Social Media Marketing

Spending on online advertising is expected to jump 20.2 percent over last year's spending, according to new figures from eMarketer. If this category of ad spend does indeed reach $31.3 billion, as the company has projected, it will return to pre-recession growth levels and be accompanied by steady i...

I have a friend who's a musician, author and former radio personality, and he likes Facebook. A lot. My newsfeed is clogged with his posts -- news from his life, comments about music and movies, photos of his travels, videos of songs, links to other people's articles. I don't think there's any possi...

On a single day in March earlier this year, The Orange County Register's website generated $188,000, mainly by selling nearly 5,457 customers on its daily deal: a Catalina Flyer catamaran round-trip ticket for $34. A portion of the revenue was generated by a side deal. For an industry poised to reac...

Once upon a time there was an online group called "The Point." It was a nebulous organization with the vague goal of using the power of social media to to do such things as crowdsource a design for the Chicago Stadium or launch a petition. One day, one of its members got the bright idea to use its n...

Pop star Lady Gaga is reportedly joining with Google's Eric Schmidt to produce a new social media site called "Backplane." Tony Carter, Gaga's manager, is at the helm of the operation and is attracting capital from important backers. So far, the company has raised more than $1 million from a group o...

LinkedIn has been a public company for roughly two weeks, but its brief history on Wall Street should give the people running other social media companies a lot to think about. The biggest question to ponder is whether they should go public now -- or as soon as they can convince an investment bank t...

I have a love-hate relationship with social media. I love platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn that let me keep up with people I truly value as friends and colleagues, even as we move on to new stages in our lives. I hate social media's potential for baring intimate details of your life with people y...

After much rumor and speculation, Twitter and TweetDeck announced what many had already concluded: the popular third-party client has been acquired by Twitter. The terms of the deal were undisclosed but various news reports put it between $40 million and $50 million. Of perhaps greater interest, at ...

Salesforce.com is participating in a social media project with Toyota Motor, in what could launch the CRM company into an entirely new industry -- telematics. Or not. The agreement between Salesforce.com and Toyota to collaborate on this offering, called "Toyota Friend," is still very much in its ...

LinkedIn's doubled stock price after its IPO on Thursday has many wondering if this could be the start of another tech bubble. LinkedIn initially offered 7.84 million shares at $45 each. Within minutes, the shares doubled in price and eventually peaked at $122.70 each. The price lingered around $100...