Social media has become a highly visual interface for connecting people with information.  Simply put, the eye naturally gravitates to images.  In social media, that means status updates containing photos, videos or other graphics are more likely to receive comments or get interaction.  For those interested in sharing all the things they like online with friends, a new platform has recently exploded on the web.  Enter Pinterest, an online pinboard for hobbyists, planners, and dreamers alike.

Google announced the launching of a number of new tools for Google Analytics over the past few days, including Google Analytics Real-Time, Google Analytics Premium and a new Google Analytics Interface.  Today I will fill you in on the details of Real-Time and how it lets you access your data in (you guessed it) real time in order to enhance your online marketing and social media marketing strategies.

Fashion editors and department store buyers have always been the biggest determining factor in which designer collections make it to market.  In other words, if you make the buyer for Barney’s upset, don’t expect your spring line to do so well.  However, this pattern is changing these days, thanks to a quickly shifting social web culture that facilitates online voting, purchasing and even customization of clothing lines.

Coming from an online marketing agency, I was really curious to see what kinds of social media techniques and ideas I would be hearing about at the American Advertising Federation (AAF) conference.  Before joining the Get You Found team, I worked for a more traditional marketing agency.  I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know about social media and online marketing until I started learning from our resident web gurus, Peter and Jess.  Everyone hears about Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but no one really goes into detail about why it’s so important to be active on these sites, or how to get the most return on your investment.  Many companies are just setting up their accounts and then never posting, tweeting or blogging.  They aren’t using the full potential of the online social media world.

Last week Facebook announced a new application designed to let all your friends know exactly where you are by using GPS in smart phones.  The blogosphere is already full of articles lambasting Facebook for privacy issues, debating whether Foursquare and Gowalla will stand a chance, and some even praising Facebook for considering privacy issues before the release of a potentially prickly service.

Already, the Internet is full of contradicting information on how the program will actually work.  This Associated Press article on Yahoo gives kudos to Facebook for anticipating privacy issues and states, “If you're out and about with friends, you'll be able to "tag" them using the (at) symbol, much the same way you can already tag them in your status updates. Your friend will then be notified that you have tagged them and can choose to check in too, or reject it.”  To me, this implies that I will get a new notification every time someone tries to check me in, which I can either approve or deny.

Yet another issue with Facebook user data privacy has come out this last week with the recent post of over 171 million user’s data to Pirate Bay.  Facebook is actually not responsible for this one though.  (Who knew?)  This data was published by someone who created a script to pull data from all publicly searchable profiles.  Scraping data from Facebook is actually against its terms of use, and anyone could have compiled this data.