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Convincing casual social media users that something like Airtime isn't just speed dating is a hard sell. Blame Chatroulette, mid-'90s AOL chat rooms or Grindr, but meeting strangers through technology not for sex still feels inescapably creepy, even when it's cleverly facilitated by an app such as Glancee or Highlight. We like connecting with the people we meet in person after the fact, and even that's hard to make adequate time for. When it comes to video chat with the people we already know, there's no compelling reason to opt for Airtime over a Google+ Hangout, a Skype chat or even a Facetime call. And if you're interested in connecting with friends and family via video to begin with, odds are you've already picked your poison. Sean Parker may want to make Facebook less "boring" by inspiring serendipitous social discovery, but it's hard to imagine that Airtime isn't dead on arrival - there just isn't room for such a diluted blend of existing social tools nor is there the adventurous userbase to adopt them. We have Facebook and Facetime for the people we already know, Twitter and Google+ for the people we want to know and OkCupid and Match.com for the people we want to know, er, intimately. And for the greyer, more "serendipitous" areas? Chatroulette still boasts enough unfettered weirdness for a lifetime.

the best approach may be to get your fans to support your reputation for you.

Reputation defenders will do anything from passively monitoring social media to creating paid, positive reviews in order to counteract negative posts - and dominate the first page of search results. (For more insight on how the process works, see Brian Proffitt's post: Inside The Mysterious World Of Reputation Management.)

Wyer's advice for businesses looking at negative reviews is to stay positive. In almost every instance, an aggressive rebuttal will look defensive. “Our experience is that, in most cases, this approach only antagonizes the attacker and this, in fact, can escalate the online conversation, accusations and attacks.”

brands are increasing their use of the social network for marketing and consumer engagement. As reported by CMSWire, a recent Simply Measured report shows that 64 percent of the Interbrand Top 100 now have an active Google+ Brand page (up 3 percent from December 2011), 22 percent of the brands now have circler counts more than 100,000, up from 13 percent, and more brands are posting more frequently: 43 percent are posting more than three times a week (up from 15 percent in February).

Among the top brands, the study showed that engagement on outbound posts is growing. Circle engagement is up 112 percent since February and content engagement is also on the rise as it increased 65 percent since February. 

During this preview period, organizations that use Google Apps will be able to use the business features of Google+ for free through the end of 2013

Digital advertisers and publishers may also want to consider using a responsive design strategy to ensure that their sites deliver consistent, high quality digital experiences across desktop and mobile channels

“Why say you went to a party on a Friday night when you can say you volunteered at a soup kitchen? Why say you spent the weekend playing Xbox when you can talk about the new art opening at the museum?” said Brent Busboom, an English teacher at Reno High School and Northern Nevada’s 2007 Teacher of the Year. Reno High is one of the best public high schools in Nevada and many of its students go on to top-tier colleges.

Some contents of ideal-self profiles are legitimate. Others, however, are embellished or exaggerated. Students don’t see an ethical problem, Busboom said. It's just "admissions jiu jitsu."

Facebook is still popular enough that a college admissions official will raise a red flag if a kid claims he or she isn’t on Facebook. And the ideal-self profiles come in handy with certain scholarship sponsors, which have started requiring applicants to accept Facebook friend requests as part of the review process.

sending messages at "8am – 10am and 3pm – 4pm can increase their average open rates and CTR by 6%." And that after 24 hours, the average email open rate approaches zero.

Encouragingly in the face of so much negative political messaging, positive information found online seemed to be surprisingly persuasive.

An impressive 54% reported finding something positive about the candidate that influenced them to actually vote for the politician. A slightly smaller number of respondents to the study (51%) found information that influenced them into not voting for the candidate in question.

Seeing positive results is thus at least, if not slightly more, important as burying negative information about a politician or launching full-scale attacks on an opponent.

Essentially what Facebook is doing here is making users pay to improve their EdgeRank score for individual status updates, the system that Facebook uses to determine how high individual stories appear in the news feed

It is really not all that different from how Google has structured its own business, where companies or individuals can pay for keywords to appear as advertisements in search results. The difference is that Google’s search engine is a much more impersonal mechanisms than is the Facebook news feed.

Where Facebook is making a mistake is in crossing the bridge between paid sponsored posts for businesses and applying it to individuals

the typical page had reach of 26%  prior to the Sept. 20, meaning that, on average, 26% of a page's subscribers would see messages posted on the page. That reach has dropped to 19.5% since Sept. 20.

In short, according to the Facebook source, if brands are seeing less engagement and reach on their Facebook pages, it’s because they’re not creating engaging content. “If a brand is continually putting up low-quality content that no one is engaging with, that content is going to be optimized out of the Newsfeed,” the source said. 

Facebook measures the quality of content through engagement: number of likes, clicks, shares and comments. Typically, a post’s reach is between 15% and 20%.

Facebook's practice of scanning messages and counting links as likes isn’t a privacy issue. It's common knowledge that what users do online - even in so-called private messaging - is potentially public. Rather, Facebook's activity raises a credibility issue. It shows that the company is fudging the numbers when it comes to advertising.

“It's not in Facebook's best interest to proactively solve this problem," said Tom Corson-Knowles, an online marketer who consults with small-business owners on ways to promote products on social networks. "Facebook's revenue is directly proportionate to the number of pageviews the site gets, and banning one percent of [pageviews] will cost the company a lot of missed ad impressions."

The advantage of this approach? Instead of catching heat for "going negative" in an attack ad, this cute and tech-savvy approach is gathering heaps of positive press.You can't miss it when you search for "Romney Tax Plan."

Facebook didn't just buy a photo-sharing app. They bought an entire social network consisting of 30 million users, many of whom use the product constantly