Launched on October 6th, Moments came to life from a prior idea under the name “Lightning.” Through the lightning symbol under the “Moments” tab, the origin of the idea plays out. The expansion of Twitter Moments serves as a way to provide news, sports, entertainment, and fun in a space that is less evasive and personal compared to the traditional structure of Twitter.

So what goes into Twitter Moments? According to Mashable, Twitter hashtags play a role. However, timely content that is relevant to users appears as the central focus for the company. Nevertheless, the factors that contribute to what you view in the Moments feed will surely alter and change somewhat in order to continually provide an enhanced user experience.

In a visual format unlike the standard Twitter feed, users trying out Moments see pleasant graphics to draw them into single featured stories. Apart from user experience, the grid layout executed in Twitter Moments illustrates the importance the company placed on design. Although the layout of Twitter Moments is different, actions such as the typical retweet and favorite tool, among others, still exist in order to create a sense of brand consistency.

The mobile interface for Twitter Moments offers snackable content in its ability to allow users to go full-screen with a story and simply swipe to go to the next tweet within a given Twitter Moment.

Once you swipe through all the tweets, Twitter will inform you that you are  “caught up” and allow you to either share the content or move forward to the next item of news within Twitter Moments.

Worried about not being able to see past Moments? No worries – Moments do not expire, thus giving users the ability to explore past ones easily.  Moreover, the Moments feature allows users to temporarily follow a live event, such as The Super Bowl. When the event is over, you do not receive updates in your feed. The aspect of non-commitment related follows allows the platform to become an even greater source of real-time entertainment and news without overwhelming the user.

Overall, if you are already sold on Twitter or still need some convincing, Twitter Moments offer a visually pleasing way to get information in a clean, easy to use format.

The post Twitter Launches Twitter Moments appeared first on Clix.

First of all, last nights Super Bowl was the most watched Super Bowl ever – which is saying a lot. Not only it was it the most watched, but it was also one of the most talked about events across social media platforms. Here are the three most talked about moments from last nights Super Bowl:

1. The Power Outage. Did anyone else think that it was done on purpose to make the game a little more exciting?? The fist half was a bit of a yawn. The power outage was the second most talked about event from yesterdays Super Bowl on Twitter with 231,500 Tweets Per Minute. It was the 3rd most talked about moment on Facebook. That 30 minute delay really put a damper on the game, but luckily when the power came back on, the game got a lot more exciting!

Power going out at the Super Bowl

2. Beyonce’s Halftime Performance. Not surprisingly, Beyonce’s half time performance was one of the most talked about moments from the night. It received 268,000 Tweets Per Minute, making it the most talked about moment on Twitter, and was the second most talked about moment on Facebook. The most talked about moment of her halftime performance, was the reunion of the group Destiny’s Child. This was by far my favorite moment of the Super Bowl, that girl can dance!

Beyonce & Destiny’s Child

3. The Ravens Winning. Of course the whole reason why there is a super bowl in the first place is to see who wins the big game, and this year the Ravens took the cake. The 2nd half (luckily for the NFL) ended up being pretty exciting to watch and it was a close game with the Raven’s prevailing in the end. When the clock expired in the 4th quarter there were 183,000 Tweets Per Minute talking about the Ravens win, and it was the most talked about moment on Facebook – beating out both Beyonce and the power outage.

The Raven’s Win!

The other big winner of the night had to of been Twitter. They were mentioned in half of the 52 ad’s that ran during the Super Bowl, far more than any of their competitors (Facebook was only mentioned in 4). And, this Super Bowl was the most tweeted about Super Bowl in the history of Twitter.

The big loser of the night was Go Daddy. There was just too much noise in that commercial! I know that I, and everyone I was with was really grossed out. And twitter just confirmed my thoughts with the majority of the people I follow also extremely grossed out. Bad move by Go Daddy, thats for sure!

It was another successful Super Bowl, and I cant wait to see what sorts of surprises next years game has in store for us.

The post The 3 Most Talked About Super Bowl Moments appeared first on Clix.

The three most significant Instagram headlines of 2012 are:

• Facebook Acquisition
• Twitter War
• Privacy Policy

Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion:

In April, Facebook purchased the photo sharing platform for a mere $1 billion. The purchase brought the mobile platform and its staff of a mere 9 employees under the Facebook umbrella. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg declared that the sharing capabilities of Instagram would not be limited by Facebook, and users would retain the ability to follow users who were not necessarily their “friends”. Sharing, too, would remain available on other platforms outside Facebook (i.e. Twitter).

The Instagram team seemed stoked about the new developments, sharing on the site’s blog:

“We’re psyched to be joining Facebook and are excited to build a better Instagram for everyone.”

When Facebook Camera launched the following month, there was speculation the social media giant would kill off Instagram to make way for its own application, in spite of assurances from Instagram that it would not happen. This turned out to be false, and both apps are available for download today.

Instagram Wages War With Twitter:

On December 9, Twitter announced via its blog that Instagram had disabled photo integration with Twitter. While users can still share Instagram links on the site, the images can not be previewed on Twitter. That means when I shared a TwitPic photo on my Twitter account:

And tweeting an Instagram photo gives you this:

Followed by a trip to Instagram.com:

While the change isn’t the end of the world, it does remove a level of convenience that existed with the previous method. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom maintained that the company would always remain integrated with Twitter.

In a statement to Mashable, Sysytom announced,

“A handful of months ago, we supported Twitter cards because we had a minimal web presence. We’ve since launched several improvements to our website that allow users to directly engage with Instagram content through likes, comments, hashtags and now we believe the best experience is for us to link back to where the content lives.”

December 10, Twitter announced on its blog the ability for users to add filters and edit photos from directly within the app, without relying on Instagram. The upcoming filters were first reported in November, and are now available when tweeting photos directly from Twitter.

The back-and-forth “improvements” and changes will continue to develop into 2013, as Instagram claims it continues to evolve in the interests of the best user experience.

Instagram Publishes New Privacy Policy:

If the average user has heard anything about Instagram this year, it is most likely the updates to the Privacy Policy that will take affect in January 2013.

Language in the updated policy implied that the site and its owner, Facebook, would be allowed access to a users information, photos, and data without compensation for purposes including advertising. Backlash was swift and loud, with users preparing to delete their accounts and wondering how to remove all of their photos from the site permanently. Some were less than concerned.

The updates coincide perfectly with Twitter upgrades and a revamped Flickr, giving users plenty of options if they decide to jump the Instagram ship.

Instagram quickly took to its blog to defend the intentions of the policy and assure users that their complaints were heard. Asserting that the sale and use of users photos for advertising purposes was never part of the plan, the company vowed to remove the language from the policy before it is implemented on January 16.

Moving Forward in 2013:

After a year of controversy and putting out fires, Instagram can hope to start 2013 with a clean slate. Assuming, of course, the world doesn’t end tomorrow.

The post Instagram Faces Challenges And Changes In 2012 appeared first on Clix.

Social media is changing the way that we receive news as a society, and it amplifies reactions to cases that would not have received such attention in its absence.

The Old Media:

Let’s be honest, my parents aren’t exactly social media savvy. Actually, they have no clue what social media really does. My mom can’t even open a word document on her own, much less log in to a website (I still love you, Mom). For people in this situation, news comes in traditional formats. We’re talking newspapers, magazines, and the local news programs. In that kind of communication, there is a single sender (the media) and the receiver (the audience). The message flow is omni-directional and the audience takes a passive role.
When watching the news or reading the paper, the audience gets the “unbiased” opinion of a given station and is not invited to offer their own comment. Ok, you could call the station or write a letter to the editor, but honestly, it’s not a very productive system. There isn’t a lot of audience feedback here, and public opinion remains muted.

The New Media:

It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of social media. I think it’s a great sharing tool and awesome for promotional purposes. When you get your news solely through social media such as Facebook or Twitter it is important, however, to consider the source. The advantage of algorithms and sharing information with friends is that you are automatically directed to searches that relate to your interests or concerns. This is a double edged sword, because you are directed to issues or events that relate to your passions and those issues are presented in a format loaded with the opinions of the people you consider to have valuable views. Users can comment on a post or story when they share it, and you, the viewer, are hit with the opinion before you have a chance to read the facts and form your own decision.

Example: If I’m scrolling through my news feed and I see a friend has posted a story with the comment “This is a crazy example of XYZ!” I’m predisposed to take that person’s opinion in mind when I read the article for myself, regardless of the actual implications of the facts. I consider myself to be an educated person, and I still value the opinions of my friends.

Public Opinion:

The catch with this new social media news distribution is that it projects the opinions of a few onto the masses and creates the court of public opinion. The projection of opinion occurs through the “liking” of statuses, re tweets, and reposting information with commentary. In sharing the information, you are unwittingly sharing the opinion of the previous poster. Not something you always want.

Social media has also created the court of public opinion and projected it on a global scale. Everything from political events, protests, and criminal trials are massively distributed.

Making a Change:

Social media is the future of news and information sharing, but it will be up to the public to develop the ability to evaluate the quality of content and opinions of their friends. When commenting and sharing news stories it is helpful to focus on the factual information.

The post The Social Media News appeared first on Clix.

You’ve started your new blog, made a couple of posts and made it look all flashy and stuff.  Now what?  How do you get people to interact with you on social media?  The first tip seems rather obvious, but might be overlooked if you’re new to blogging.  Display your social media icons prominently near the top of your blog.  This will make it easy for your readers to connect with you on your social networks.  I say this is a great idea.  Next you will want to create a Facebook page for your blog specifically, this isn’t the first thing I would do, but it makes sense, it might drive your blog readers to be your fan on Facebook, which ultimately creates more interaction.

Some of the other tips included generating traffic with StumbleUpon, which is a recommendation engine; again this should be good for your blog as long as you tag things appropriately for random people to find your niche.  Using the same concept there are a few tips about using things you might already be using to promote yourself, such as sending your RSS feed to your LinkedIn account and using Pinterest.  You can even add a pin it button to your blog, to make it easy for your users to share your content.  If you can get people you already engage with to interact with your new blog, then others might join in.

Other tips were to use link shorteners, even when you don’t need to; this is so you can gain access to metrics.  Metrics are always good; this way you know who is clicking and when they are doing it.  Other things you can do is to use your blog name as your username, this will promote your personal brand.  On top of that you should join many blogger groups on Facebook, this will hopefully lead other bloggers to link to you, if you have good content, which ultimately builds social awareness of your blog.

On that same note, you should show some love to other bloggers as well, retweet them, share their content on Facebook, or repin their stuff, and hopefully they will return the favor.  The last thing you should remember is to stay on Social Media, continue to post and read everything you can.  This will help you make and maintain relationships and get new ideas for your upcoming blog posts.

The post Socially Interacting with your Blog Readers appeared first on Clix.

Why am I talking about customer service?  Because, this year the city of Indianapolis, who is hosting the Super Bowl, is taking customer service to the next level. Let’s call it customer service 2.0.  They are calling it the Super Bowl social media command center.

What exactly is a social media command center; well it’s proactive customer service using social media to lead the way.  It consists of a team of strategists, analysts, and techies that are set to monitor digital fan conversations via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.  All of this is going to be done from a 2,800 square-foot space.  They will be running the command center from Monday through February 5^th.  The plan is for them to tweet directions to fans in search of parking, direct visitors to the cities best attractions, and be available in case of an emergency or a disaster.

With 150,000 people expected to hit the downtown area of Indianapolis, the idea is to use advanced search tools and analytics to identify fans in need of help.  They are going to do this by indexing certain keywords and phrases.  So if a fan is tweeting “parking is horrible” or “parking sucks” they will be able to offer assistance.  The fan won’t actually have to ask someone “where can I find parking”.

This social Media hub will be quite an operation with more than a mile of Ethernet cable and more than 20 people running the center for 15 hours per day.

All of this points to how important social media is in all of our lives and how important it is for companies and organizations to utilize these tools to improve their relationships with their customers or audiences.

Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidous, the company managing the communication hub said “We’re kind of breaking new ground here so we don’t know the exact numbers yet of what we’ll be dealing with, but we should be able to provide that after the game to other cities that have to deal with these types of issues”.   He went on to say, “I think a lot of brands will start to see a need for something like this.”

Will this lead to other major events setting up similar Social Media command centers?  Only time will tell.

The post Social Media Command Center appeared first on Clix.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections.  Pinterest plans to connect everyone in the world through shared tastes and the “things” they find interesting.  The idea is for each user to create and label pins that go on specific boards under many different categories.  Once uploaded or shared on Pinterest, the images become known as Pins.

At fist this might seem pointless, but think about the possibilities.  What if you are a bride to be and you can completely replace the three-ring wedding binder.  What if you are a college student and you want to create a shopping list of things you need for school.  Think about if you like to cook as a hobby, and now you can follow other culinary hobbyist and share recipes.  The possibilities are endless.

The Social Angle

The question might be, where does the social part of Pinterest come into play?  That’s actually the fun and easy part.  It’s as simple as finding a good pin, leaving a comment, liking it, maybe repining it to your own board.  You can then head over to the Pinners profile and follow their Boards.  You can also Tweet or share your pins on Facebook.  Pins can be pictures or videos, want to learn how to sew or skateboard?  I bet there’s a tutorial for it.

SEO?

The next question then is where does this fit into the SEO world, it is obviously a great tool to share, and its live in the Social Media world, however if you have a small business will it work to increase your SEO?  With Pinterest being on the hot list for social networks and cracking the top 10 list for social networks (while still being invite only) some peoples first instinct might be this is the next great free SEO tool, but not so fast.

So far the trend seems that you can promote your small business, however do so in small doses and with caution.  Pinterest users frown upon spam, who doesn’t, I don’t even like the food.  You won’t get banned if you simply load your boards with products from your business, however if you want to be taken serious, you will have to contribute to the community, which can help to build your brand by linking and connecting with people that share your companies style.  Be creative when using Pinterest for promotion and it might become your friend.  The jury is still out on where the service will fall into place in the SEO world.

The post Where Does Pinterest fit in? appeared first on Clix.

First off, you can now easily track conversations with the new changes. When it comes to conversing on Twitter, its very important to track which tweets and links are creating a dialogue. When you find out which tweets have been creating more dialogue than others, you can than use that information in the future when deciding what type of tweets to write to create more conversation with your followers and fans. With the new updates, hovering over a tweet in your Twitter timeline will make an “open” button appear. Clicking this button will expand into the full exchange of replies and mentions that tweet received. This will allow businesses and marketers to easily see who is tweeting at them, what reactions people have, and how long they keep up the exchange. The feature is similar to Facebook’s “See Friendship” option, which allows users to see previous interaction with a specific friend, dating all the way back to when they first got Facebook or became “friends” with someone.

Unfortunately, it also means that it wont be as easy to track multimedia sharing success. When sharing links to valuable content on Twitter, many people often use URL shorteners like bit.ly to shorten the links. A big advantage to this was that it provided analytics for every click that a specific link received. This data factor is now in jeopardy. The new Twitter updates will allow any media containing link, such as a photo or video on a site like TwitPic or YouTube, to expand inside the actual stream and display as the picture or video. This eliminates a persons need to click on the actual link because they will be able to just watch it within their feed. This change will make such analytics tools less valuable to people, because they will no longer be able to see how many people viewed a certain link.

Next, you’ll now be able to use retweets as a tool for analyzing . If you’re managing your company’s Twitter account or sharing company content through your personal Twitter account, you could previously get an email notifying you when someone retweeted your tweet. Now you easily view this for all tweets. The new update will have a horizontal list of users who have retweeted that specific update upon click. This means that if you wrote about a new feature in your industry on your blog at the same time as another blog site, you can view how many people shared your blog update, as well as the competitors. You can also see who retweeted your update versus another similar update, which can help you understand what wording, links etc gets more shares, or which users are consistently sharing your content. Of the new features, I think this one is the most important and influential to your business. To be able to see who gets more retweets and clicks between you and your competitor is a great tool, and will only help you and your company improve on content in the future.

Finally, this makes Twitter much more user friendly. It seems Twitter’s new timeline updates primarily serve to make Twitter more user-friendly. Clicking on a user’s Twitter username will now pop up a single frame over your timeline showcasing their profile. The frame is identical to the window that previously opened to the right of your page every time you clicked on a user on your timeline. Now it simply just pops right up in your face so you can be sure to know exactly what that user’s last three tweets were.

If you’re interested in a brief overview of the new Twitter updates, take a look at Patrick Bisch’s video for a great explanation here: Twitter Quietly Rolls Out New Timeline

The post Twitter Announces New Changes, What Do They Mean? appeared first on Clix.

Its no secret – my life would crumble without Google.  And though I haven’t come to rely on Google’s web browser as I have some of its other tools, I have developed a deep appreciation for it.

As a Google junkie, I love to explore and test the different tools Google Chrome has to offer, and some of the best tools come from its huge selection of extensions. Though not all of the extensions I’ve tried have blown me away, here are a few extensions I as a Social Media Strategist couldn’t live without.

Hootsuite is an integral part of my social media management toolbox. It allows me to monitor and update each of my client’s twitter feeds simultaneously.

A huge part of managing a client’s twitter account is updating it with relevant content. These updates often contain links that their followers would be interested in. Here’s where the Hootsuite extension comes in. Rather than copying the link and pasting it into Hootsuite, the extension allows you to tweet the link through Hootsuite without leaving the page or copying any URLs.

Simply click on the Hootsuite extension button in the top right corner of your browser, select the appropriate twitter account, type your message, and tweet!

While Hootsuite allows you to quickly share or schedule content to be shared, ocasionally, you’ll want to save content to share or schedule later. This is where Evernote comes in.  Evernote is a great tool for saving and organizing links, images, ideas, notes, and almost anything else you can think of.

Like the Hootsuite extension, the Evernote extension allows you to save content to Evernote without leaving the page. Again, simply click on the Evernote extension button, clip the desired content, add a description, tags, notes, etc. and continue browsing as usual. When you want to return to the content, again, open the Evernote extension, find the content and open it from there.

Even with Hootsuite and Evernote helping me keep my tabs organized, I am notorious for having an excessive number of tabs open. Hey, when you’re managing several social media accounts, you have be a good juggler. Unfortunately, I don’t always work from the same computer. Sure, I could open each tab one-by-one, but with the TabCloud extension, I don’t have to.

TabCloud saves groups of tabs so you can quickly access them from any computer. Simply click on the TabCloud extension and hit the save icon next to any open tab grouping you’d like to save. Then, when you move computers, open tab cloud and click on the tab group quickly open all saved tabs.

I wrote on this tool not too long ago, so I will be brief. InboxQ is a great tool for establishing yourself as an expert in a certain field on Twitter by helping you find people asking questions you are able to answer. The inboxQ extension makes finding questions fast and easy. For more on InboxQ, see my blog post on earning tweet-cred with questions.

What’s your favorite

Though I consider myself a Google junkie, I know I’ve only scratched the surface on useful extensions. What’s your favorite Chrome extension?

The post 4 Chrome Extensions Every Social Media Enthusiast Should Know appeared first on Clix.

Costolo is joining Scott Charney, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, McAfee President David G. DeWalt, Jamie Dos Santos, the current president and chief executive of Terremark Federal Group, and Lisa Hook, the president and chief executive of Neustar.

And the mission?  They are to oversee the availability and reliability of telecom services and cybersecurity in the US, which is critical to our national security, as many believe that the next world war will be waged in cyberspace.  The Pentagon has formally recognized cyberspace as a new domain in warfare, which has become just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air, and space.

Obama continues to reach out to Silicon Valley – mentioning both Google and Facebook in his most recent State of the Union, and dining recently with the heads of Google, Apple, and Facebook.

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