Social Networks

The madness that is Social Media Week (SMW) officially begins on Monday, but organizers, sponsors, and partners kicked things off today with a press conference at the Hearst Building in New York City.

One of the new additions this go round is a Health and Wellness hub in NYC, which was introduced by Saatchi & Saatchi‘s Wellness MD Ned Russell.

“Social media is the great leveler” in so many areas, said Russell. That includes healthcare. Click here to check out the schedule for this and all of the other activities for the week.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

In just 18 months’ time, older generations of in-house lawyers have stepped up their social media use, largely on LinkedIn and law firm blogs, according to a new survey by communications firm Greentarget, consulting firm Zeughauser Group, and InsideCounsel magazine.

The 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey finds that lawyers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s are using social media in far greater numbers than they were in 2010.

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For the past week, we’ve been watching clip after clip of the upcoming Super Bowl commercials. Needless to say, the ads are a highlight of the game.

But the public relations industry is also excited for the event. The big game is not just a platform for creative advertisements, but for all of the PR and marketing that surrounds the broadcast at the game and elsewhere.

“For PR practitioners, there are several avenues to consider when thinking of ways to work with your clients around the Super Bowl,” Lisa Zlotnick, Lippe Taylor‘s VP of media told us in an email.

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Thus far, women have been driving the amazing growth of Pinterest, the social network where users “pin” images to share info. Now that the site is a bonafide hit, others may be jumping on the bandwagon.

Despite the annoying headline (“Pinterest: Where domestic divas hang out online’) this story uses a quote from the Pinterest website that says the site wasn’t meant to be just for the ladies.

“Our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting,” the quote says. “With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests.”

TheStreet.com goes a step further with its article, “Why More Men Should Join Pinterest.” Among the four reasons it gives are “product discovery” and “more engagement with strangers.”

Mashable recently outlined the “21 Must-Follow Pinterest Users” and among them are a few guys and a few accounts that have general interest, like one on gadgets.

Businesses may also start seeing the benefits of becoming involved. Monetate has published an infographic that shows the high level of sharing the site is generating and its growing importance to the retail industry (a point that’s also made here). That infographic is available after the jump.

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LinkedIn has chosen Maloney & Fox as its U.S. PR firm, replacing M.Cader PR. The consumer duties will focus on branding and outreach to users, The Holmes Report writes.

The social network has come a long way in recent months. In paperwork submitted for its IPO about a year ago, the company said it had plenty of members, but few visited regularly. Today, membership stands at about 135 million with lots of apps and other features.

“We believe that the ‘Apply with LinkedIn’ feature will be crucial in sustaining this growth in 2012 as well,” says Forbes. “If LinkedIn manages to tie up with more employers to adopt this feature, it may definitely see more candidates registering as members.”

And HubSpot says the site is great for lead generation.

“People join LinkedIn to showcase their career, work expertise, and find content and information to make their professional lives better. So businesses who target other businesses will naturally find a higher concentration of their target market on LinkedIn,” the blog reads.

The President is on the Internets again. This time, he’s doing a Google+ Hangout, answering questions during a live Q&A next Monday, January 30 at 5:30 ET. Questions will come from YouTube users and can be submitted here.

While the President has been an active social media user for the purposes of these sorts of Q&A sessions, GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have actually done hangouts before Obama.

Obama joined Google+ in November. The White House announced it had joined Google+ on Friday.

Separately, senior advisors to the White House will be available after tomorrow’s State of the Union address to answer questions about the speech on Twitter, Facebook, and at live tweet ups. Experts will be available to answer questions on Twitter on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. More info about those events here.

[via Mashable]

While we were away, the Golden Globe awards happened. Glamour, glitz, Madonna made a funny!

While we were casually flipping back and forth between the awards and the Australian Open, others were tweeting with purpose about all of the goings on in Hollywood. According to some new numbers, there were more than 822,000 tweets from nearly 300,000 unique users. The most retweets were for the one at left from Zooey Deschanel. Others who had the Twitterverse all fired up were the host, Ricky Gervais, Perez Hilton, and Game of Thrones. TweetReach tells the tale in the infographic here.

While the tweeting reached an all-time high, the ratings did not. It beat other programming on at that time, but fell short of last year.

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No one is talking about Pinterest, so we thought we thought perhaps we should take another look at it. Kidding! Seriously, it seems to be all anyone can talk about. And with more chatter comes more advice about how to maximize its potential.

A couple of days ago, Mashable offered 13 tips (sorry triskadekaphobics) for all “pinners” (sorry Pinterest users) to better use their accounts and master a few of the basics. Among them — become an expert in a topic and link your new account to your existing social media pages. Good tips for publicists to carry across social media platforms.

American Express’s Open Forum blog looks more specifically at how brands are using Pinterest.

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New Year’s is a time for revelry, reflection, and making resolutions, both personal and work-related. PsychCentral blog says about forty to forty-five percent of American adults make at least one New Year’s resolution. USA.gov, America’s official Web portal, lists the most popular categories of New Year’s resolutions. Among the top ten, though not in rank order, are getting a better job, a better education, volunteering, money management, eating healthier, stopping bad habits, managing stress, getting fit, recycling, and taking a trip.

While many people set their sights high, far fewer follow through on their lofty plans. The Psychology Today blog cites research that shows after six months fewer than half the resolvers  have kept their New Year’s commitments and after a year less than ten percent have done so. According to the experts, one of the keys to achieving one’s New Year’s goals is sharing them with family and friends. New social platforms may help provide the answer to reaching your New Year’s resolutions in the coming 12 months.

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A picture’s worth a thousand words and, hopefully for marketers, a thousand shares.

Meet Pinterest, the new social network that’s drumming up a lot of interest. Mashable has an intro to Pinterest that we found pretty useful, but in a nutshell, it’s a social media site (or “online pinboard”) for posting images. The site has more than four million users now  and it’s growing quickly. Nearly six out of 10 users are women between the ages of 25 and 44. Moreover the number of visits to the site is increasing by leaps and bounds.

Besides the sharing and discussion among Pinterest members (the site is accessible by invite-only), the network has been cited as place to pick up on trends, which may be just as valuable.

For more stats on Pinterest (and other hot social networks from 2011), check this out.