Mediaboss Marketing

June 13, 2012, 1:41 PM PDT

Takeaway: If your social media presence is becoming impossible to manage, one of these tools may help bring things under control.

Social networking has become an inevitability for businesses of all sizes. No matter what your product or service, youre hurting yourself if you dont have a social media presence. And as you grow, so do your social media needs. At some point, your social presence is going to become hard to manage using the standard interfaces. You will need newer and more powerful tools that are better suited for the task.

I found five low-cost (or free) tools that can help manage your social media presence. With these tools, you can handle various tasks (some offer more than others). But most important is the ability to keep track of your social accounts as well as your followers (and their mentions of you or your company/product).

Note: This list is also available as a photo gallery.

SocialBro (Figure A) is available as a Google Chrome extension and as a desktop app. It allows you to get fairly fine-grained with the viewing of your Twitter accounts. SocialBro is one of my favorite tools, simply because it offers so much information and so many capabilities with Twitter. You can search users and keywords, create specific filters, find your best time to tweet, monitor hashtags, analyze competitors, and much more. You will have to create a SocialBro account (free) and then give the extension permission to access your Twitter data.

TweetDeck (Figure B) is offered as a Google Chrome extension, a desktop client, and mobile clients (IOS and Android). All versions of the tool offer the same features. With TweetDeck, you can customize what you see (arranging your feeds to display the way you want), schedule tweets, monitor unlimited accounts, get notification alerts for new tweets, see media previews, handle list management, and much more.

GroupTweet (Figure C) is a unique tool that allows multiple users to post on a single Twitter account. This can quickly ease the burden of managing a social presence on Twitter. Each user that is given permission to post is displayed in the group account individual names can be enabled or disabled. You can have unlimited contributors to an account and any Twitter client can be used with GroupTweet. For $4.99 per month (for the Premium account), you gain extra features like Tweet moderation, scheduled tweets, prioritized tweets, and multiple hashtag designation.

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Five tools to help simplify social networking management

WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwire -06/13/12)- ePals (SLN.V)

News that Facebook may allow children under 13 to join the social networking site raises important questions about online safety for our youngest Internet users and purposes of learning. All over the world, new learning standards are emerging that focus on communication and collaboration as an important means to provide the writing and media creation, critical thinking and problem solving skills essential to the 21st century work place. Proper use of social media tools in furtherance of learning has the potential to motivate and empower students in ways that traditional home and school learning methods cannot match.

ePals, which operates the largest social learning networking site specifically designed for children and teachers, has been focused on creating a safe and secure education experience for children for more than 15 years. Please see the following Top Five Tips for creating a safe and secure online environment for children.

1. Understand The Differences Between Consumer Social Media and Social Learning Platforms

It's important to distinguish between social media platforms and social learning platforms. Social media tools for education take into account the safety and privacy of students and teachers and are focused on social learning, not just being social.

2. Steer Kids To Safe and Secure Social Networking Sites

Find social networking sites with the TRUSTe seal and that have active tools such as content and language filters. Ensure that forums are screened for appropriate material that creates a safe and secure online environment. Only allow your kids to visit sites that are actively monitored to ensure a safe environment for kids. Examples of top kid-centric sites can be found here.

3. Prevent Cyber Bullying

Teach your child how to recognize and avoid cyber bullies. Only allow your children to access sites where parents, guardians and teachers have the ability to set access levels. Should a student come across a cyber bully make sure they know to report it to a trusted adult -- just like they would with a playground bully.

4. Keep Kids Connected To Learning Over The Summer And Extend Summer Reading Activities

Read this article:
Top Five Tips to Keep Your Young Kids Engaged in Safe Social Networks and Summer Learning

Google may soon bring business-to-business "social ads" to its Google+ social networking platform, according to a recent job listing for a product marketing manager for social ads launch marketing.

Google+ does not currently include any advertising. The company does deliver personalized advertising to users across its properties. Social advertising, however, generally refers to ads that are served to users based on their social contacts' activities on Google+.

Google will apparently first look to introduce the B2B "social features to businesses worldwide," according to the posted job description. The marketing manager will also help determine how Google will talk about the advertising at launch, focusing on "core features," "social ads" and "analytics and platforms," the job listing indicates.

Daina Middleton, U.S. CEO of the digital marketing firm Performics, said that even B2B businesses are struggling with their conventional sales models and are increasingly turning to "social tools."

It's not clear exactly how B2B social advertising would work, and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But industry insiders suggested it would be similar to business-to-consumer marketing. Martine Hunter, creative director at MLT Creative, suggested it might consist of having people who do purchasing professionally give a "plus one" to particular brands on Google+, essentially recommending them.

Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence and a blogger on Search Engine Land, suggested that the ads would likely look much like the consumer-facing social ads on Facebook. For example, they might highlight brands that have a certain number of followers, he said. But they would target users who make business purchasing decisions.

It remains unclear whether the social advertising would be served exclusively to users on the Google+ platform or whether users might see them on other Google properties or even across the Web. Google describes its social network as a "social spine" for all of its products, rather than a destination website like competitor Facebook.

Last month, changes to Facebook's data use policy triggered speculation that the company will begin delivering targeted social ads beyond the limits of its own platform.

Cameron Scott covers search, web services and privacy for The IDG News Service. Follow Cameron on Twitter at CScott_IDG.

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Google+ Looks Poised to Roll out Social Ads

11-06-2012 15:28 Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites can be used to make friends, plan events, and maybe even find a relationship... if you know how. We got a great student video asking how a social awkward student can use social media sites to make friends. Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks and John Iadarola give him advice on how to use facebook to make friends... and whether that's even the best way to go about it. Do you think Jonathan should focus on using sites like Facebook and Twitter to plan events and find friends in college? Or should he use more traditional means like clubs, parties, etc? What advice would you give him? Have you started any real friendships or relationships online? Let us know! And if you liked this video, hit that Share button and "like" it as well! 🙂 Subscribe to TYT U for more ? Submit a video to TYT U! We love hearing from students and faculty Follow us on twitter! ?

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How do You Use Social Media to Make Friends? - Video

Social networking site LinkedIn has revealed details of attempts to increase security in the wake of 6.5 million usernames and hashed passwords being published on a Russian hacker forum.

A blog entry by director Vicente Silveira revealed that LinkedIn has not received any reports of unauthorised account access in the wake of the security breach.

The company also revealed that passwords of the service's users are now salted as well as hashed. "That transition was completed prior to news of the password theft breaking on Wednesday," Silveira wrote.

Ty Miller, chief technology officer of penetration testing firm Pure hacking, said that although the salting of password hashes has been around for a long time, "we find that many Web applications either do not hash their passwords at all, or use common hashing algorithms, such as MD5, without a salt".

"Social and professional networking sites such as LinkedIn are major targets for hackers," Miller said. "Combining this with the complexity of these types of web applications, the chance of a critical vulnerability being present is likely. This means that a defence-in-depth approach should be a necessity for LinkedIn, which includes protecting passwords with strong cryptographic methods."

Miller said that social networking services such as LinkedIn store a wealth of personal information about their users and have a responsibility to implement a very high standard of security, with security measures, such as salting password hashes, implemented as part of application design.

Salting a password makes it less likely an account will vulnerable to hackers using rainbow tables, which are essentially dictionaries of hashes that allow someone to discover what a user's unencrypted password is.

"Salts are designed to ensure that the generated hash is different even if the same password is being hashed," Miller said. "The larger the salt, the more different hashes exist for the same password. This generally means that Rainbow Tables are not a feasible option for cracking salted hashes because there are too many combinations to create.

"This means that attackers have to rely on dictionary-based password attacks, which has to calculate every possible salted hash for each password in the password dictionary. This means that weak passwords will be able to be cracked easily, and stronger passwords are more likely to remain secured."

Rohan Pearce is the editor of Techworld Australia. Contact him at rohan_pearce at idg.com.au.

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LinkedIn: No account breaches in wake of hack