SI Social: Hitman Social Media Game Shows How To Do It Wrong

Social media is a fairly new medium, so it’s no surprise that people gaffe from time to time when they try to execute it right. Of course, there’s a varying degree of severity between “Whoops, I posted the wrong link!” to “Oh my, I’ve done something so bad that I need to dig a hole and crawl in.” You might expect the latter from individuals or smaller companies, but when a big company slips on that level, it comes as a bit of a shock. And that is just what happened yesterday when the enormously high profile video game publisher Square Enix tried to use a Facebook game to promote their newest title in the Hitman game series.

Google's Augmented Reality Game 'Ingress' May Be the Path to New Business Opportunities

Being a gamer myself, I think seeing video games developing new uses is pretty nifty. We’ve all been exposed to the concept gamification by now — most people don’t call it that, but sites like Foursquare and Yelp! have relied upon the tactic to make their services a lot like level-building in games. Social media ranking site Klout relies heavily (and shamelessly) on the same gimmick. It’s a simple way to draw out the kid part of us that wants to make it to the next level before bedtime, and it works like a charm. But gaming has more relevant applications than just engaging consumers, as Google is proving with its newest offering.

SI Social: Facebook Announces Couples Pages, World Retches Audibly

In the modern world, there’s tremendous emphasis on finding a romantic partner. As if we didn’t get enough pressure from literature about star-crossed lovers, movies about pairing up, and images splayed across glossy magazine pages depicting blissful partners holding hands and gazing into the sunset, now Facebook has decided to join the bandwagon with a new addition. It’s called Profiles for Couples (cutely spelled “profiles4couples” in the URL), and it gives you an excellent opportunity to show the world that you have indeed achieved putting off old maiddom for the time being.

SI Social: How the iPhone 5 Could Change the Social Media Landscape

Oh, Apple. You and your sexy marketing campaigns. You know that we love all that sleekness, those stark white backgrounds. And do I need a new phone? Nope; my iPhone 4 still works just fine (albeit a little slower than it did when I bought it a year and a half ago). But now, with the launch of what we think might be the iPhone 5 right around the corner on September 12th, the internet is being flooded with videos and roundup posts about the new gadget, which is rumored to have a taller screen than its predecessor.

SI Social: Klout Adds Metrics In Bid For Actual Relevance

I won’t mince words; I’ve been pissed off about the very existence of Klout since day one. It’s clearly a site that shamelessly uses gameification tactics to make people think their score is something worth worrying about. Their motto is “The Standard for Influence.” Who says, buckaroo? You? This is the kind of thing that makes me ornery with the entire internet.

5 For Friday - Links, Stories, & Posts for your Weekend

Welcome to the Twitter Olympics – CNN

In case you live under a rock, the Olympics are going on, and the whole world is closely watching as the best of the best compete. Leave it to the internet to bring both humor and serious discussion to the event via Twitter. There was some mud-slinging, as to be expected, but when a Greek athlete was suspended from the games for racial comments via her Twitter account, it makes it clear that Twitter etiquette is becoming just as important as real life.

The 10 Keys to Optimizing Facebook Engagement – Social Media Today

How To Twitter: Using Hashtags at San Diego Comic-Con

Since I’m an Level 9000 bona fide nerd, I traveled to San Diego last weekend to celebrate Comic-Con. Of course, I took lots of pictures of what was going on when I was there. If you don’t already know, you can join the Twitter party of any major event by using the hashtag associated with it. This year’s Comic-Con used #SDCC — by hashtagging all of my related tweets, I was able to add my feedback to the public conversation about the convention, which anyone looking for the hashtag can read. If one of the people that reads one of my tweets wants to know more about me (or my business!), they might just follow me. What a neat way to network, right? (Don’t forget to check the “wrong” hashtags, too. It’s definitely not called “San Diego Comiccon“, but a lot of people searching the internet think it is.)

Twitter Ditches LinkedIn, Says It's Not Personal

I'm a fan.

“It’s not you. It’s me.” That’s what Twitter proclaimed to LinkedIn this morning, ending a two-year partnership between the micro-blogging giant and the social network site for job seekers. Breakups are hard to do, as the saying goes, but according to LinkedIn, they didn’t even care in the first place.

“If you had previously synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, and selected the option to share Tweets on LinkedIn, those Tweets generated from Twitter will no longer appear on LinkedIn,” says Ryan Rolansky on the official LinkedIn blog. “There will be no other changes to your LinkedIn experience.”

SI Social: Hunger Games Viral Campaign is Clever Marketing at its Best

The next blockbuster young adult film is just about to explode onto the silver screen: The Hunger Games, based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling trilogy of the same name. Aimed at the Twilight set of YA readers, it tells the story of a courageous tomboy named Katniss Everdeen who lives in a dystopian world that’s split into twelve districts and ruled over by an iron-fisted government called The Capitol. Each year, members of the community are selected to participate in The Hunger Games, where they are sent into an arena to kill one another until only one is left standing.

Are Online Reviews More Influential Than Advertising?

When it comes to how we consume, things have dramatically changed over the last twenty years. For instance, if your mother and father wanted to go to a restaurant in the seventies, it was probably because they heard it was good from friends or neighbors or simply wanted to give it a shot. 1979 brought about the debut of the Zagat guide, which of course gave people more of a guideline than ever before. Fast forward a few decades, and there’s suddenly more information than you could imagine available for everything from eateries to shopping for clothing. Because of the popularity of the internet as a means of sharing information, people can now log on and leave reviews for all sorts of experiences, making it that much harder to pass off a bad meal or a sleazy transaction than it used to be. In some ways, it’s great. But how is it affecting us as consumers?