Eight percent of internet-using American adults are using Twitter, according to a November 2010 study from PewResearch Center. Twitter is an increasingly popular social networking activity among young adults, minorities, and those who live in cities especially. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a project of the PewResearch Center, usually focuses on general surveys and reports on internet usage and activities (as opposed to narrowing questions to a single brand or company) but based on the large increase in Twitter usage and its ever-growing popularity, Pew decided it warranted its own study. In eight surveys between August 2008 and September 2010 PewResearch asked: “‘Do you ever use the internet to use Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?’ In August 2008, 6% of internet users said ‘yes’ to that question. In September 2010, 24% of internet users said ‘yes.’”

With the recent launch of Google’s Airship Advertising, famous tire makers “Goodyear” are scrambling to close sponsorship negotiations with existing contracts, terrified of being locked out in favor of what may be a more profitable money maker from Google.

“We tend to take our time signing deals with stadiums as there just isn’t really any competition in the blimp messaging business,” says Bill Pmilb, Director of Dirigible Marketing at Goodyear, “We just never saw this coming – especially from an internet-focused firm like Google. They really caught us with our pants down on this one.”

The latest marketer to embrace Twitter’s Promoted “Trending Topic” ad space (at the estimated/rumored cost of $200k a pop) is single-cup-of-coffee brewing magnate Keurig (or more precisely Green Mountain Coffee Roasters who owns Keurig and many other popular coffee brands)… Brew Over Ice K-Cups is the newest Keurig product and so to launch it, Keurig and Green Mountain turned to Twitter, trusting their rabid fans would be eager to spread the coffee love. And for non-keurig users, theres always the cruise. Yup. They are giving away an Alaskan cruise to one lucky winner.

Yesterday Google announced the release of Chrome 11 beta.  As usual Google Chrome team continues to push the limits of the web.  With this release they made public their use of a little known Web API for decoding speech into text.  The new API from google is not documented and has probably been in existence since early 2009 when they opened up more of Google Voice and made know their use of transcription for voice mail.   These features are all very interesting.  Thanks to the good work from “don’t panic”, it was very easy to put together a ruby library that helps make it even easier to use the speech API.  Check out the source a github.com.

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On the heels of our last post, How Do I: Make a Facebook Page for My Business?, we wanted to immediately address a very common question and concern that our clients have when it comes to Facebook: How do you control what people post on a Page’s Wall?

The thought of complete strangers posting negative comments or inappropriate material on a Page’s public Wall seems to be the first thing to pop into many business owners’ minds. So let me first say, that yes, you can delete any comment and even block individuals from ever posting to your Page again. But that should be a last resort action and not the first button you push.

With Facebook’s New Pages Overhaul now fully implemented, we decided it was time to update our old article about Creating Your Facebook Fan Page (and the subsequent Managing Your Facebook Fan Page – Basics) to better reflect the features and visual changes that you will now encounter.

So we’re gonna go a little off-topic today and talk about a problem that affects all of us from time to time. Headaches. Oh yes, that common ailment that keeps drug companies in business and makes us flee from bright lights and loud noises. With so many of us staring at computer monitors all day and TV screens all night, its no wonder that we suffer from pain commonly attributed to eye strain and stress.

We are regularly asked for assistance and advice on social media related topics, so when the opportunity presented itself to give back to our local business community, we jumped at the chance. In cooperation with the Severna Park Chamber of Commerce, we will be hosting several short, intense, small-class size seminars on Social Media geared toward small business owners and their employees.

Static asset bundling in Ruby on Rails is super easy with assemblage.

SSL is important when dealing with user data. The rails 3 router makes it easy to mark specific sections of your application secure using the :constraints option within a scope block.