Pheed, a social media platform that has been called an alternative to sites like Twitter and Facebook, has just released its Android app, now available on Google Play.

Kenshoo Social, a social marketing platform, published a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, "The Key to Successful Social Advertising," that evaluates how marketers are using social advertising, with the goal of educating marketers on how to develop social media strategy and activate the most effective tactics.

LinkedIn says it wants to make it easier for you to stay on top of the news and insights you need. The social network is debuting a refreshed look on LinkedIn Today and introducing channels to make it easier to discover and share professional news and insights.

New business analytics technologies available from Jive Software, Inc. enable businesses to measure the reach, reaction, and influence of their work, and use predictive analysis to anticipate customer behavior, including loyalty, likelihood to buy, and predict customer churn.

Topsy, the real-time social analytics company, announced that users can now act immediately on insights they uncover in their analysis. Topsy Pro's new functionality allows users to reply, retweet, or favorite key Tweets surfaced in an analysis.

When company executives think about managing the online reputations of their organizations, they are typically concerned with what people are writing about them on websites, blogs, and social media platforms. But they must now recognize their reputations can be damaged in the electronic media space by something "worth a thousand words": a picture. Without saying a word, disgruntled consumers can paint a negative picture of a company's trademarked brand.

The journalist's toolkit has changed dramatically, according to news industry analyst, Ken Doctor. He considers an early 20th Century doctor and the meager tools of diagnosis he had in his traveling black bag. "The journalistic equivalent is the pencil and pad," Doctor says, jotting down facts in chicken-scratch shorthand that only he could read (if lucky), and traveling here and there to gather the facts from the most reliable sources. Now that journalist has the whole world at his fingertips. Even in an age of endless web information, it goes beyond Google searches and Wikipedia entries; today's journalists are also scouring social media, namely Twitter, for breaking news ideas.

Building reader engagement is at the top of every web publisher's to-do list. Getting your users to comment and partake in online discussions is one of the best ways to keep them coming back to your site. But when you open your content to commenters, you also open it to trolls, and many very successful websites with engaged users are still struggling to find ways to foster discussion and drown out the troublemakers.

Fifteen years ago, Thea Selby and Linda Ruth founded the Exceptional Women in Publishing organization to address what Selby referred to as "the vacuum in women's leadership in the magazine industry." On March 6 at EWIP's fifth annual Women's Leadership Conference, held in San Francisco's elegant Art Nouveau City Club, more than 250 attendees took a moment to reflect back on the massive changes that have taken place in the publishing industry since 1998. But the primary focus of the event was how to leverage the technologies and trends, from video integration to mobile monetization to social media partnering, that stand to radically impact the industry's future.

The Content Marketing Institute reports -- in its 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends -- marketers are now choosing LinkedIn the most for content marketing purposes. In 2011, 71% of B2B marketers posted content to the site formerly associated with nothing more than a virtual resume, but 2012 showed an increase to 83%, with Twitter and Facebook trailing by a nose at 80%.

America loves its Facebook. According to comScore, Inc., the social network had 158.01 million unique visitors in the U.S. in May 2012. Believe it or not, that represented a slight decline in the number of visitors. Despite its popularity, Facebook has some competitors out there, and they may just be stealing a bit of attention from the leader in social networking.

Social media has provided us with a world with no boundaries and has allowed small companies to dream of having a global reach. But, along with opportunities come challenges-chief among them is navigating the tricky terrain of communication and social differences in diverse geographies. In 2010, Buddy Media, Inc., a New York City-based software-as-a-service company that works with some of the top global advertisers, conducted a study that looked at the gap between the perceived potential of global social media and the actual level of achievement. The survey of 105 Fortune 1000 brand managers was conducted by Harris Interactive, Inc. While 72% of respondents indicated that social media offers great opportunity to reach existing and potential customers around the world, they also indicated that they were lacking the tools and information necessary to leverage global social media effectively.

The World Wide Web has forever changed the way companies of all sizes do business. From the smallest mom-and-pop shop to the largest enterprise, the internet has not only made it easier for companies to grow, but it has added new concerns. To be sure, the web is the great equalizer. In the past, only a select few corporations operated on a global scale, but the web has made it possible for organizations in Peoria, Ill., to sell goods and services to those in Prague. While leveraging the web to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time may seem relatively straightforward, it is not.

On the chaotic and often tumultuous playground that is the World Wide Web, one thing is becoming more and more clear: Publishers have to play nice with social media if they hope to succeed. Yes, Facebook and Twitter are the popular kids on the playground, and they're the ones spreading the word about your content. According to the "State of the News Media 2012" report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), "Facebook users spent an average of 423 minutes each on the site in December. By contrast, a PEJ analysis of Nielsen Net View data puts the average time on a top 25 news site at just under 12 minutes per month."

So, you want to get social? You realize your business cannot live without it. Kudos to you for having a strategy and a plan and for not just putting up Facebook and Twitter pages. But now you realize how time-consuming it will be to drive real measurable success. So let me tell you how we determined the right tools to help us drive our social media practice.

By the time you read this column, Facebook's redesigned Timeline and News Feed will be old news. But as I was casting around for column ideas, I instant messaged my friend Mike--otherwise known as @tech_envy--and asked him what he thought I should write about. I was stuck for ideas. He wanted to talk integration. Specifically, he wanted to talk about the changes to Facebook's look, which would put new emphasis on your activity.

I quick scroll through the feed and the news of a nationwide internet outage is unfolding on social media. The nation's third largest telecom provider, CenturyLink, is experiencing outages from Las Vegas to Florida and across my region in Tennessee and North Carolina. On Twitter and Facebook the complaints are piling up about loss of internet and email, and downed websites. So what should a company do in the face of a massive problem? How do you use the myriad of tools online to effectively communicate with customers and resolve issues?

Social TV is making headlines as broadcasters endeavor to monetize their audiences whose attention is now spread simultaneously across multiple platforms. It is now common knowledge that most TV viewers, while watching their favorite shows, are actively engaged in social media conversations about the shows. Broadcasters have largely seen this phenomenon as an opportunity to grow the audience of their TV programs and accompanying websites, thereby increasing the value of those properties. However many broadcasters have been seeking ways to harness their social media audiences to create new incremental revenue streams. This may sound futuristic but, in many ways, the emerging business model actually harkens back to the earliest days of broadcast media.

The marathon bombing changed a lot of things for the people who call Boston home. It certainly changed things for me. It made me love the city I live in just a little bit more. It gave me a new respect for the law enforcement officials who protect the place I call home. It changed how I feel when I walk down Boylston Street toward the Boston Public Library and Copley Square. And it gave me a heightened appreciation for technology, specifically social media.

The problem with identity creep is that it goes beyond individuals. While your business may not be pulled over by customs anytime soon, you may be surprised to find that people who search for your company are asking who you are, where you are, and what you've done. The confusion that follows can cost you contacts, leads, and sales.