smarter approach to meeting new people but also transmit readily available information from social media profiles directly into that contact profile...here’s a breakdown of five applications that are breaking the barriers of the traditional contact managing system on the computer as well as mobile devices."
#3: Job Seekers: Beware These Social Media Traps
"First impressions are everything, but sometimes they creep up on you. As a job candidate, 86% of potential employers will look at your social profiles — even if you don’t explicitly share those links...Column Five Media put together an infographic [included below] of tips for using social media to make first impressions — and included a few things every job seeker should avoid."
#2: Ever wonder what the top 25 pages are on Facebook are? Here they are.
"Entertainment continues to dominate the list of most popular Facebook pages, according to our PageData tool, which counts the number of fans added to a page daily. After Facebook’s own pages for its mobile app and main company page, the most Liked pages are those of entertainers, athletes, TV shows, games, and a few international brands."
#1: Facebook Improving Site Integrity Systems To Combat False Likes
"Facebook updated its site integrity system today in an effort to crack down on fake likes, a move that the company says will benefit legitimate users and page owners.The company says the improved automated efforts will detect and remove Likes obtained by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users or purchased mass Likes. While Facebook says it has always protected against these threats, the new system will specifically be tailored to identify and erase suspect Likes."
The Social 6: 8/31/12 News Roundup
The last 24 hours or so had a bunch of news (& views), considering it's late August. Here are some of the highlights:
#6: The #1 Oversight in Social Media Community Building
"No matter now compelling your content, how widespread your reach, how generous your reward, community attrition will be the undoing of any social media campaign leaving you to constantly rebuild sand castles at the foot of waves.To avoid this a brand of any size launching nay campaign must studiously walk through five stages:..."
#5: Facebook Sponsored Stories: Engaging Content is More Important than Ever
"Brands wanting to connect with fans need to be even more creative about the content they post, especially if you plan to use Sponsored Stories. Your fans still want to look smart in front of their friends, share funny photos and feel like they have a connection to something larger than themselves. Even if you pay for that positioning, these rules still apply."
#4: Bing rolls out a dedicated tool for searching your friend’s Facebook pictures
"Today, Bing announced and released ‘Friends’ Photos,’ a tool that allows you to search the social giant for specific pictures that your friends have uploaded....Bing’s recent redesign includes Facebook integration, but this new tool is a singular tool, unlike the right side-bar in the New Bing."
#3: Twitter launches 'Certified Products' to further encourage the apps it wants
"Twitter launched a new certified products platform Wednesday. The program is initially launching with three verticals Twitter says are “based on the needs we see from partners every day” — Engagement Products, Analytics Products, and Data Reseller Products...the 12 partners launching today are Attensity, ExactTarget, HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, Sprinklr, SocialFlow, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, Topsy, DataSift, and Gnip."
#2: Is Google selling off a portion of Motorola?
"Google (GOOG) supposedly wants to sell a portion of its recent acquisition of Motorola, and has hired Barclays Plc (BCS) to do the dirty work of finding a buyer. Google wants to sell the “Home Business” division of the messy ex-techno-giant, which it acquired for $12.5 billion in May. Bloomberg opines that this unit might net about $2 billion."
#1: I Am A President -- Obamamania Shuts Down Reddit
"In another social-media first, President Barack Obama took to Reddit today to become the first sitting head of state to moderate the site's "AMA," or, ask me anything, series.
The chat lasted an hour, and got so much attention that it shut the site down during his post."