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| StumbleUpon: 10 Tips and Tricks for Power Users | | 10:11:09 AM | Christine Erickson |
|  Thousands of websites are created every day, yet sometimes the Internet feels a bit stale. How do you filter through all of the junk when you want to discover something new? StumbleUpon is a site that randomly shuffles through websites, curating content and information specifically for you. Since its start, the site has surpassed 20 million users, and continues to be a dominant source of traffic for the world's top social media sites. According to StumbleUpon, the site delivers more than 1.2 billion recommendations per month, and users spend seven hours per month stumbling. Most surprisingly, according to this infographic, the average stumbling session lasts 69 minutes. SEE ALSO: StumbleUpon's Most Popular Searches and Links of 2011 Those numbers might seem a bit overwhelming, especially if you don't have that kind of time to devote to the site. However, there are a few things you can do ahead of time, and while stumbling, that'll provide you with the best sites specific to you. Here are 10 ways to get the best stumbles. |
| Super Bowl XLVI Gets a Social Media Command Center | | Saturday, January 21, 2012 5:50 PM | Sam Laird |
|  Super Bowl XLVI host city Indianapolis has concocted a new way to deal with the madness that comes with managing the world's biggest annual sporting event. The solution? The Super Bowl's first-ever social media command center. A team of strategists, analysts and techies will monitor the digital fan conversation via Facebook, Twitter and other platforms from a 2,800-square-foot space downtown. The station will open on Monday and run through Super Bowl XLVI on Feb. 5. The team will 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. "Social media is just how people interact now," said Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidious, the digital marketing agency that the Super Bowl's host committee tapped to manage the communications hub. "We felt it was critical to have some horsepower behind that aspect of the Super Bowl here, versus what you might have seen from other Super Bowls." Some 150,000 people are expected to flood into downtown Indianapolis -- where the game will be played at Lucas Oil Stadium -- over Super Bowl weekend. Advanced search tools and analytics will help Jackson and his team identify fans in need of help by indexing key words and phrases. For example, a fan won't need to tweet, "where can I find parking?" to get help; Raidious operatives will be able to pick up on a general phrase such as "parking sucks" to offer assistance. But it won't be a simple operation. The command center will utilize more than a mile of Ethernet cable and more than 150 square feet of networked screen space. More than 20 people will man the center for 15 hours per day. Researchers from nearby Ball State University's Center for Media Design will conduct a study of the command center, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses. Michael Holmes, director of the center's Insight & Research Unit, wrote in an email that the command center is an example of the "the ubiquity of social media and the absolute necessity for companies, organizations and communities to use these tools to improve their relations with their customer, audiences and citizens." Both Holmes and Jackson said they would not be surprised if the Super Bowl's first designated social media warroom sets a precedent for other major events. "We're kind of breaking new ground here so we don't know the exact numbers yet of what we'll be dealing with, but we should be able to provide that after the game to other cities that have to deal with these types of issues," Jackson said. "I think a lot of brands will start to see a need for something like this." What do you think about the Super Bowl's first-ever social media command center? Would you like to see major events set up more operations like this? Let us know in the comments. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, LUGO |
| Top 7 Comments on Mashable This Week | | Saturday, January 21, 2012 4:28 PM | Keith Kaplan |
|  We're back again with another roundup of the top Mashable comments of the week. In this post, we showcase the week's best comments on our site. We always look for thoughtful comments that engage the community and drive more conversation, as well as those that make us laugh. This week, the Mashable community took an interest in coverage of SOPA and Apple's launch of their new iBook authoring tool. The top comments were loaded with strong ideas and well-supported opinions. Take a look at this week's top comments on Mashable: If you haven't commented on a Mashable article before, check out Mashable Follow, our content curation and social tool, as well as our comment guidelines to learn more. We'd love for you to join the conversation. Remember to comment on next week's articles for a chance to be in the top comments roundup. |
| CoTweet Gone: Here Are 7 Great Alternatives | | Saturday, January 21, 2012 4:07 PM | Sam Laird |
|  The popular social media management application CoTweet will no longer exist after Feb. 15, but we've found 7 free or low-cost alternatives that'll take its place. What happened to the free Co-Tweet? The service's parent company, ExactTarget, announced in a blog post this week that it will soon re-christen CoTweet as SocialEngage -- a premium-only service the company says will feature enhanced integration and marketing powers. The free version will be gone forever. CoTweet was a hit with Twitter users, and many consumers of the free option are unhappy. A long string of comments following that ExactTarget blog post showed displeasure at the company for the abrupt move and its opaque pricing information. ExactTarget has not publicly said what it will charge to use SocialEngage, instead inviting former CoTweet users to make direct contact for more details. Existing CoTweet users can also test drive a free trial of SocialEngage until the end of February. Margaret Francis, ExactTarget's vice president of social products, declined to elaborate on pricing information in a recent interview with Mashable, beyond that there will varying costs for different levels of service. She said the free CoTweet was scrapped so that ExactTarget could "put all of our resources" behind SocialEngage, and that many of the company's larger clients are happy about the switch. Fans and users of the free CoTweet, meanwhile, are left weighing whether to open their wallets for SocialEngage or look elsewhere for other free alternatives. Managers of social media campaigns for tiny companies or non-business clients likely won't be willing or able to afford an upgrade. User David Beronja captured the mood of many when he posted this comment in response to the ExactTarget blog entry: "Been using cotweet for a long time. Good bye it was nice while it lasted. Time to find something else." But what might that something else be? Here, Mashable offers seven free or low-cost alternatives to SocialEngage. Some offer the full range of scheduling, monitoring and engagement capabilities -- while others specialize in one or two. (Existing CoTweet users can also test drive a free trial of SocialEngage until the end of February.) Scroll through the slideshow below, then get back to us in the comments: What do you think about ExactTarget killing the free version of CoTweet? Which alternatives do you most recommend? |
| Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week [PICS] | | Saturday, January 21, 2012 1:18 PM | Charlie White |
|  There's no need to go through 30 million pictures posted on Twitter last week when you have our top 10 Twitter pics of the week. Using a special algorithm developed by our partners at social media search engine Skylines, we've narrowed down that plethora of pics to find the diamonds in the rough for you, the most interesting photos from Twitter over the past week. How do we do it? We focus on the most popular Twitter trends, using hashtags that dominated the discourse on the microblogging service this week. Our modified algorithm focuses on events and happenings around the world, rather than personalities, which were the focus of our previous algorithm. We've abandoned that because it brought us pictures of mostly boy bands, and ended up being a popularity contest rather than a gauge of what people were really thinking and talking about. So here they are, a week's worth of Twitter pics encompassing a variety of topics and interests -- the results of our digital analysis of more pictures than any army of people could actually look at themselves. By the way, if you'd like to take a look at the full results of our extensive survey, find it at the Skylines site. |
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