Social media mavens gathered in New York City Monday night for the 5th annual Shorty Awards, which honors the best short form content across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare and more. 

Considered the Oscars for Twitter, the of-the-moment awards ceremony garnered more than 1.8 million tweet nominations during this year's voting process. With acceptance speeches limited to 140 characters, the awards capture the brightest spots on social, from the most viral memes to the most shared social campaigns. 

Started in 2008 by tech startup Sawhorse Media, the first Shorty Awards catered to a small audience of 300, but since then, the importance of social media campaigns have grown exponentially.Continue reading...

With GM pulling an about-"face" and now returning to Facebook as a limited advertiser, could the company's re-embrace of Super Bowl advertising be far off? Either way, Facebook is continuing to push skeptical advertisers to take a closer look at its site.

Chevrolet is advertising on Facebook again, in a test of mobile ads for the Chevy Sonic, less than a year after General Motors' very public repudiation of the effectiveness of paid advertising on the site. The brand "is testing a number of mobile advertising solutions, including Facebook, as part of its 'Find New Roads' campaign," Chris Perry, vice president of U.S. Chevrolet marketing, said in a confirming statement issued by GM in the wake of a story published by Advertising Age.

It's an "industry-first mobile-only pilot campaign" for Sonic that "utilizes newly available targeting and measurement capabilities of Facebook."Continue reading...

It seems we just can’t enough of Facebook, either reviling the world’s largest social network or checking in on it—14 times a day—according to research by IDC, which was sponsored by Facebook. 

It’s a perfect social media storm for the latest FB feature that lets brands target users for status updates that don't appear on their brand pages. The units, called "posts," are actually links to a brand's homepage or Facebook Page that run in the News Feed. Testing is underway for behavioral-targeting-based Facebook Exchange ads to run there as well—center-page real estate previously off limits.

“For example, a sporting goods brand could run a post appealing to basketball fans. While the post wouldn't appear on the brand's Page, it would run in the News Feed of fans who have an affinity for the sport,” explains Mashable. “The unit can be used for A/B testing of ads. In other words, a marketer can run two or more different messages and then see which ones do the best.”Continue reading...

#Hashtags #Are #Coming #To #Facebook

— Team Coco (@TeamCoco) March 14, 2013

Facebook is taking on growing rival Twitter in the hashtag realm by integrating the iconic marker into its own platform as the battle for mobile usage and ad dollars heats up.

The social behemoth is testing allowing users to click on a hashtag to pull up all related posts on a trending topic or event, incentivizing users to stay logged in longer and see more ads. (Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year uses hashtags so users can sort photos.)Continue reading...

In the never-ending quest to find good talent, more and more companies are taking to social media and implementing interesting tactics to discover their next great employee. 

Most recently, MasterCard has launched a search for five eager beaver interns. Hopefulls must apply via LinkedIn with an idea of how to facilitate a cashless future. Applicants must then follow MasterCard's Twitter, since that's how they're planning on notfying the chosen applicants. The company even created an animated short to advertise the opportunity.Continue reading...

Facebook’s redesign of its News Feed, the largest since launch of the feature in 2006, gives users increased social savvy including new ways to catch up with friends by sorting through splashier photos, videos or music choices rather than being confined to parsing by "Top Stories" or "Most Recent." 

The new feeds include: "All Friends," "Photos," Music" and "Following." The mobile app will reflect the changes in the next few weeks. 

"This is a high-stakes move," notes the Chicago Tribune. "News Feed is indisputably the most valuable real estate on Facebook. It's the place that people get updates from their friends. And it's the place that Facebook is betting advertisers have the best shot at connecting with its 1 billion-plus users."Continue reading...

LinkedIn is locked in to a successful if lackluster business model, as far as Wall Street—and the online social network's 40 to 43 million reguar unique visitors—are concerned. That puts it in contrast to many of the sexier brands in the social media-sphere.

While the market capitalizations of darlings such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon have fallen by 25 percent to 60 percent since their recent public offerings, LinkedIn is now valued at more than $18 billion versus just $4 billion when it went public nearly two years ago. With that, its stock closed at all-time highs this week.

That's because the Mountain View, Calif.-based brand has managed to create and then dominate social media networking focused around jobs, careers and business identities. LinkedIn also has been able to monetize its site by selling services such as job ads, career pages and a recruiter talent finder that helps companies find, attract and manage their talent.

In turn, LinkedIn's utility has helped make it gradually more attractive to the most career-challenged generation—Milennials—in addition to Generation Xers and boomers who tended to become the initial members of LinkedIn as established professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook, for instance, has lost its identity as the place where young social-networkers gather. Continue reading...

Recent social media blunders by two major brands contain lessons for others in how not to behave online, experts say. Take these two rather dramatic examples:

In St. Louis, an Applebee’s waitress loses her job for a post showing a receipt from a pastor who left a snarky note instead of a tip. (Since she gave God 10 percent, the pastor wrote, why should she give the waitress 18?) 

Fellow employee Chelsea Welch takes a picture of the receipt (at right), uploads it to Reddit — then loses her job for violating a customer’s privacy. The firing creates an Internet firestorm, angry groups form on Facebook, and the chain's on widget tracking the twitterverse shows nonstop attacks on the chain. (The controversy came two weeks after Applebee's itself exposed the name of a pleased customer on its Facebook page, then began tagging and arguing with other posters over the issue in the middle of the night.)

Meanwhile in the U.K., as struggling music retailer HMV begins laying off 190 employees, its community manager Poppy Rose begins live tweeting how it feels as "the company you dearly love is being ruined."Continue reading...