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...

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a rare appearance today, speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in a "fireside chat," marking his first public remarks since his company's disappointing IPO in May. In a bid for transparency and humility, Zuckerberg said he's "ready to double down" on the company's future. He also admitted making mistakes, including betting too much on HTML5, and talked up his focus on mobile and advertising as a way to bolster revenue and FB's stock price. He also denied rumors of a Facebook phone being in the works while confirming new product development including a search engine. He even gave a shout-out to other tech brands he thinks are "killing it" right now: Spotify, Airbnbn, Nike+ and Runkeeper. Read more on TechCrunch.

It's been a month (since July 10th, to be exact) when a social youthquake tremor rumbled under the tweets and Facebook posts of the olds when Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters social network opened its doors to the public.

A raucous riot of visual updates from Gaga's legions of fans — with shades of Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr and Facebook thrown in for good measure — the highly anticipated site defines the next iteration of fan-based social networking. Two weeks after launch, on July 25th, the site passed a quarter of a million users.

Powered by the Backplane, it was engineered by Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, who's also a cofounder of Backplane. “The goal of Little Monsters and Backplane is to unite people around affinities, interests and movements,” said Matt Michelsen, co-founder and CEO. And to keep out all those aforementioned old-timers cluttering up Facebook and Twitter and ruining the party for fishnetizens who worship at the altar of Gaga and nonconformity.Continue reading...

The bloom quickly fell off Friday's Facebook IPO, as the wildly overhyped public debut staged by the social media giant and its bankers are now being sued by shareholders for concealing weakened growth forecasts prior to the $16 billion offering.

According to Reuters, defendants including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Morgan Stanley were cited as hiding “a severe and pronounced reduction” in revenue forecasts during the IPO marketing process. Two lawsuits have been filed, one in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and the other in a California state court. The New York filing said lowered business forecasts were “selectively disclosed by defendants to certain preferred investors” and not to the general public.

While everyone knew there would be post-IPO challenges, Wall Street and Silicon Valley have been stunned as Facebook shares fell 18.4% from the $38 IPO price in the first three days of trading, reducing the value of stock sold in the IPO by more than $2.9 billion.Continue reading...

Those who regularly use Twitter [like the author], it's a regular surprise just how fast information can be designated and how that information can culture, spore, and explode with momentum. Just the same, regular users know just how banal Twitter can seem. As you eat up live updates on the #Syria feed, you realize that, instead of #Syria, #Anchorman is trending. Why? Because some basic cable channel happens to be rerunning the film Anchorman and millions are tweeting about it while watching.

Now Twitter has released a list of 2011's "Hot Topics" and it's exactly what an experienced tweeter would expect: true life and gravity (Japan's earthquake, Egyptian uprising) vs. pointlessness (Charlie Sheen's #tigerblood meme). Continue reading...