In less than a decade, social media has empowered businesses of all shapes and sizes across almost every industry worldwide to attract and engage with fans and customers to raise awareness, drive website football and boost sales, but it’s a relationship that, by definition, has to work both ways.

Accordingly, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have made it increasingly difficult for brands to maintain control of their online reputation, with these (and other) channels also empowering customers to proactively voice their opinion and share their experiences about these companies and their products and services. Which, of course, is fantastic when everybody is happy, but let’s return to the real world for a moment: what do you do when things go wrong?

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Teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they have in the past but are also more proactively taking steps to better manage their privacy, reveals the latest report from Pew Internet.

In their Teens, Social Media, and Privacy analysis, Pew discovered that while 91 percent of teens have shared a photo of themselves, 53 percent have posted their email address and one in five (20 percent) have shared their cellphone number on a social networking site, 60 percent of Facebook-using teens have their profiles set to display to only friends and family, and almost one-quarter (24 percent) have a protected profile on Twitter.

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The poor folks in Oklahoma have lost so much over the past couple of days and we bet they’re on your mind.

If you’d like to help them, but didn’t know how, we have a pretty simple way. You can send them food, something they’re in desperate need of, and it’s as easy as sending a tweet.

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Scratch that, if you hit and run, you shouldn’t tweet about it at ALL, but tweeting they deserved it is just all kinds of crazy.

And it seems this Twitter user is just that.

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You’re all over Twitter every day and you know all about it, right? Well, maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but (most likely) you don’t have “everything Twitter” at the tip of your tongue every second of the day, particularly if you’re a Twitter marketer and not an app developer.

Either way, we have a quick list for your reference. It’s full of Twittery things you either didn’t know about or heard of before and forgot they existed (like diphthongs). Take a scan so you don’t send out foolish tweets or say something silly the next time you’re “talking Twitter” with the masses.

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We’re having a one day sale on our summer social media networking events, AllTwitter Marketing Conference and AllFacebook Marketing Conference, June 4 and 5 in San Francisco.

Today only, you’ll save $100 off your ticket to either event or $200 off a Combo Pass to attend both. Just use the code ONEDAY when you register!

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No matter your profession, age, gender, socioeconomic status, geographic location, interests, or hobbies, surely you occasionally seek advice.

Whether it’s the optimal place to launch your startup, the best Italian restaurant in your neighborhood, legal advice, or tips for finding a better work/life balance, everyone finds themselves at one point searching for advice.

But where do you start?

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If you’re a parent, you will flip for this Twitter account.

If you’re not, you will flip for this Twitter account – and decide to push back your child-rearing timeline by a few years.

@HonestToddler, a Twitter account-turned-book, illustrates the detailed daily inner thoughts of a toddler. And the results are pretty hilarious.

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The way people shop and make purchase decisions has changed dramatically with the advent of social media.

Indeed, not only does e-commerce account for 8% of all retail sales in the U.S., online retail is expected to outpace sales growth at physical stores over the next 5 years, reaching an incredible $370 billion by 2017.

And it’s not just e-commerce websites that these numbers are credited to: sales of physical goods through social networks are pegged to grow to $14 billion of U.S. sales by 2015.

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Digital marketers know that marketing to Europeans requires different tactics and messaging, if only slightly, than marketing to Americans, or people anywhere else.

And when 20% of the world’s Internet users are European – when Europeans only make up 12% of the world’s population – getting educated on where and what Europeans are doing online is vital.

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