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Vancouver police host Canada's first virtual town hall meeting to update public on riot charges

Late last week the Vancouver Police Department promised that a minimum of 40 Stanley Cup rioters would be charged by November 1st, with hundreds more charges pending after that. The announcement was made via a virtual town hall meeting.

A first of its kind among Canadian police forces, the video livestream saw VPD Chief Jim Chu and Integrated Riot Investigation Team head Insp. Les Yeo answer questions from social network Facebook and microblogging platform Twitter.

Poorly publicized, the meeting attracted just 200 viewers at any one point, but that's still significantly more than would have attended a physical town hall. Is this the future of town hall meetings?

Four Lessons I Learned From Social Media Week in Vancouver #SMWVAN

Social Media Week descended upon Vancouver for the first time since its conception February 2009 in New York City and it did not disappoint. 30 events were held in 5 short days starting September 19th in which great amounts of discussion occurred, ideas shared, and lessons learned.

aWith the purpose to educate and further advance understanding of Social Media, the week was of great value to those in the Social Media Community particularly those in the business industry. I was personally able to attend 10 events, all of which had different perspectives and offered different insights.

Below I highlight the four major lessons I learned from SMW Van.

Lesson 1: Everyone is trying to catch up with Social Media.

The area has grown so quickly and is continuing to expand at such an incredible rate that it is impossible to be able to understand all of its complexities. The days in which someone could distinguish oneself as an internet marketer are gone. Social Media has outgrown this broad category and has segmented into different channels such as SEO, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Blogging to name a few.

Independent consulters of Social Media have had success by positioning themselves as a specialist in one platform or another. Examples of this are titles such as a Youtube specialist or a Search Engine Optimizer. Being great at one platform is starting to prove quite effective for individuals in today’s state of the market.

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Does Social Media Curb Or Promote Terrorism And Violence?

This article was originally published on Smedio.

I often say that social media is a powerful monster and with power, comes responsibility. If you use it for constructive means, it pays off. If you don’t get it right, you pay for it. Though it’s hard to believe, social media has been directly or indirectly associated with a large number of incidents related to violence, terrorism and uprisings all over the world.

Whether it’s the revolts in Egypt and Libya, the recent riots in London or the more recent ‘Twitter Terrorism’ in Mexico, social media is now the de-facto trigger for such events across the world. On one hand, it has freed nations from dictators but on the other, it has promoted looting and served as a medium for communal violence.

I don’t think anyone could have imagined that social media would play such an important role in global peace or the lack of it. In this post, I pour my heart out and present my opinion on whether social media curbs or promotes terrorism and violence.

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Twitter's expanded promoted tweets program starts rollout today

Twitter has long planned an expansion of its promoted tweets program as part of its goal to generate profit.

Rolling out today, Twitter will add paid tweets to users' timelines from companies they may not be following (before, paid tweets would only appear if you followed that company). Not everyone will see these tweets immediately. Right now, less than 10% of users will see them as the microblogging platform gradually expands this new ad system.

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Twitter announces analytics service for publishers using technology from Toronto's Backtype

Twitter today announced an analytics service for publishers at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Twitter's Director of Web Business Development April Underwood unveiled Twitter Web Analytics, leveraging technology from the microblogging platform's July acquisition of Backtype.

The analytics dashboard will show which stories are the most shared and the most discussed, and which referring sites are sending the most traffic. Twitter's new link wrapper, "t.co," is driving 100 million clicks a day. April stated that an API into this data will be made available.

Social media account for 22% of the time we spend online: Study

Social media is the number one category in terms of how we spend our time online, according to Nielson's “State of the Media: The Social Media Report." It accounts for a whopping 22.5% of Americans' online time.

This statistic is powered largely by Facebbok, which reaches 70% of the country's population. The report revealed that Americans spend over 50 billion minutes on Facebook every month, not even including time spent accessing it via mobile devices. Given that Canadians are even more addicted to social media than our southern neighbours, it's safe to say we clock in it at least 5 billion minutes monthly.

Other popular time consumers were Blogger (720 million minutes monthly), Tumblr (620 million), Twitter (565 million), and LinkedIn (325 million).

Twitter to serve up more ads as mobile usage explodes but company still has no timeline for IPO

Real-time information network Twitter plans to serve up more of its tweet-based advertisements to users as it ramps up for a potential IPO in 2012, although CEO Dick Costolo says the microblogging platform has not set a timeline and will only go public on its own terms.

Twitter has more than 200 million registered users and mobile usage is growing by 40% per quarter, the company says, and sees 400 million unique visitors monthly, already up 60% from the year's start.

However, only half of Twitter's users log on daily (although that's still much better than Google+).

 

Is an Internet with increased geofencing becoming too local in spite of a worldwide economy?

In light of Flickr, the photo uploading and sharing service introducing geofences which allow you to designate a certain geographic area in which your photos can be viewed, there are a variety of ways in which geofences could have serious ramifications for those that currently rely on the Internet to work from abroad. 

For the Internet as North Americans know it has often been the proponent of being able to connect with people anytime, anyplace and anywhere in the world. If an e-mail user were to block all incoming messages from Canada, then that would be an example of geofencing.

Let me be clear that I am not against the geofencing of personal photos or information. I am however concerned with the general direction the Internet has been developing in as of late. The mere fact that we are becoming geofenced in light of a global world driven by a global economy. 

How much geofencing is too much geofencing?

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Canadian companies aren't using social effectively: Study

Just 17% of Canadian companies post to social media sites regularly and monitor often for corporate mention, a new study by SAS and Leger discovered.

While 30 per cent of executives interviewed said their company posts to social media sites at least several times a week, only three in five of those often monitor social media conversations. For those that don't actively monitor for mentions, half of them cited a lack of resources as the reason they aren't doing it more often.

A quarter of respondents (24 per cent) said social media strategies and tactics are driven by the CEO. Twenty-one per cent said efforts are driven by the director of communications, while 18 per cent cited the chief marketing officer as the corporate social media lead. 13% of those surveyed said their company does not engage in social media at all because it is viewed as a waste of time and effort.

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