Admin | July 2, 2011
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Social Media Trends

Social media generates a phenomenal wealth of real time content at a ceaseless rate. From all the content that people create and share, only a few manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become temporal trends that are displayed to users. The question of what factors cause the formation and persistence of trends is an important one that has not been answered yet.

Social media is growing at an explosive rate, with millions of people all over the world generating and sharing the content on a scale barely imaginable a few years ago. This has result in massive participation with countless number of updates, opinions, news, comments and product news being constantly posted and discussed on social websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Dig, to name a few. These sites are even used by other sites like the HCG diet site that uses a lot of social media.

This widespread generation and consumption of content has created an extremely competitive online environment where different types of content compete with each other for the scarce attention of users’ community like in a HCG diet plan. In spite of seemingly chaotic fashion with which all these interactions takes place, certain topics manage to attract inordinate amount of attention, thus bubbling to the top in terms of popularity. Through their visibility, these popular topics contribute to the collective awareness of what is trending and at times can also feel the public agenda of the community.

At present, there is no clear picture of what causes these topics become extremely popular or how some persist in public eye longer than others. There is considerable evidence that on aspect that causes topics to decay over time is originality. Another factor responsible for their decay is competitive nature of the medium. As content starts propagating through a social network it can assume positions of earlier topics of interest, and due to the limited attention of users, it is soon rendered invisible by newer content. Some users generate content that resonates very strongly with their followers thus causing the content to propagate and gain popularity.

The source of the content can originate in standard media outlets or from users who generate topics that eventually become part of the trends and capture the attention of large communities. In either case the fact that a small set of topics become part of become part of the trending sets mean that they will capture the attention of large number of audience for a short time, thus contributing in some measure to the public agenda. When topics originate in media outlets, the social medium acts as filter and amplifier of what the standard media produces and thus contributes to the agenda setting mechanisms have been thoroughly studied for more than three decades.

Social media will become conversational marketing and its practitioners will shift their focus more to ideas and technologies that can create or stimulate conversation versus simply focusing on the engagement in conversation. These technologies will be very data measurement driven. By making this shift, social media consultants will retain and improve their standing with in internal ROL driven cultures of today’s companies.

Category: Social Media |
Admin | July 2, 2011
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Who is Ashton Kutcher

Christopher Ashton Kutcher, best known as Ashton Kutcher is an American actor, former fashion model and comedian. He is best known for his portrayal of Michael Kelso in the Fox sitcom That 70’s Show. He also created, produced and hosted Punk’d and played the lead role In the Hollywood films. Dude, Where’s my car? , Just Married, The Butterfly effect, The Guardian, and what happens in Vegas? , are his famous Hollywood movies. He is also the producer and co creator of the supernatural TV show Room 401 and the reality TV show Beauty and the Greek. It was announced in May 2011 that Kutcher would replace Charlie Sheen in the hit CBS sitcom Two and a Half man.

Ashton Kutcher was born in February 7, 1978 in Cedar Rapids, lowa, to Larry Kutcher, a factory worker, and Diane, a Procter and Gamble employee. Kutcher was raised in a conservative Roman Catholic family, with an old sister, Tausha and a fraternal twin, Michael, who had a heart transplant when the brothers were young children. Kutcher attended Washington High School in Cedar Rapids for his freshman year before his family moved to Homestead, lowa, where he attended Clear Creek Amana High School. In a 2010 interview on Late Night with David Letterman, Kutcher claimed to be an all state linebacker who averaged 15 tackles per game in the high school. Kutcher’s brother’s cardiomyopathy caused his life to become increasingly stressful. Kutcher enrolled in the University of Lowa in august 1996, where his planned major was biochemical engineering, motivated by a desire to find a cure for his brother’s heart aliment. At college, Kutcher was kicked out of his apartment for being to noisy and wild. Following his stay in New York, Kutcher returned to Cedar Rapids before relocating to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting.

After participating as a modeling contestant in an IMTA competition in 1998, Kutcher signed with the Next modeling agency in New York, appeared in ads for Calvin Klein, modeled in Paris and Milan and appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial.

After some success in modeling, Kutcher moved to Los Angeles and after his first audition was cast in Michael Kelso in the television series The 70’s Show which debuted in 1998 and ended in 2006. Kutcher was casted in a series of film roles; although he auditioned but was not cast for the role Danny Walker in Pearl Harbor. He also starred in many comedy films.

Kutcher was part of the management team for Ooma, a tech- start up launched in September 2007. Ooma was in the Voice over Internet Protocol business and Ashton’s role was a creative director. He was leading light a marketing campaign and producing viral videos to promote this service. Kutcher has also created an interactive arm of Katalyst called Katalyst Media with his partner from Katalyst Films, Jason Goldberg. Their first site is the animated cartoon Blah Girls. Ooma revamped its sales and marketing strategy with a new management team in the summer of 2008, replacing Ashton Kutcher as their creative director.

Category: Ashton Kutcher |
Admin | July 2, 2011
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Facebook Practical Uses

Facebook is a social networking service, launched in February 2004. It is operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users. Users create a personal profile, ass other users as friends, and exchange messages including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook users must register must register before using the site. Additionally users may join common interest user groups, organized by work place, school or college or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the conversational name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administration in the United States to help students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows any user who declares them to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the website.

Mark Zuckerberg found Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students. Users can create profiles with photos, list of personal interest, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private and public message and chat feature. They can also create and like the groups of interests and like pages, some of which are created by organization for advertising.

To allay concerns about privacy, Facebook allows users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see the specific part of their profile. Users can control who sees other information they have shared as well as who can find them in searches, through their privacy settings.

A lot of people are going crazy about this new fad called Facebook. People use Facebook to socialize with other people to beat time and distance constraints.

Facebook has affiliated the social life and activity of people in various ways. It can reunite the lost family members and friends. Facebook as a social networking site become helpful in problems concerning legal matters. Even if seems that Facebook is a bit informal in the non-professionals eyes, it can aid in searching legal disputes.

Online communities like Facebook always tend to be effective instruments for communication. It can allow you to search long lost friend, relatives or acquaintances you have not been in touch for a long while. In addition, users are given the capacity to meet new groups and friends, which they can interact with and actually know what their likes and dislikes are. It also enables the user to access each other’s profile to find out interesting facts that they can use

Facebook seems to be appealing more to the younger generation than the older ones, primarily due to similarity in interests and hobbies. This makes a perfect gateway to connecting students and engaging them to form interest based organizations. They can then clash with ideas with their Facebook pages or Facebook groups, which they might find helpful when they need to set meetings. Organization can publish wall posts and updates about the upcoming gatherings, events or activities they are up to.

Category: Social Media |
Admin | July 2, 2011
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What is Icing

Icing is a mixture of sugar with water or butter, typically flavored and colored, and used as a coating for cakes and cookies. It is also called frosting in the United States. It is a sweet often creamy glaze made of sugar with a liquid such as water or milk. It is often enriched with ingredients such as butter, egg whites, cream cheese, or flavorings. It is used to decorate or cover baked goods, such as cakes or cookies.

According to the food timeline, Elizabeth Raffald documented the first recipe for icing in 1769 in the Experienced English Housekeeper. However, it was not until the 1915 that Mrs. Fred W. Gurney created the first butter cream recipe, and Fannie Farmer followed suit with several more recipes in 1918 and 1923.

Icing can be formed into shapes such as flowers and leaves using a pastry bag. Such decorations commonly grace birthday and wedding cakes. Chef’s color dye or food coloring is commonly added to icing mixtures to achieve the desired colors. Sprinkles, coloring mists, edible images or other decorations are usually used on top of icing.

The simplest icing is a glace icing, containing icing sugar and water. This can be flavored and colored as desired, for example by using lemon juice in place of water. More complicated icings can be made by beating fat into icing sugar as in butter cream, by melting fat and sugar together, by using egg whites as in royal icing, and by adding other ingredients such as glycerin as in fondant. Some icing can be made from combinations of sugar and cream cheeses, or by using ground almonds as in marzipan.

Icing can be applied with a utensil such as knife or spatula, or it can be applied by drizzling or dipping or by rolling the icing out and draping it over the cake. The method of application largely depends largely depends on the type and texture of icing being used. Icing may be used between layers in a cake as a filling, or it may be used to completely or partially cover the outside of a cake or other baked product.

Bros of the world, unite the recent icing craze which is a drinking game centered on the barely drinkable malt beverage Smirnoff Ice, might seem like the Holy Grail of the Internet Marketing. After all the trend did jump from frat houses to websites and blogs, where it went viral, infecting multitude of frat boys’ wannabes, causing them run out and buy the drink.

For starters, the game is not exactly a celebration of Ice. It is way bros can disgrace fellow bros. there are only two rules in icing:

1.     When presented with a Smirnoff Ice, the girly treacle comes in nine flavors that include, watermelon, and something called Black Ice.

2.     A participant must get down on knee and chug its contents, which are 4.5 % alcohol by volume.

But if players are wily, they can summon Rule number 2.

Category: Icing |
Admin | July 2, 2011
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What is Twitter

Twitter is a social networking site, which is owned and operated by twitter Inc. which also offers micro blogging service along with social networking. It enables its users to send and receive messages. Those are called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the user’s profile page.

The website is based in San Francisco. Twitters also have servers and offices in San Antonio and Boston. Twitter is originally incorporated in California but as of 2011 is incorporated in Delaware. Twitter was produced in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July. Since then twitter has gain popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 200 million tweets a day and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as SMS of the Internet.

Twitters origin lie in ‘daylong brainstorming session’ held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS as service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that William later ascribed to Noah Glass inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.

Twitter has been compared to a web based Internet Relay Chat client. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however, senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external application such as for smart phones or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Users may subscribe to other users’ tweets; this is known as following and subscriber are known as followers. Twitter allows users the ability to update their profile by using their mobile phones either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smart phones or mobile phones.

Users can group posts together by topics or type by the use of hash tags; words or phrases prefixed with“#” sign. Similarly, “@” sign followed by the user name is used for mentioning or replying to other users. To re post a message from another Twitter user and share it with one’s own followers, the re tweet function is symbolized by “RT” in the message.

Twitter is ranked as one of the ten most visited sites worldwide by Alexa’s web traffic analysis. Daily user estimate vary as the company does not publish statistics on active accounts. There are numerous tools for adding content, monitoring content and conversations including Tweet deck, Salesforce.com, Hoot suite, and Twitter feed. Less than half of tweets are posted using the web user interface with most users using third party applications based on analysis of 500 million tweets by Sysomos.

Twitter messages are public but users can also send private messages. Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to sell this information as an asset if the company changes hands.

Category: Social Media |