CEO Pierre Zarokian to Speak at Social Media Marketing Conference

Submit Express President and CEO Pierre Zarokian will be one of the keynote speakers at the Social Media Marketing Las Vegas 2011 conference, held at the Flamingo Hotel on January 12.

Zarokian’s session, entitled “Reputation Management using Social Media” will show attendees how to use social media to combat reputation management issues. Zarokian will discuss the latest reputation monitoring tools, illustrating the effectiveness of social media in brand protection.

Taking place one day after the popular Affiliate Summit, this exciting conference will feature the leading social media experts in the industry and will cover timely topics such as viral social media campaigns, how to get digital PR for your company, how tech writers cover social media and how to build communities for brands. Speakers include Murray Newlands, David Koloski, Eric Petersen, Neil Glassman, Andrew Dumas and many others.

Although tickets are on sale now, Submit Express is offering a great opportunity to win free passes. You can win a free pass when you tweet about the conference using code #subm10 #smlasvegas. The two best Tweets will get into the Social Media Marketing Las Vegas 2011 conference free of charge. You can also receive 10 percent off your ticket price by using the code subm10 when you sign up.

Registration and additional information are available online.

Facebook Might Make Your Brain Bigger

Is it possible that Facebook users have bigger brains than everyone else? While it might seem like an overly-fanciful marketing campaign from Facebook, Time Magazines reports that recent research suggests that people who use Facebook regularly might have larger brains than non-users. Specifically, a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests a relationship between the number of Facebook friends a person has and the development of the portion of the brain called the “amygdala.”

The amygdala processes the memory of the emotional reactions within a brain. It helps people identify if they are familiar with a person or not, and if they should feel comfortable interacting with them. Researchers at Northeastern University studied 58 adults with Facebook friend groups of different sizes and levels of interaction. They discovered that people with larger and more complex social networks have larger amygdala than people with more closed Facebook networks.

The results suggest that people make emotional connections with Facebook friends, even if they don’t know them personally. The report concluded that “humans are inherently social animals. We play, work, eat and fight with one another. A larger amygdala might enable us to more effectively identify, learn about and recognize socioemotional cues in conspecifics, allowing us to develop complex strategies to cooperate and compete.”

NHL and NBC Announce Facebook Integration for Winter Classic

Fans who watch the National Hockey League’s Winter Classic game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals on New Year’s Day will have a chance to experience something unique beyond the outdoor location of Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field. The NHL and NBC announced the “NHL Winter Classic Fan Challenge,” a cross-platform collaboration which utilizes Facebook to create an interactive viewing experience for the home audience.

Viewers can register by signing up through the “Watch And Win” tab on the NHL’s Facebook page. During the game, viewers who register on the Facebook page will be selected at random to win prizes, with a Facebook message being sent to their accounts and shown during the broadcast. Prizes include a Honda CR-Z sport hybrid coupe and trips for four to both Universal Orlando Studios and the 2011 NHL All-Star Game.

Twitter Tweets Fluther

Twitter announced Wednesday that it has acquired the brains behind Fluther, Inc., a Q & A website that connects people who have questions with those who have the answers.

Through its acquisition of the Fluther team, the popular micro-blogging site is welcoming four engineers and one designer — Ben Finkel, Andrew McClain, Tim Trueman, Richard Henry and Cameron Dutro.

According to Twitter, the product Fluther.com is not part of the deal and will remain separate from Twitter.

“We are thrilled to be joining such a fantastic company and to have the opportunity to participate in the next stage of Twitter’s growth,” wrote Finkel and McClain in a post on the Fluther blog.

“Thank you to everyone who helped Fluther grow from an idea into a thriving community with over a million visitors a month. We’ll have more details about the state of Fluther in the coming weeks.”

The new team will be responsible for “helping users discover the most relevant content on Twitter.”

TripAdvisor Launches Enhanced Trip Friends Feature with Facebook Collaboration

Leading online travel site TripAdvisor launched a collaboration with Facebook on Tuesday which lets users see recommendations and highlights from their friends’ travels to various cities. The extension of the “Trip Friends” feature uses the site’s “Cities I’ve Visited” Facebook application to tell users about movies, hotels, restaurants and other location-based interests that have been highlighted by their friends.

Previous versions of Trip Friends required that a person message their friends in order to get advice about locations to visit in different cities. TripAdvisor’s Adam Medros told USA Today that his company’s users “wanted (Trip Friends) to be easier, and the bar to using the feature was higher than we would have liked.” Trip Friends lowers the bar, Medros said, by placing friends’ reviews first and highlighting places where friends have visited on a home page map.

Facebook Simplifies Photo Tagging

In an effort to make tagging photos in the social networking site easier for users, Facebook announced last week tag suggestions, a new tool that automatically groups similar pictures and suggests the names of friends who might appear in them.

When a Facebook user or a friend of a user uploads new photos, the site’s new face recognition software will automatically match photos to other tagged photos.

“By making tagging easier than before, you’re more likely to know right away when friends post photos,” writes Justin Mitchell, Facebook engineer, in a post on the Facebook blog. “We notify you when you’re tagged, and you can untag yourself at any time.  As always, only friends can tag each other in photos.”

To avoid the automatic suggested tags feature, users can disable it in their Privacy Settings.

Facebook Won’t Let Captain Awesome Change His Name

When you register for a Facebook account, you have to provide your real name. In fact, the company takes pride in its system of checks and balances to ensure that a person is using their real name on the site. This helps to avoid identity theft or people setting up false accounts to impersonate celebrities to perform scams.

But what happens when your legal name is Captain Awesome? Apparently, you can get a driver’s license with that name but not a Facebook account. AOL News reports that one man legally changed his name to Captain Awesome from the more pedestrian Douglas Smith, Jr., but Facebook won’t allow him to change his account to reflect his new, “Awesome” moniker.

Awesome claims that he is an “Outrageous Ordained Minister” and that he makes his living performing humorous and non-traditional weddings. The name change was made to further his career, but he said that Facebook’s policies have made it impossible to market himself on the site.

“On Facebook, I’m still Doug Smith,” he said. “I wanted to change my name to something that reflects who I am as a person.”

Bing Enhances “Liked” Search Results Feature

As part of the latest series of updates to Bing’s search engine, Microsoft today announced a new enhancement to its “Liked” search results feature. Originally introduced in November of this year, the “Liked” feature shows users which of their friends have “liked” relevant search results.

The recent enhancement has expanded the results to include more sites. In addition, “Starting today, if your search results include a specific link that has also been ‘liked’ by someone in your Facebook network the link will be highlighted as ‘Liked’ within Bing,” wrote Paul Yiu, Group Program Manager at Bing, on a company blog.

“This gets especially interesting for a query like ‘Xbox’ where my friend ‘Liked’ the ‘Kinect’ site and while our algorithms didn’t feel it was relevant enough to make it the ‘answer’ we reference above, we are still able to indicate that my friend liked that link that happened to show up within the results.”

Hit Me Up Tops List of 2010 Facebook Status Updates

What do the World Cup, Chilean miners and Justin Bieber all have in common? According to Facebook, they were among the most popular topics among its users in 2010. The social media site has released its second annual “Memology,” listing the top trends in status updates in the past year, and those three items were among the top 10 overall trending status updates. However, none of them could compare to a single phrase: “HMU.”

Standing for “Hit Me Up,” the term rocketed to the top of Facebook’s year-end status update chart despite being barely used in 2009. However, its popularity with teens and other young users as a way to ask friends to contact them made it the most popular phrase on Facebook in 2010.

The top 10 trending status update phrases from Facebook in 2010, according to their blog post:

1. HMU
2. World Cup
3. Movies
4. iPad and iPhone 4
5. Haiti
6. Justin Beiber
7. Games on Facebook
8. Mineros/Miners
9. Airplanes
10. 2011

Almost One in 10 Online Americans Use Twitter

According to survey data released on Thursday by the Pew Charitable Trust, eight percent of all Americans who are online use Twitter. However, Computerworld reports that a small percentage of the Twitter population is active on a regular basis. According to the report, only 25 percent of Twitter users responded that they Tweet on a daily basis.

However, the survey results showed that people are much more likely to check their Twitter feeds than actively make posts, as 24 percent of all Twitter users said that they check their feed several times a day, while an additional 12 percent said they check at least once a day.

Not surprisingly, the most popular subject for Twitter users is themselves. Survey results showed that 72 percent of Twitter users post updates about their personal lives, compared to 62 percent posting updates about their work lives, 55 percent sharing links to news stories and 53 percent retweeting items tweeted by other people.

Next Page »