Social media is everywhere nowadays. It finds you in the morning during your commute to work, sneaking its way into a promotional radio announcement for concert tickets – learn more about this music spectacular via the station’s Twitter account. It’s embedded in the e-mail we read; Vanessa tagged a photo of you on Facebook and Nathan wrote on your wall. It’s even incorporated into the TV programs we cherish – visit Fox.com/Glee to follow us on MySpace, check out video extras and learn more about the cast.

With each passing day, social media becomes more institutionalized within our culture, and our ability to separate social media from ordinary life becomes opaque and jaded. Such a transformation – social media into the norm of everyday life – also encourages the public to use social media as a gateway for sharing of every kind of information without thinking twice.

Below you’ll find real-life examples of how society has embraced social media to portray the good, the bad and the ugly.

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Are you one of many social media addicts who have been disappointed by the seemingly unjust privacy violations implemented by Facebook? Are you exhausted from worry of what might happen to your personal data with the topsy-turvy regulations set to protect your information? Would you like to rest assured that your social interactions on the web won’t come back to haunt you several years down the road?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you’ll want to pay close attention to a new social media platform that’s garnering favorability among social media consumers – and it hasn’t even been launched yet.

Diaspora, which has been coined a Facebook alternative by many, is an interactive online platform designed to grant social media users the privacy they demand matched with the social activity they crave. In fact, the social network’s founders – Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy – say it best in the following video clip.

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

Set to launch September 15, 2010, Diaspora developed an interim, promotional website to deliver an overview, that’s both creative and concrete, of what social media users can expect along with a platform for the inevitable, frequently asked questions. The website describes the soon-to-be-launched social network in saying:

“We are 140-character ideas. We are the pictures of your cat. We are blog posts about the economy. We are the collective knowledge that is Wikipedia. The internet is a canvas – of which, we paint broad and fine strokes of our lives with. It is a forward extension of our physical lives; a meta-self comprised of ones and zeros. We are all that is digital: If we weren’t, the internet wouldn’t either.”

To stay current with Diaspora news and events in the final days before its launch, visit the social platform’s blog and KickStarter page.

If you’re having trouble deciding which is more important – the quantity of your Twitter following or the depth of your relationships with your followers – rest assured that both are of equal value.

Now that your mind is uncluttered and free of question, it’s best to concentrate on how you can enhance both aspects of your Twitter account to ensure the most oomph for your efforts.

Below you’ll find five indispensible resources to establish successful Twitter marketing, thanks to SocialMediaExaminer.com, which zoom in on the following key areas:

• Generating new followers
• Managing your newly established following surplus
• Transforming shallow relationships into deeper, more connected ones

 1. Blast Follow
A must-have Twitter application, Blast Follow is a remarkable resource for e-commerce entrepreneurs who could use a helping hand in accomplishing the necessary grunt work to locate others in their industry. With just a single click, users can generate a seemingly endless list of followers.

So, how can such a near impossible task become so simplified? Quite easily in fact. The concept is based on a societal norm – the law of reciprocity – which states that it’s in the nature of humans to desire reciprocation (whether a friend or stranger) of actions.

This concept takes on a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ appeal and, in this case, Twitter users seem to adhere to a loyalty to that says ‘you follow me; it’s only fair that I follow you.’

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It’s nearly impossible to turn on the TV, tune in to the radio or surf the web these days without encountering the social media craze that continues to intertwine with all aspects of our daily lives.

The buzz question of a once reluctant, yet curious, populace is no longer ‘Why should I become active in social media?’ Instead, the hot-button issue of inquisition in recent days has become ‘How can social media benefit me?’

Therefore, we’ve comprised a list of five social media trends, thanks to Mashabale.com, that provide consumers with a variety of perks and rewards, in addition to the in-demand essence of social media itself.

1. Social Scanning
The development of the Smartphone has granted users instant access to a magnitude of informational and social resources online. Most recently, these newage applications have yielded the convenience of comparison shopping to Smartphone users through barcode scanning technology.

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When it comes to starting up a business blog, most people find themselves overwhelmed from the get-go. There’s much more than posting to account for when strategizing for a striking blog, in fact, the key areas to consider are the theme, topics, audience, design, multimedia and promotion. Plus, if you haven’t already chosen a domain name for your blog, that’s a primary feature you’ll want to carefully develop to represent your brand most effectively.

Today, Mashabale.com published an article to showcase 15 fabulous business blogs; each represents a separate, valuable component of orchestrating a successful corporate blog to captivate the inquisitive nature of web surfers worldwide.

To keep things simple, however, we’ve selected the five most prominent must-haves for any business blog. This should to get you started sans the headache and hassle of sorting through an overwhelming to-do list. 

1. Squarespace: Choose a Suitable Blog Design

  
Business blogs often lack originality thanks to a corporate misconception that they need to be branded with overpowering images and text or visually underdeveloped and boring.

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Today, Google unveiled a brand-new system designed to simplify two key functions for Gmail users: overall contact management and keeping these contacts consistent with the rest of Gmail.

Such a roll out couldn’t have surfaced a minute too soon as animosity among Google’s users has been brewing worldwide in response to multiple disappointing oversights by the social network. Most notably, a formal letter to Google orchestrated by 10 nations to express deep concern about the lack of privacy regulations in the company’s recent debut of Google Buzz.

Now, more than ever, Google fans are craving a little reassurance about why they’ve pledged their cyber loyalty to the enterprise. And now, thanks to Google’s Gmail enhancement, supporters can rest assured – for the meantime – that the network is powering through their obstacles to provide a better overall Google experience.

Gmail members can now look forward to new features that include:

• Keyboard shortcuts that mirror Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts
• Sort by last name filter
• Faster editing options
• Autosaving
• Custom labels

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It’s not uncommon to think ‘geez, what’s next?’ when you consider the thousands of new social media applications that surface daily. As a society, our astonishment with the basic utility of networks like Facebook and Twitter has become feeble and impatient.

Today, excitement is fueled by stellar advancements in emerging technology such as the iPad, while the hype regarding simple applications like BreakkUp and Pandora is usually generated partially by the anticipation for something – anything – new.

Degree of public interest aside, the overarching commonality among all forms of social and emerging technologies is the simple fact that they connect users through an endless span of preferences, thoughts and searches. In fact, this newage trend is garnering public interest Webby-worthy technologies and the possible integration of these elite systems into the online platforms of crucial American industries – specifically education.

As the nation’s second largest enterprise (just behind healthcare), higher education – according to Mashable.com – is “experiencing a similar shift as it struggles to adapt traditional design and delivery models to the demands of modern audiences who are accustomed to digital interactivity.”

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The term blogging often sounds awkward and intimidating to newbie web entrepreneurs and emerging small-business owners, however, the concept behind the wording is quite the contrary. In fact, e-commerce go-getter Gloria McQuade insists that blogging is as simple as keeping a pen and paper handy to scribble down creative thoughts and ideas as they come to you.

“It’s important to be a multitasker to succeed in the competitive world of e-commerce,” McQuade said. “As a full-time employee by day, I have to take advantage of every free moment I get to help market my web business.”

Blogging allows business owners to promote their products/services in brief, engaging articles while dually encouraging interaction and discussion among consumers. It also happens to be a key concept behind the professional marketing strategies of iePlexus – the company that helped McQuade formulate a business blog of her very own.

Developed in May 2010, www.PrincessAndTheBlog.com was created to educate readers about the numerous functions and exciting features presented by McQuade’s collection of dollhouses that’s available for individual purchase through her web store. In recent posts, she has discussed important tips for assembling a dollhouse, the similarities of dollhouse doors to life-size doors as well as the dramatic difference dollhouse accessories – such as winding staircases and decorative furniture – make to each miniature home sweet home.

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Just five years ago, Dina Kaplan co-founded a video sharing platform for independent web shows called Blip.tv. And during these five, short years she watched as her business blossomed from a small niche of professional video bloggers to an online hotspot where thousands of users now host their own TV shows and upload self-produced videos.

Needless to say, Kaplan has learned a tremendous amount about what it takes to make a business flourish. In fact, her website has scaled to 96 million video views per month and payouts to content producers have increased a whopping 77 percent just from quarter one to quarter two of this year.

Below, thanks to Mashable.com, Kaplan has put together five essential business tactics to live by as an entrepreneur.

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Twitter emerged as a new-age social network (a peculiar concept in itself as social media is still considered a modern technology) in 2006 with a bold and enlightening concept of mini-blogging – 140 characters or less, to be exact.

Today, Twitter’s booming popularity has inspired the development of new avenues to enhance social interaction among users, including the sharing of music files. However, Twitter’s most recent advancement allows tweeters to share audio files.

So, whether your fancy is to make the punch line of a joke more vibrant, an apology more sincere or even sing happy birthday to a friend, Twitter is now the place to be seen and heard!

Check out these five different outlets, thanks to Mashable.com, to capture audio messaging on your next Twitter post.

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