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Stranger than fiction: TV show characters live on in social media

Jackie BoyAre you connected to Jack Donaghy, VP of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming at Kabletown, and star of 30 Rock on LinkedIn? What about Erica Strange, star of Being Erica on Twitter?

Donaghy’s LinkedIn profile is pretty accurate to his character in the TV show. He lists his previous employment as “Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming at G.E.,” and “Director of Crisis and Weather Management at Homeland Security.”

He outlines his favourite interests as “songwriting (credits include "You're So Vain"), collecting cookie jars (retired) and overcoming allergies through willpower.” And a few of his fictional co-workers have written recommendations for him.

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Bear VS Beaver: Which Animal Should Represent Canada?

The beaver is Canada's national emblem. But should it be the polar bear?

Toronto-based market research firm Social Media Group has been tracking the online battle between the rodent and the mammal, a very divisive topic. The beaver ruins our other icon, the maple tree, while polar bears have on occasion eaten humans. A fierce debate on Twitter organized itself into #teambeaver and #teampolarbear.

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Social media shifts to a crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and contextual big data combo at X-Summit

Social media was initially perceived to be a conversation between the brand and the customer, but is now shifting towards building platforms for consumers to be social on so that they can draw insights and feedback on what to do next to better serve their customer as was well explained in ING’s crowdsourcing efforts by Andrea Wahbe.

While the latter is disrupting the traditional marketing research agency, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are now working together to potentially change how big studios choose programming through new services like MobCaster in the entertainment world as explained at last week’s X-Summit conference held by Interactive Ontario.

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Twitter silently rolls out new timeline features [Video]

Yesterday Pinglio founder Patrick Bisch noticed some changes to his Twitter timeline that no one else did.

What appears to be a currently silent, very tiny and/or slow rollout of new features sees the Twitter timeline—which has famously remained simple and true to its roots, unlike Facebook—get some subtle enhancements. First, the reply and retweet icons have been moved from the bottom of tweets to the top. This seems pointles at first but it's actually to pave way for Open, a new feature that allows you to expand tweets to obtain more information.

For example, if the tweet links to a photo or video, you can "open" the tweet within Twitter (that is, you do not open a new window or tab or load a new page). The tweet box expands to reveal the media. It can also reveal threaded conversations (this should come in handy for many) and other activities like who retweeted something.

Pat briefs us on the changes he observed in a short YouTube video.

With calls for blogger and media regulation, can Twitter help to provide context for an older generation?

While bloggers claimed one victory from the Supreme Court of Canada last week as hyperlinking was deemed to not be libel, they may face yet another hurdle in the coming months led by the fallout from the Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal and the Quebec Federation of Journalists.

Serious questions were being raised at Thursday night's Canadian Journalism Foundation event about whether or not regulation is needed across a field that includes journalists, reporters, bloggers, or whatever one may be. Simply put, the Internet has made it possible for many to rise above traditional reporters and journalists, and not more so in the age of Twitter. 

It's not the first time the question has been raised, but never has the Internet played such a massive role in media.

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Would you like some Tweets to go with that wine? Best social media wine pairings

Natalie MacLean, a popular Canadian wine writer and blogger recently released a video which describes the best wines to pair with social media.

Below are some of her wine pairing suggestions for Twitter, Facebook, and Google +.

Twitter: Perhaps something low in alcohol, like the 2009 Lingenfelder Bird Label Riesling from Australia is the best bet. Natalie says this “will allow you to Tweet all evening while you drink it.” However, please drink and Tweet at your own risk. Here’s a link to the funniest drunk Tweets by comedians from the Huffington Post.

Facebook: Natalie suggests that you can toast Zuckerberg’s success with Mark West’s Pinot Noir from California.

Google +: Try Union from Ontario, because Natalie believes Google + will bring us all together in a meaningful way.

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Google+ to roll our 'major improvements' soon

Google plans to roll out several major improvements to its social network, Google+, during the next three months.

One early improvement will be Google Doc integration. This enhancement is expected to be available within a week.

Future improvements include deeper integration with Google search, YouTube, Google Maps, and the company's mobile operating system, Android.

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What Twitter took 3 years to do at first, it now does twice per week: CEO Dick Costolo talks numbers

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco last night, CEO Dick Costolo unveiled numerous mind-boggling statistics about his real-time, microblogging social slash information network platform thingy (read: Twitter).

Twitter now delivers 250 million tweets per day—up from 100 million at the start of 2011—which equates to nearly 175,000 tweets per minute. These tweets are coming from more than 100 million active users, including over 50 million daily users (now pause to consider the fact that Justin Bieber has 13.5 million followers). Now seeing almost two billion tweets per week, Dick notes that it took the startup over three years to reach its first billion tweets.

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Take your content marketing far beyond automation and apps with these incredible tools

I recently attended Marketo's Revenue Rockstar Tour in Toronto at the Pantages Hotel.

While Marketo says they are the number two automation company behind Salesforce in their respective niche of targeting small to medium sized businesses, they say the best way to generate leads with their platform is through content marketing.

Toronto-based Eloqua founded automation over ten years ago and Doug Wotherspoon of Algonquin College has found it effective for generating sales from alumni and tracking prospective students, but that's just basic measurement man.  

A few months ago AOL announced their "prove portrait" feature that shows where to best optimize your display ad on a webpage for increased click-thru rates and interaction time through varying biometrics as I explained a few weeks ago. 

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'Dear BlackBerry' trends on Twitter and it's not to say I Love You

Somehow, the formula of "Dear Noun, statement of opinion" has become popular online. Sometimes it's good—"Dear Yaletown, I love you. Sincerely, Yorkshire Terrier." But usuallly it's bad. Case in point: tonight's consumer response to RIM's outages this week.

Trending even hotter than "Downloading iOS 5," "Dear BlackBerry" is making the rounds big time on Twitter tonight and it's not to spread the love.

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