Mediaboss Marketing

Social networks have grown in popularity as a way for friends to stay in contact and share information about their daily lives. Businesses often attempt to benefit from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ too, but to really get the most out of it, its important to use it in the right way. The secret to success is in the name socialnetworking.

Too often, businesses get into a routine of posting about themselves (new products, pricing, offers etc.) and overlook the real purpose of social networking, which is to connect with other people. For businesses, this can be customers, prospects, and other companies.

Here are five ways to network effectively using social channels:

Tune in to what your customers want

Use the search function on Twitter and Google+ to look for phrases relevant to your industry. Often people will turn to social media to answer questions. If you are friendly and not too pushy you can answer these questions, using this as a sales tactic.

Also make sure you use the social networks built-in analytics tools to see which of your posts perform best. If you get the most engagement by posting images or asking questions, make sure you are publishing these types of posts most frequently.

Use social media as a real-time customer service tool

Often people dont have the time to pick up the phone to ask a customer service question, they would rather fire off a quick tweet or Facebook message. Make sure youre there to answer any customer service questions as quickly as possible. If potential customers dont get an immediate answer they may take their business elsewhere.

It doesnt need to be difficult, simply make sure youre logged in to your social sites whenever youre working on your computer, or set up mobile notifications so you can respond while youre out and about.

Monitor your reputation

Here is the original post:
5 ways to put the ‘networking’ back into social networking

Twitter, an online social networking and microblogging service, announced terms for its IPO on Thursday. The San Francisco, CA-based company plans to raise $1.3 billion by offering 70.0 million shares at a price range of $17 to $20. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Twitter would command a fully diluted market value of $12.8 billion.

Twitter, which was founded in 2006 and booked $534 million in sales for the 12 months ended September 30, 2013, plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol TWTR . Twitter initially filed confidentially on July 12, 2013. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, BofA Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

At its announced price range, Twitter will qualify for inclusion in the Renaissance IPO ETF (symbol: IPO) on a fast-entry basis, five days after the commencement of trading, pursuant to the rules of the Renaissance IPO Index.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

Original post:
Social networking service Twitter sets terms for highly anticipated $1.3 billion IPO

Translated by SOONG PHUI JEE Sin Chew Daily

A 15-year-old girl met with a friend she made through a social networking website to work on cosplay costumes was killed as she fought back when the man tried to rape her. The girl's misfortune is a deep grief for her family, as well as an alarm for parents with teenage children.

The apple of discord implies two common social problems. Firstly, the 23-year-old suspect and the girl, Ng Yuk Tim, are both from single-parent families and secondly, they made friends through a social networking website. Although Ng's parents have divorced, she was still loved by her mother, grandfather and other relatives. She was innocent and lacked the sense to guard against others. She enjoyed excessive freedom even she was still under age, leaving room for the suspect to commit the crime and resulted in the tragedy. Meanwhile, the suspect's mother had deserted the family when he was young and his father died about a year ago. He claimed to have been abused by his father and might thus, formed his crooked personality. The incident showed the significant influence of family harmony and parenting style on children.

In today's Internet era, modern computer technology has dominated many people's daily lives. Many teenagers are addicted to the online world and have indulged in playing online games and making friends in the virtual world. More dangerously, they meet with friends they made online without understanding their backgrounds.

We have always heard about cases in which teenage girls were raped or abducted when meeting their friends they made online and the police has received a number of similar reports involving victims aged between 13-18 years old. Ng lost her precious life when meeting with her friend she made online and this painful lesson should be a warning for parents, reminding them to pay more attention to their children, particularly in their usage of Internet. Parents should also oversee their children's habits of making friends online and chatting with strangers on social networking websites.

Social networking websites provide a convenient friend making platform, allowing Internet users to chat, no matter whether they know each other or not, particularly when they share common interests. However, the virtual world is actually full of hidden lies and pitfalls. Although there are examples showing men and women meeting online eventually ended up as life partners, the society is complicated and people's minds change. Teenagers meeting with friends they made online actually face an extremely high risk. Parents must pay close attention to children's behaviours to protect their safety. The online world is unfathomable and full of fraudulent deeds. Even adults can easily fall into traps as long as they are a bit greedy and having not enough of common sense, let alone teenagers.

Different from traditional family structures, women nowadays play also the role of bread earner and double-income families have become increasingly common. However, although it helps to improve income, parents who are busy working might be lax in disciplining and supervising their children, while neglecting their needs, causing them to spend most of the time sitting in front of computer and express their loneliness and study pressure through chatting with other netizens who they might not know on social networking websites. If parents do not understand what their children are thinking and doing, how are they going to enter their children's world to educate and guide them?

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Teenage girl murder sounds an alarm for all

Current ratings for: First child 'cured' of HIV remains in remission for 18 months

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Researchers have revealed that a 3-year-old girl from Mississippi who was born with HIV continues to be in remission 18 months after her combination antiretroviral treatment was stopped. This is according to an updated case report published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Medical News Today reported on the early findings of this case in March this year, in which the researchers said was the first case of a "functional cure" in an HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) positive infant.

But the research team from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Mississippi Medical Center, say this confirmation of their findings suggest that the child's remission is "not a mere fluke."

They add that the findings provide "compelling evidence" that if an HIV positive child is started on antiretroviral therapy within the first hours or days of infection, viral remission can be achieved.

Born to an HIV-infected mother, the child began aggressive antiretroviral therapy (ART) 30 hours after birth.

Through a series of blood tests carried out days and weeks after treatment first began, the child demonstrated rapidly diminishing levels of the virus in her blood. When tested 29 days after birth, there were no detectable traces of the viral infection.

The child received antiviral treatment until she was 18-months-old, after which point the treatment was stopped. After undergoing standard repeat HIV tests around 10 months after the ceasing of treatment, the report states that physicians detected no HIV in her blood.

The researchers believe that through beginning the child's treatment so early, ART was able to halt the formation of hard-to-treat viral reservoirs. These are defined as immune cells with "dormant" HIV that can reignite the infection within weeks of ceasing therapy.

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First child 'cured' of HIV remains in remission for 18 months

[ Watch The Video: Barrier To HIV Cure Bigger Than Previously Thought ]

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports Your Universe Online

Although current treatments for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can keep the disease at bay, a larger-than-expected amount of hidden virus may complicate efforts to find a cure, according to the most detailed and comprehensive analysis to date of the latent reservoir of HIV proviruses.

The three-year study, published Thursday in the journal Cell, deals a painful blow to researchers working hard to find a cure for HIV/AIDS, a disease that kills nearly two million people per year according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Infectious disease experts at John Hopkins found that the amount of potentially active, dormant forms of HIV hiding in infected immune T cells may actually be 60 times greater than previously thought.

This hidden HIV is part of the so-called latent reservoir of functional proviruses that remains long after antiretroviral drug therapy has successfully brought viral replication to a standstill. If antiretroviral therapy is stopped or interrupted, some proviruses can reactivate, allowing HIV to make copies of itself and resume infection of other immune cells, the researchers said.

Senior study investigator Robert Siliciano, M.D., Ph.D., who in 1995 first showed that reservoirs of dormant HIV were present in immune cells, said that while the current studys results show most proviruses in the latent reservoir are defective, curing the disease will depend on finding a way to target all proviruses with the potential to restart the infection.

These results indicate an increased barrier to cure, as all intact noninduced proviruses need to be eradicated, Siliciano said. Although cure of HIV infection may be achievable in special situations, the elimination of the latent reservoir is a major problem, and it is unclear how long it will take to find a way to do this.

The studys results showed that among 213 HIV proviruses that were isolated from the reservoirs of eight patients and that were initially unresponsive to highly potent biological stimuli, some 12 percent could later still become active and capable of replicating their genetic material and transmitting infection to other cells. All of these non-induced proviruses had previously been thought to be defective, with no possible role in resumption of the disease, said Siliciano, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

These disappointing findings pose a serious problem to prevailing hopes for the so-called shock and kill approach to curing HIV, he said. That approach refers to forcing dormant proviruses to turn back on, making them visible and vulnerable to the immune systems cytolytic killer T cells, and then eliminating infected cells from the body while antiretroviral drugs prevent any new cells from becoming infected.

Read more from the original source:
HIV's Secret Hideout Frustrates Efforts To Develop A Cure