Oh Facebook. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Recently, an eighteen-year-old young male was accused of posing as a girl on Facebook (named either Emily or Kayla) and convincing at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos or videos of themselves and then blackmailing some of them for sex acts.
Eighteen year old Anthony Stancl, of New Berlin WI, was charged in early February with five counts of child enticement, two counts of second-degree sexual assault of a child, two counts of third-degree sexual assault, possession of child pornography, repeated sexual assault of the same child, and …read more

I can admit it – I geek out over statistics. I pour over my Google Analytics reports, and I ogle Omniture. I also get a little gooshy over seeing compete.com come out with statistics for social networks as a whole… oh, and my hands down guilty pleasure has got to be all of those Twitter statistics measurement APIs floating about like Twitter Grader and Twinfluence. I can’t help it, deep down, I am a dork.
Compete.com recently released their January 2009 statistics for traffic ranks to the various social networks.

I find this endlessly fascinating. Look at Twitter’s skyrocketing hurtle …read more

We’ve all heard the ‘horror’ stories. IT departments who block Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace. We’ve all got friends who can’t access even personal email until they get home in the evening. Personally, I think it’s silly, because of some of the massive benefits that I, and others I know, have experienced through social networking.
A study completed by the UK ‘think tank’ and research firm, Demos, is trying to convince enterprise bosses to embrace the new technologies.
Any attempt to control employee’s participation on these sites can limit the way staff communicate, as the Demos study said, but also, can limit …read more

This evening was Vancouver’s monthly Third Tuesday, where Mhairi Petrovic, the founder of Out Smarts, explained how to sell social marketing to the traditional marketing decision makers. Raul (aka Hummingbird 604) live-blogged the event.
The information was fantastic, and I thought it needed a wider audience. The full post from Raul is here, but the salient points are below.

Some of the primary objections to social media that traditional marketers have to social media include: 
1) “We already use social media” Complete misconception –  having a website or a facebook page is not participating in social media.  
2) Perceived as a tool for only the younger set. This is a …read more

There are more and more instances of this popping up all over the interwebs, and mainstream media is starting to shine the spotlight on the good that social networks can have in people’s lives. This is from MSNBC. Hat tip to Jim Long for pointing it out.

Lisa, sometime guest poster, blogger and twit, spotted this on Perez Hilton the other day. We found it interesting that Perez Hilton is starting to report social media news.

Needless to say, I find it interesting that Facebook is now the global leader in the social networking world. The Business Week article that Perez Hilton is using as his source explained how and why Facebook is overtaking MySpace as the number one leader in social networking.
In fact, Facebook is quickly expanding in many regions. The site is the top global social network, according to figures released by comScore (SCOR) …read more