-From the “I’m not sure I like this” file: The National Hockey League allowed Who’s The Boss? actress Alyssa Milano to take over its Twitter handle during a Stanley Cup playoff game between the Los Angeles Kings and Phoenix Coyotes. The one-time Charmed witch is supposedly a perfect fit for celebrity Twitter takeover, because, um … she likes hockey?
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.The Webby Awards will be giving this year’s Lifetime Achievement award to New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, citing his work with Bloomberg L.P., which began a decade before the ubiquity of digital technologies we use daily.
If you have been lagging and not Tweeting, Twitter has a plan to get you back. Twitter has acquired RestEngine, a personalized email service that will send out a “best of” list each week to show you all the fun you’ve been missing. Twitter will take on RestEngine employees as well as the company.Research conducted by Ketchum (with help from Communispace) finds that people around the world are most appreciative of the ways in which technology makes their lives easier, even more than tech’s entertainment value. Other countries included in the study were France, China, and Spain.
The Ketchum Digital Living Index polled 6,000 participants between the ages of 16 and 54 (between the ages of 18 and 64 in the U.S.) with results showing 46 percent of consumers want technology that is going to simplify their lives. But 76 percent said they weren’t happy with technology’s ability to make life easier. Only 35 percent said they were more desirous of technology that entertains them.
In addition, a cultural anthropologist who helped with the study, Emma Gilding, expressed surprise over the ways in which opinions differed depending on country of origin. “I didn’t expect that because the dominant narrative is that technology sells itself. But the data shows that this just isn’t true,” she said in a statement.
After the jump, we’ve got an infographic that illustrates the Index’s findings. You can also read more here.
LinkedIn just announced that it will be acquiring SlideShare, the site where companies share PowerPoint presentation, videos, and other documents, for $118.75 million — 45 percent in cash and about 55 percent in stock.
According to the press release, users have uploaded more than nine million presentations on SlideShare and the site had more than 29 million unique visitors in March. LinkedIn has 161 million members around the world.
“Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity,” said Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO. This, he added, aligns the two companies on a similar mission help LinkedIn members in their professional endeavors.
Trying to avoid hipsters? Or looking for a bar that caters to the Mad Men crowd? Hoppit, a Manhattan-based startup that searches restaurants and bars based on ambiance (choices at left), has launched in 25 cities. Its founders describe Hoppit as a cross between Yelp and Pandora, which allows you to filter locations as they would appeal to, for example, a two-year-old, your great aunt Norma, or business colleagues. Or maybe all three; you be the judge.
Anyone holding out hope of using Chomp on their Android is out of luck. Chomp is an app discovery service that also allows you to see what interesting new apps your friends and co-workers have found. MacRumors is reporting Apple bought Chomp for $50 million and has no plans to let Androidians Chomp their way to new apps. And it won’t be compatible with the competing phones.
-Cision has released Seek or Shout, a new online community for journalists, bloggers, freelancers, and PR and marketing professionals that allows those writing stories to connect with sources and calls attention to those with published content. The Cision Media Database has also introduced new search tools to help filter results, pull media data, and build media lists faster.
-PR Newswire has launched PR Newswire… for bloggers, a resource for bloggers (of course) and other “self-publishers.” The goal is to provide resources and added visibility to the growing number of people publishing on the Web. In addition, PR Newswire will also review five new blogs per week.
The Ad Age Digital Conference continued this morning with a presentation from David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of business and marketing partnerships, whose presentation could be boiled down to this: “Your brand needs an always-on strategy.”
When your brand is on social networks, like, say, Facebook, it’s always accessible. Moreover, marketing efforts “have always tried to stimulate word-of-mount, but it’s really short-lived. Social technology is changing that,” Fischer added.
It’s not just about reaching the people who “like” you, it’s about reaching the people they’re friends with. According to Fischer, the average user has 130 friends. Reaching those friends spreads your company’s message naturally.
We were looking around the Internet a little bit today and noticed a gaggle of wide-ranging Google stories.
A big newsmaker was the earnings announcement last Thursday. Besides the good strong numbers, the company also announced a stock split that has had people talking over the past few days.
“Cleverly, Mr. Page, along with his other co-founder, Sergey Brin, and the company’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, created the stock split so that Google could issue a special new class of shares to current shareholders. The catch: the new class of shares has no voting rights,” writes Andrew Ross Sorkin for the Times’ Dealbook section today.
In fact, the news about Google over the past several days has been like that — some good, some not so good, some in the middle.
As our lives have become more infused with technology, so have our homes. Consumer electronics company LG, has partnered with Janna Robinson, a lifestyle technology guru and host of the DIY Network program Hi-Tech Hollywood, and ESPN’s Stuart Scott to promote the fine art of “techorating,” the term trademarked by LG Electronics USA defined as the “blending of modern technology with the art of decorating to create a functional, yet stylish environment.”
The three have launched a competition, the “Sport of Techorating,” that puts two dad bloggers against each other to create the “best technorated living room” using LG products (of course). The rooms have been presented on Facebook for a public vote, giving fans the chance to win LG products.
According to Robinson, the idea of techorating is something she’s been into for years.
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