Social Media

With Facebook's stock price crashing and employee morale sinking, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stepped up and delivered a home run he would never have been able to hit even just a year ago.

As you may know, Zuckerberg has been under fire the last few months for Facebook's plummeting stock price. A darling of Wall Street before its IPO, Facebook fell to half its IPO price in just a few months. As a result, a growing chorus of critics have called for new leadership at Facebook. Some have even called for Zuckerberg himself to resign.

While I've … Read more

President Barack Obama has set a new record, at least on Twitter.

The president's speech at the Democratic National Convention yesterday lit up the Twittersphere with 52,757 tweets per minute, a new record for the micro-blogging site, Twitter has revealed.

Overall, the DNC has generated heavy traffic on Twitter. From the starting festivities on Tuesday to the closing events last night, more than 9.5 million tweets about the convention have made the rounds. The final day saw around 4 million tweets alone, according to Twitter, many of them sent during Obama's speech.

The 4 million one-day … Read more

If you're one of the tens of millions of former FarmVille players who gave up the old homestead, Zynga hopes it has a way to coax you back.

The game maker unveiled FarmVille 2 today, with the aim of bringing back former addicts as well as attracting new players.

The game was designed to more completely emulate farming with a stronger storyline and a virtual ecosystem. This means that when you grow crops, they're harvested to be used in a kitchen to make baked goods or sold on the roadside for coins. The coins can then be used … Read more

Before the U.S. Open tennis tournament began this week, I had never heard of 18-year-old Laura Robson (@LauraRobson5), even though she won an Olympic mixed doubles silver medal in London this summer.

To me, the women's game is dominated by the Williams sisters, Serena (@SerenaWilliams) and Venus (@VenusesWilliams), and a revolving cast of mostly unmemorable Russian players, except for Maria Sharapova (I couldn't figure out her official Twitter feed -- can you? Her site has a social section, but it only lists a Facebook account).

But 89th-ranked Robson, who sent former champ Kim Clijsters packing in … Read more

The screen grab above is from The Crowdwire, a new, noncommercial project that among other things looks at the success of the political campaigns in regard to branding and social media.

As you can see, in this snapshot for the period July 16 to August 15 the brand of President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, figure in the top three most-discussed brands on social media (I was surprised to see that the Batman movie came in only at fourth place considering the fact that the Colorado shootings took place July 20).

The Crowdwire (@TheCrowdwire on Twitter), a … Read more

All is not well at Facebook. Some have even started calling for CEO Mark Zuckerberg's head. But the panic is premature, and the social network has plenty of time and opportunity to turn things around.

Facebook's stock price has traveled south since its flashy (and disastrous) debut in May. Facebook closed at $19.44 per share on Wednesday, barely half of its $38 IPO price.

Why is Facebook's share price dropping like a boulder off a cliff? M&A specialist Marty Wolf provides an excellent explanation, but I'll summarize the key points:

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and his wife were trying to find a nice San Francisco neighborhood for their young family to call home. A year and half ago, they found what they were looking for, a 6,300-square-foot lot occupied by an early 1900s home that they now want to demolish to make way for a new house.

Not so fast. This is San Francisco, after all, where even little changes are hard, especially in old neighborhoods like this one, which sits near the peak of a picture postcard hill just south of famous Golden Gate park. The planned tear-down … Read more

Twitter users who want to know how many spammy or "fake" accounts are following them can check out a new service called Fake Follower Check.

Designed by a group named StatusPeople, the service looks at your Twitter account to scan a certain number of followers. In return, it tells how many of your followers are good, inactive, or fake. In my instance, it informed me that 77 percent of the accounts were good, 19 percent inactive, and 4 percent fake.

You can also get results for other Twitter accounts. Just plug in the name of the account, and … Read more

It's not easy being a wealthy parent, especially if your kids want to do the same things as the kids of other wealthy parents do.

You know, like, um, constantly feeding your Twitter account.

Wayne Gretzky seems to have been one modern patrician who became frustrated with his daughter's Twitter postings, reportedly shutting down his daughter's Twitter feed twice. She does like a racy shot or two, does Paulina Gretzky.

Now I hear there might have been another marginal breach in Twitterdom in the bosom of Michael Dell.

As Bloomberg Businessweek reports it, Dell's 18-year-old daughter … Read more