Social Media

It was a big week for social media. On today’s Morning Media Menu (MP3 link), GalleyCat editor Jason Boog shared his thoughts on Facebook’s long-awaited IPO, speculating on how today’s results will affect the larger social media ecosystem.

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Facebook hit the stock market this morning at $42.05 a share, sparking debate all across the Internet on how the rest of the day will go. On StockTwits, a social network for the investing community, more than half of today’s conversations are devoted to that very subject. Some of these people might even know what they’re talking about.

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LinkedIn currently connects 161 million professionals around the world. Are you one of them? This latest installment in the Complete Idiot’s Guide series by Susan Gunelius offers a comprehensive tutorial for companies, recruiters, and job seekers who want to use LinkedIn for both professional networking and B2B marketing. Practical, concise, and easy to implement, LinkedIn users of all levels will want to have this book handy while they’re setting up their pages or trying out new features.

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Characters will meet character limits at this year’s O Music Awards, MTV’s Webby Award-winning show that celebrates all things “offbeat, outrageous, and online.”  Because there’s no soap box quite like social media, the television network has announced a brand new category, “Most Intense Social Spat,” to reward the awful things celebrities write to their fans, their moms, and each other.

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Facebook’s IPO One of World’s Largest (AP)
Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share on Thursday, at the top of expectations. Now, regular investors will have a chance to buy stock in Facebook for the first time. The stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq sometime this morning. The ticker symbol will be FB. The Verge To commemorate the momentous day, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been invited by NASDAQ to ring the stock exchange’s opening bell. He won’t be at the New York stock market in person, but the ceremony will be carried out remotely from Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters Reuters The scramble for shares in what is one of largest initial public offerings in U.S. history quickly divided the haves from the have-nots on Thursday. Those with big brokerage accounts and a long history as customers of Wall Street firms likely got at least part of their orders for Facebook shares filled, but would-be buyers who had no such ties were lucky to get any. Bloomberg Businessweek The average first-day “pop” for a technology company is 32 percent; if Facebook follows that trend, it’ll be worth $137 billion by day’s end. But there’s little about Facebook that’s average, including its public offering. TechCrunch Facebook kicked off its 31st Hackathon Thursday evening to celebrate the IPO. Hackathons are a company tradition. They’re a place where engineers and other non-technical employees get to stay out all night building concepts into real products that sometimes eventually get shipped. The Huffington Post The big money has already been staked out. Facebook’s founders and early investors own huge amounts of stock. When the company goes public, some will hold on to their stock; others will walk away with cash after selling shares at the IPO. The Daily Beast The $104 billion Facebook IPO testifies to the still considerable innovative power of Silicon Valley, but the hoopla over the new wave of billionaires won’t change the basic reality of the state’s secular economic decline. AllFacebook We now know that Facebook’s initial public offering will open at $38 per share. But what price will it reach at the end of the trading day? Let us know your prediction by taking our poll. The Washington Post On Thursday, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., used the anticipation surrounding Facebook’s big day to talk again about why Congress needs to close loopholes in corporate tax law. Levin objected to Facebook’s decision to issue its employees options to buy company stock in the future at its original issuing price. Read more

When Google added a social layer to its search bar, it seemed that the company might have gone too far in using social media to enhance its other products. But the search engine’s newest feature, the Knowledge Graph, will use the connections between particular people, places, and things – not friend recommendations – to deliver better search results. The enhancements are already rolling out to English-speaking users in the U.S. for Web, and are optimized for most iOS and Android devices.

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The hiring process for jobs and internships is changing. More and more employers are turning to social media to filter and find the best applicants and a new infographic from Online Colleges sheds some light on how employers are using social media in their hiring process and how job and internship seekers can use sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to their advantage.

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Pharrell, the singer and drummer of hip-hop group N.E.R.D., is launching a new social media project called “i am Other”, which, judging by the introduction video, is a social network dedicated by being different.  The network seems to be aimed at attracting a whole group of indie-styled people of various backgrounds to be different and stick it to the mainstream.  It seems like it will be focused on giving a younger generation of really different people an opportunity to rise and show off their talent.

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Facebook to Set Final IPO Price Later Today (CNN Money)
Facebook’s long road to an initial public offering is coming to an end. Late Thursday, it will fill in one last piece of the puzzle: Its final IPO price. Mashable On Wednesday, Facebook announced that an extra 84 million shares will be added to its stock pool for sale. The extra shares will come entirely from insiders and early investors, according to the AP. Reuters But investors who want Facebook shares when the No. 1 online social network goes public later this week may have lost the opportunity. TD Ameritrade and Fidelity’s brokerage arm both stopped accepting orders of Facebook shares as of Tuesday evening, according to representatives for each of the companies. CNET Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who is simultaneously becoming one of the richer and more reviled people around, wants to set the record straight. Saverin, who is now a citizen of Singapore after renouncing his U.S. citizenship, said his decision has nothing to do with taxes. Forbes All eyes are on Facebook this week in the lead-up to the social network’s initial public offering, but Google did all it could to steal back a little bit of glory on Wednesday. One of the biggest pieces of news was the search company’s addition of “Knowledge Graph” to its core product, a way to find answers without ever clicking a link and leaving the search results page. Read more

‘Zuckerberg: The Musical’ tells the story of Facebook, set to the tune of songs from popular musicals like Westside Story, RENT, Phantom Of The Opera and more.

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