Facebook Connect has removed Google Friend Connect from its data sharing system following what Facebook describes as breaches in privacy issues. Facebook's news release stated: Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we've had a chance to evaluate the technology. We've found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge,

If you are a regular user of YouTube to spread your video campaigns, you are probably aware of Insight, YouTube's analytics area. Until now Insight has been handy but lacked a lot of information that is generally required from an analytics program. YouTube have now announced the inclusion of Demographic data within the Insight program. As YouTube's blog announcement stated: '.new features to Insight.

According to a post on e-Consultancy , perhaps not. The post looked at research by Forrester who are advising marketers to spend more on social marketing. Part of Forrester's argument included: "Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.

Reputation Management is one of those areas that every business owner is aware off, yet when it comes to the online world, they often don't know where to start. A recent post on Small Business Labs highlights the need to work much smarter on your reputation management strategies. The post highlighted some interesting statistics which include a report that 60% of those surveyed stated they would use social media to vent their feelings about a poor experience.

Market segmentation has been a major part of marketing for many decades. Do you apply the same principles to your online social marketing and through your social bookmarking? According Wikipedia : A market segment is a subgroup of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to have similar product needs'.

I am not sure if social marketing etiquette exists these days unless you have your own self imposed rules. Sure, social sites have their own rules or conditions for use, however these seem to be red flags to some marketing bulls who just want to charge through them. The last twelve to eighteen months has seen the development of social marketing skills to the point that many individuals are able to market their sites quite openly - not etiquette at all.

Today is Mother's Day in many parts of the world so you can imagine how busy many of social sites such as Facebook and MySpace are going to be. We live in a world where distance is no longer measured in miles, it's measured in how long it takes to send an email, and whether it's day or night where your loved ones are. Special events like Christmas, Easter and Valentines Day have been commercialized to the extent that the true meanings are often lost.

MySpace is opening your profile data so that you can share the information across a number of other social sites. A report from Reuters News states : MySpace social network will let users choose to share their public profile information, such as pictures, videos, and text, across the Web to spread its service beyond its own borders.

Social marketing is not about advertising, at least not advertising on its own. Social marketing is the art of getting others to talk about your brand or products. Brand awareness or product awareness should be your ultimate aim with social marketing. When someone wants one of your products, it should be your site or business that first springs to mind. How you achieve this depends on the amount of time and energy you can put into visiting social media sites and, basically,

Facebook have introduced an interesting new feature, '"People You May Know". The idea is to help you to connect to friends that you may not have known were on Facebook. The system will match data from your profile with many others to see if there are any common areas such as employment and schooling. It is understandable. If one of your co-workers is on Facebook then why not connect with them - then again, perhaps Facebook is your escape.

Whether you are blogging or building a web site their is one piece of social content that will always grab a visitors attention and that is a graphic, picture of photo. Many people are visual and while the written word can send a message, a picture, as they say, can tell a thousand stories. Humans are strange creatures. When it comes to pictures, it needs to be funny, cute, dangerous or just plain stupid - and I mean that in the nicest way.

Podcasting has become as popular as blogging possibly due to the fact you can download and listen to the content at a more convenient time. If it is going to be played back through an MP3 player and headphones, the sound quality needs to be spot on. It really isn't that difficult to produce quality podcasts in minutes. Your first requirement is a decent microphone. Quality podcasting relies on a quality recording.

I will preface this by saying that one size doesn't fit all and sometimes, by a fluke of good fortune, terrible social content does go viral, occasionally as a case of how not to do something. There are many articles written on how to produce social content to get your site noticed. There are not as many that tell you what can get your content totally canned - the social content turnoffs.

Social and viral marketing is a trust issue - not a trust in you - more a trust between friends. It just needs the seeds. For any issue to become viral, the word needs to be spread, and that is done through trust, or at least perceived trust. Social sites are everywhere and on many of these sites, your online friends are also your offline line friends, relatives or acquaintances. You may have five of these friends who each have another five friends.

I am not a stats person, however some stats stand out and should be taken into account when planning any campaign. The Stats from the Facebook stats page do make for some interesting reading. So here is a did you know? Did You Know?

Jason Alba wrote an interesting post on "I'm On LinkedIn - Now What???" regarding his approach to ' friend' request on LinkedIn . I am not sure how ethical his approach is although I can see where he is coming from and why. There are many social sites around and from the moment you join you start to receive 'friend' requests. It is a little like a pyramid scheme. You join and add a couple of individuals to your 'friends' list.

If you like to keep up with what is going on with your friends on Facebook then you may like this handy little social blogging plugin. The plugin requires WordPress 2.5 and above. To quote from this social blogging plugin's homepage : this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard.

When we consider social sites we automatically think of Facebook, MySpace or perhaps Bebo. Social media sites include YouTube and Flickr. There are many social bookmarking sites that can be used to deliver traffic to your sites. Digg and StumbleUpon are the two most popular sites although del.icio.us is is also well respected. These are not the only sites around. The following bookmarking sites could well be worth a visit depending on the genre of your site.

One aspect of social marketing which every business owner should be aware of is that it's completely free. However, the most preventable marketing mistake that a business can make is to focus to heavily on themselves, their product or their service. Don't get me wrong, social marketing is all about promoting, but it is how you promote that matters. Social sites are, by their definition, places where people meet to socialize.

Web page design is becoming more important as each day goes by. StumbleUpon joined the thumbnail team earlier this month with thumbnails of stumblers favorite web sites displayed in their profiles. It is becoming a trend that I feel will only spread further since many members of social networking sites feel more comfortable seeing images. StumbleUpon provides users with two options, either grid or list.