If President Barak Obama’s election campaign taught us anything, it’s that social media is a powerful tool that can shape the future of the United States and the world at large. However, it’s surprising that one of the Nations greatest phenomenons of the past decade has yet to capitalize on the power and virility of social media.  That is until now.

After eight successful seasons, “American Idol” has finally lifted the bans that previously silenced contestants from directly communicating with a fan base via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

While this move to embrace social networking is relatively late and still tightly managed, the results will be astronomical.

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As you begin to craft your pitch to investors, you’ll have a natural inclination to simplify it in favor of mainstream adoption, however as you generalize your pitch so that everyone can understand, the process could come at the cost of diluting your original dreams and high hopes.

A few weeks ago, I was attending an event in San Francisco, The Founder’s Showcase, hosted by Adeo Ressi of thefunded.com, and I had the pleasure of hearing a great ad-hoc presentation by Phillip Kaplan of Blippy.com. His product had just launched earlier that day and voice was giddy with the excitement that is often lacking in many entrepreneurs today. I had been following the news about Blippy.com for quite sometime now, even finding myself contributing to most of the articles about it on major tech news outlets. The controversy that had risen out of the Blippy came from the rumor that service was determined to expose everyone’s credit card purchases online to the world’s real-time content stream. I think upon hearing this, half the men in the world eked for a moment about thought of decade old questionable purchases reemerging to the surface such as hotel room porno purchases, or gifts for unidentified mistress or just plain old excessive krispy creme purchases. Read more

I was recently reading an article one Social Media Today about PPC tips and what stated as a small comment turned in to a big list of detailed tips regarding how we have approached Google Adwords and what we think works regarding optimizing your PPC. Here’s a link to the original article by Shailesh Ghimire: socialmediatoday.com

It seemed daunting at first when I thought about managing my PPC weekly let alone daily but now I find myself checking my Google Adwords account nearly every hour if not at last at 8am, 12pm, and 5pm. Here’s my take and tips on the subject.

What I’ve come to learn is that my ad position sweet spot in somewhere between 2.5 and 4.5. That there is a good return with in that position, if your position is below 2.5 you are probably over paying and if it’s over 4.5 you probably aren’t getting enough click to reach your daily maximum.

Now the reason I check at these 3 times through out the day is that my first visit at 8am is to adjust the PPC max bid based on the position. Based on my scenario above I look at the previous day and adjust appropriately by adding a penny or two depending on the position. For example if yesterday the ad was at position 5.5 then I add a penny to the PPC or if it was 6.5 maybe I add 2 cents. However, if it was 1.5 then I take away a penny.

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I was recently reading a blog on trendwatching.com titled “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010” and I utterly agree that Real-Time Reviews will be crucial not only next year, but will change how we approach reviews for many years to come. However, I also think the examples presented are still some what limited. We have to stop thinking that everything that is real-time is somehow connected to Twitter. There can be a real-time world outside of Twitter nor does just pulling in Twitter Feeds make you real-time or even useful. Read more

Recently at the Techcrunch Real-Time CrunchUp in San Francisco, CA the main topic discussion was how to filter the stream. It’s true that these days, we are so inundated with information from multiple streams, people assume that it’s impossible to adequately disseminate all this information both efficiently and effectively. I too find it hard to manage and I think that both the Twitter list functionality and Facebook’s distinction between News and Live Feeds does sort of help to quell this dilema. While there are many varieties of Twitter users, I think most fall into 3 broader types; Content Consumers, Content Creators and Content Reactors. Read more