Study: Google Ads Work Better Than Facebook’s (Boston Herald)
Facebook may be this week’s stock market darling, but when it comes to online display advertising, search engine Google provides advertisers with “significantly more value” than the social media giant in terms of growth rates, performance, targeting options and formats, according to a study released Tuesday. The study compares the value of Facebook advertising to Google’s Display Network. PC Magazine Facebook moved quickly — again — to address concerns that it wasn’t doing enough to satisfy mobile users, buying the developers of the Lightbox Android photo app. However, the company also made it clear that Facebook was not acquiring the company or the photos that users had stored on the Lightbox website, just the developer team. AdAge General Motors said Tuesday that it is “reassessing” its spending on Facebook advertising — about $10 million — but “remains committed” to the social network as part of “an aggressive content strategy with all our products and brands.” Meanwhile, Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, said that the automaker is bullish about Facebook ads — particularly “sponsored stories” that contain a social layer — and intends to “accelerate” spending on them. AllFacebook Facebook followed up last week’s introduction of its app center with two new metrics to its insights for applications: app ratings and negative feedback. The new app ratings dashboard will bring developers information on how users rated their apps with the five-star ratings system Facebook recently implemented. The negative feedback feature shows developers how many times stories from their apps have been hidden or reported as spam, as well as how many times the app itself has been blocked. Mashable Two Colombian criminals almost got away with robbing an Internet cafe, but one of them checked Facebook first — and ended up being identified and arrested because he forgot to log out. The two men whipped out guns at the cash register to demand money and made a clean getaway on a motorcycle. After the men escaped, an employee at the cafe called the police turning in information from the Facebook page that led to his arrest. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A true-to-life drama better than anything Aaron Sorkin could pen for Hollywood.

Dan Lyon’s The Daily Beast reported today that Facebook hired “Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.”

Burson offered to help Chris Soghoian, a prominent blogger, write a Google-bashing op-ed. Then, Burson backed up the proposal with a promise to place the blog in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico and The Huffington Post.

Facebook’s proposed smear campaign was fabricated from a Google tool called Social Circle. The tool allows people with Gmail accounts see information about their friends and about the friends of their friends. Google calls it “secondary connections.”

Burson’s wanted to slant the claim that Social Circle was “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users—in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google's] agreement with the FTC.”

The Daily Beast also reported that Burson was trying foist off on the media the idea that “The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day—without their permission.”

But, the scheme backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. My hat goes off to Chris Soghoian for turning down Burson’s offer and exposing their smear campaign.

The smear campaign spiraled over the USA Today where the publication reported that two PR agents from Burson “had been pushing reporters at USA Today and other outlets to write stories and editorials claiming Google was violating people’s privacy with Social Circle.”

The Daily Best confronted Facebook with evidence in which “a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.“

“A smear campaign is an intentional, premeditated effort to undermine an individual’s or group’s reputation, credibility, and character. “Mud Slinging,” like negative campaigning, most often targets government officials, politicians, political candidates, and other public figures. However, private persons or groups may also become targets of smear campaigns perpetrated in schools, companies, institutions, families, and other social groups.” Wikipedia

Why a smear campaign? What is Facebook afraid of? There’s plenty of space on the Internet for everyone to reap the benefits. The Daily Best says there is a growing rivalry between Google and Facebook. “Google, the search giant, views Facebook as a threat, and has been determined to fight back by launching a social-networking system of its own. So far, however, Google has not had much luck, but Facebook nonetheless felt it necessary to return fire—clandestinely.”

We have seen our smear campaigns through history such as General Motors against Ralph Nader and Nixon’s re-election campaign. I am just delight that this one got nipped in the bud before it arrived in the press. Now, lies are recoiling on Facebook as well as Burson-Marsteller. The social network and the 58-year old PR firm have a lot of cleaning up to do. Burson’s CEO, Mark Penn, Burson’s CEO, was the political consultant for Bill Clinton, and is best known as the chief strategist in HIllary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

MVPs for Windows Phone 7: Blogging While on the Move with a Windows Phone

In the article I cover using a Windows Phone 7 smartphone to directly create and post content to blogs using WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous services. Blogs can be created an hosted for free on any of these platforms/sites. However, I forgot to mention a big platform in my article: Google’s Blogger. Thanks to @weemundo for pointing this out to me on Twitter. This follow-up blog posts will fill in that gap.

There’s a Windows Phone 7 WordPress app to create and manage WordPress hosted blogs (either by WordPress itself or self-hosted). Posting mobile blogs to Tumblr and Posterous involves a simple to setup email process. There isn’t a native Windows Phone app to post blog items to Blogger. However, like Tumblr and Posterous, Google/Blogger provides a simple email mechanism that can be used. This process is described here on a Blogger help page.

How do I post via email?

Blogger provides a unique email address that accepts posts just for your blog. Anyone who knows the secret word and your username can post a blog item to your blog. So, be sure to keep the secret word a secret like your password. Like Posterous, Blogger translates the following email components into blog components:

Email title -> Blog title
Email text -> Blog text
Attached digital photo -> blog image

You can add a pound sign (“#”) to the end of your intended blog text to make sure that other unnecessary items like email signatures do not get posted into your blog entry.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Redneck Mommy

Nearly swallowed whole by the loss of her young son in 2006, Tanis Miller was saved by her kids and her blog. Writing at TheRedneckMommy.com, Miller is just as likely to dish out pee-your-pants humor as she is to write a heart-wrenching post about finding her way out grief’s foggy forest. She’s sometimes crass, always honest, and doesn’t try to hide her daily struggle to put one foot in front of the other.

Her Bad Mother

Catherine Connors knows parenting can be an experiment. Her motto, “Bad is the new good,” bashes stereotypes about “perfect” mothering. Blogging at HerBadMother.com, Connors is tight-lipped about nothing. Her faux pas, frustrations, and ugly parenting moments are all a matter of public record – along with joyful posts about her family. Connors believes moms should toss out convention and just figure out what works – and more importantly, what doesn’t. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you know more amazing templates for Blogspot share them in comments!

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Demo | Download

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

One interesting thing about this new feature is that you can import the “Blogs I’m Following” directly into your Google Reader. I’m not quite sure how useful this feature is for me since a large portion of the blogs I’m reading aren’t hosted by Blogger but I figure a lot of people will begin using it. The shift toward a more social web is clearly continuing and Google is one of the companies leading the push.

The only problem with this new feature is that it doesn’t extend to blogs outside of Google. I want a single identity and a single community on the web and this surely isn’t a step in that direction. Then again we can’t make all of our decisions with data portability as the primary end-goal. Now you have yet one more way to interact with people you don’t know on the web thanks to Blogger!

What does the future hold for social blogs? You’ve got me! It’s Friday so I’ll leave you all to figure out the future of the social web. Everybody, including Google, appears to like throwing kinks in the whole equation. With all this socializing taking place on the web it’s too complicated to figure how it all will end up in the end given that it’s the Friday before a 3-day weekend!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.