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PR Daily asked 2,714 communicators how their companies use social media in their Ragan/NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions survey, and Go-Gulf.com highlighted some of the findings in an infographic.

This was a fairly decent size data set for the survey and it's still surprising to me that companies have not figured out how to generate leads on social media though they seem to be able to measure social media results.

Some of the most amazing points I noted were:

• Over 80% of companies have less than 3 people managing social media.
• 86% of companies only track vanity metrics like fans and followers.
• Only 31% of companies can track social media to sales.
• 65% of the companies say the biggest obstacle for companies to use social media is time.
• 40% of the companies think the goal of social media is to increase sales
  

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To ensure that our members have a consistent authentication experience across our platform, we are requiring all applications to use Member Permissions by July 15th.

In August 2012, we introduced Member Permissions. This feature allows you to specify exactly which information the member shares with your application and actions you can take on their behalf. In November 2012, we introduced a migration path to this new flow for applications created before that change. We have been thrilled to see the excitement in adopting Member Permissions and many of you are already using it to streamline your site registration.

Key benefits of this feature are as follows:

• Members have more visibility: LinkedIn members have clearer visibility into the data and actions your application requests access to.
• Standardized lifespan of access tokens: Previously members could choose to grant tokens ranging from one day to forever. Now all tokens are 60-days in length. Developers can proactively renew tokens in 60-day increments when members come back to their app.
• Ability to fetch additional profile data: You can fetch email address of the authenticated user, which wasn't previously available.
• Standardized profile data: You can continue to access the Full Profile of logged in member, however you can only retrieve the Basic Profile for users other than the authenticating member.
  

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1. Reddit has become, simply put, mainstream media.
As noted in Ad Age recently, Reddit closed out 2012 with more than 37 billion page views and 400 million unique visitors. Even people who don't check the so-called social-news site regularly -- or at all -- constantly experience the Reddit Effect because ...

2. The mainstream blog media is almost ridiculously (even pathetically) dependent on Reddit.
Reddit has a state-of-the-art-circa-1998, text-centric user interface, but its critical mass and core upvote/downvote system has allowed it to become a sort of real-time cultural Zeitgeistometer. A post that captures the imagination of Reddit readers (aka Redditors) gets upvoted and then speeds to Reddit's home page (and/or the home pages of Reddit's major topical verticals, e.g., reddit.com/r/worldnews, reddit.com/r/funny, etc.).

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The day to day struggles that come with running a business are enough to rattle even the most organized person. With the addition of managing social media marketing campaigns and technology, the stress is often taken to a whole new level. These marketing methods can be extremely successful; however it is important to learn to manage your social media presence effectively to get the most out of your time and investment.

Tip 1: Include Everyone

When you include everyone in your business in your social media campaign it will increase the visibility that you have and make sharing and posting information much more efficient. One method is to allow posts and updates to be circulated to different people on various days. This will keep the content fresh, without anyone becoming burnt out handling the entire social media campaign themselves. You can also implement this with your company's blog. Have your employees create blogs occasionally that will bring a new perspective and view to your content, keeping it fresh and engaging for your readers. This will also save your slim budget for marketing.

Tip 2: Organize You Social Media Schedule

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More often than not I am baffled by how Wall Street works.

First, in case you haven't noticed, the markets are at all time high at the exact same time the economic uncertainty for the 'little people' is staying at very high levels. The president of the US claims to be for the 'little guy' but coddles Wall Street and celebrates their success which means the rich get richer (which I am fine with by the way) but the rest of the world gets, well, hosed. Makes no logical sense but maybe emotionally driven buying and selling shouldn't make sense. You make the call.

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New Instagram features were released this week allowing users to tag friends and display photos of themselves on their Instagram profiles.

While there are many well developed communities and active users on the platform already without user tagging, the ability to see a group of photos with common topics had previously been limited to locations (thanks to Foursquare's API) or hashtags.

Tagging other users was just something that only provided a link to another person's Instagram account and a notification.