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[typography font="Lobster" size="26"][dropcap]T[/dropcap][/typography]     his week's #SoMash is here with the top stories from last week, including Google criticizing Facebook, 10 mistakes businesses make on LinkedIn, Tumblr's success, 2012's top social media updates, and Starz's final season. Google Slams Facebook's Interruptive Ads and 'Like-Gate' The major online conglomerates have not been playing nicely this week. On Wednesday Bing launched a “Don’t Get Scroogled” campaign against Google’s practice of selling their shopping results. Later that day Google VP, Bradley Horowitz, spoke out against Facebook’s advertising practices at a public talk at the Ignition Conference in New York. During his talk, Horowitz argued that Facebook’s practice of filtering posts and reliance on algorithms, (what he called “like-gate”) disrupts user’s personal interactions. Instead, Horowitz argued that Google+’s structure, which is largely devoid of ads, is beneficial to users “by not having their most human moments interrupted by ‘the monetization agenda’ of profit-hungry social networks.” Horowitz hopes that this will further the critical discussion of Facebook’s advertising practices and bring new users to Google+. 10 Mistakes Your Business Might Be Making on LinkedIn This week Alyson Shontell from Business Insider spoke with LinkedIn’s senior manager of corporate communications, Krista Canfield, to discover how companies can better utilize the social media platform. Her suggestions include following competitors, encourage employees to fill out their profiles to completion, link the company LinkedIn profile to the business’ website, create customer groups, foster group discussions, and more. Tumblr Breaks Into Top 10 U.S. Sites  This week, Quantcast reported that Tumblr is now one of the top 10 most trafficked websites in the US., with a worldwide audience of 170 million people. Worldwide, the blog site welcomes more than 168 million unique viewers each month. Over the last month alone, Tumblr’s US and global traffic has increased by 10%. In a statement released on the company blog, founder and CEO David Karp, congratulated employees on the fact that they have “earned an audience bigger than the biggest TV networks.”

Top 16 Most Important Social Media Updates of 2012 As the year starts to come to a close, HubSpot looks back on the most important social media updates that have occurred in 2012. Ranking at the top of their list is Global Brand Pages. These pages allow marketers to be more efficient as they “maintain just one Facebook page URL, but route fans to different versions of the page based on their location.” Other important developments include mobile-only Facebook ads, tailored trends, Twitter cover photos, LinkedIn Community Pages, and more. Starz Uses Transmedia to Promote Final Season of 'Spartacus' As “Spartacus: War of the Damned” returns for its final season this January, the Starz networks has created a complementary, multi-screen experience for fans to compete with one another. The experience links to Facebook and Twitter and requires that users download a mobile app. Fans are rewarded for their participation with “three hours of bonus video content, an opportunity to unlock the first episode ahead of the premier, and a shot at an all-expense-paid trip to Italy.”  

Other social media articles from last week that you may enjoy:

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[typography font="Lobster" size="26"][dropcap]H[/dropcap][/typography] aving a pixelated or stretched avatar is today's version of wearing jeans to a job interview -- it's unprofessional. It is crucial to ensure that the images you use to represent your brand on social media are optimized for each different network. From Facebook cover photos to pins, it's hard to keep up with the different image sizes for the many social networking sites. Now there's a handy guide that provides the image sizes for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn. See how each social network measures up in the infographic below.

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[typography font="Lobster" size="26"][dropcap]T[/dropcap][/typography]     his week's #SoMash is here with the top stories from last week including successful ad campaigns from LinkedIn, Olympians rebelling against Rule 40 on Twitter, and the number of fake accounts on Facebook.

LinkedIn, which is mainly known for business networking and job searching, is also home to a $63 millin per quarter ad business. But what does a successful ad campaign look like on LinkedIn? The network's global marketing director Alison Engel shared a deck of its eight biggest advertisers: Citigroup, Cathay Pacific, Philips, Microsoft, Prudential, Chevron, HP, and Volkswagen. See how these major companies utilized LinkedIn ads below.
Citigroup used polls to generate discussion in its new Professional Women's Network group. The  group got 30,000 members in the first three months.
Prudential's group was designed to build brand awareness for future retirees. The company utilized LinkedIn Polls to gain market research data about prospective savers and investors. It received over 11,000 responses from the poll as well as over 230 comments from LinkedIn members.
Volkswagen used LinkedIn's recommendation ads to get recommendations from professionals in India. It received 2,700 recommendations in 30 days, which exceeded VW's goal by 400%.
Rule 40 of the IOC's Social Media, Blogger, and Internet Guidelines limits Olympic athletes  from appearing in advertising during the Games to prevent ambush marketing from non-sponsors. Athletes are claiming that these restrictions are ultimately affecting their performance by obstructing sponsor relationships. So, they have taken to Twitter to coordinate an online rebellion against the rule.
Track and field athletes, including Dawn Harper, Leo Manzano, Maria Michta, and Trey Hardee, are leading the campaign, using the hashtags #Rule40 and #WeDemandChange. Unless the athletes have deals with official sponsors, such as Procter & Gamble, Adidas, BMW, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola, they are prohibited from mentioning any other corporate sponsors on social media during the Games.
One athlete, sprinter Lauryn Williams, wrote:
During the time period when we have the biggest platform to be heard we cannot even thank those who have helped us the last four years...It also reduces an athlete's value to any sponsor outside the scope of the IOC or USOC, making it difficult for most athletes to secure personal sponsorship and make a living.
Do you think the rule is unfair to athletes?
Everyone knows there are fake accounts on Facebook. Maybe you've even create a few for a pet or to test apps. But we never knew just how many until now. In a regulatory filing released Wednesday, Facebook revealed that 8.7% of its 955 million monthly active users worldwide are actually duplicate or false accounts.
Facebook divided these accounts into three categories. Duplicate accounts, in which users create more than one account or create accounts on the behalf of others, make up 4.8%. Misclassified accounts are personal profiles that have been made for companies, groups, or pets. These types of profiles made up 2.4%, or 22.9 million, of active accounts. The last category is also the smallest, making up just 1.5% of all active accounts. These are the spam accounts.
Facebook disables any false accounts it finds. Although it wipes all the information associated with the profile from public view, it doesn't delete the account from its servers. Therefore, the owner of the account can't retrieve any of its content, not even by requesting a copy of the data. If your account does get shut down, Facebook says you can't create a new one without permission.

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[typography font="Lobster" size="26"][dropcap]T[/dropcap][/typography]     he Social Media Mashup is here with the top stories from last week including LinkedIn's acquisition of SlideShare, Twitter's new Discovery tab, the NBA tapping into new social networks, the launch of Pinstagram and NHL's Draw Something campaign. LinkedIn Spends $119 Million on SlideShare -- the YouTube of Slideshows The big story last week was LinkedIn's acquisition of SlideShare for $119 million. Since 2006, SlideShare allows users to upload and share documents, presentations, and videos. SlideShare attracts 29 million monthly visitors while LinkedIn gets 107 million unique monthly visitors. According to LinkedIn's SVP of Product and User Experience, "We're excited to figure out the vest ways our offerings will work together to help professionals around the world be more productive and successful." LinkedIn's CEO Jeff Weiner says that SlideShare's purpose "aligns perfectly" with LinkedIN's mission. To learn more about the acquisition, check out SlideShare's presentation: What the New Discover Tab Means for the Future of Twitter  Last week, Twitter released its new Discover tab that displays personalized trends and stories tailored to users based on an algorithm that includes the accounts your follow and the accounts those accounts follow. Launched in December 2011, the discover tab acted as a Twitter trend front page, showing the same news stories from around the Twitterverse to all users. Now, those stories will be catered to each user's Twitter experience.

Twitter is hopping on this new trend of personalized news. LinkedIn was the first of the social networks to provide tailored news articles for its users with LinkedIn Today. Recently, Facebook released a trending articles feature for the News feed that shows you the articles your friends are reading on the social reader apps. Even Google has altered its search results, basing it on users' Google+ activity. While many applaud the change, Daniel Levine feels that it changes the nature of Twitter:
Since its inception, Twitter has acted as a site you use to go out and find the information you want...But with this new change, Twitter is instead inching closer to bringing the information to your doorstep, leaving out the news that may seem disconnected from you, but informaiton you want nonetheless.
What do you think of the new Discover tab? NBA Steps Up its Social Game for the Playoffs To help kick off the 2012 playoffs the NBA launched official Pinterest and Tumblr accounts for fans to follow along. The two visual platforms offer a way for the league to share photos that it couldn't on other platforms. The NBA wanted to be sure to tap fan interest around the playoffs. Melissa Rosenthal Brenner, the NBA's vice president of marketing said,
In the playoffs, everything gets heightened on and off the court, including fan interest.
The NBA's Tumblr page will showcase photos from recent pro basketball history such as monumental moments from players or championship match-ups.

The NBA's Pinterest profile will follow to different strategies. One is to showcase apparel for ecommerce and the other to give fans a look at what makes the league so fun to follow off the court, like the hair and crazy characters of the NBA.

Pinstagram! How Two Friends Merged Pinterest and Instagram in Two Days

What happens when you combine the two hottest social media networks, Pinterest and Instagram? You get Pinstagram, of course! The product of two friends coding over a weekend, Pinstagram allows users to connect their Instagram account and view their photo stream in a Pinterest layout. Similar to Instagram, users can like and comment on photos, but they can also pin photos to their Pinterest pinboards.

Pek Pongpaet, one of the creators, says that Pinstagram fills a void: "This is the perfect interface for Instagram for me. A lot of people are still browsing the web on desktops." Besides allowing users to browse their Instagram pictures on their desktop, Pinstagram also improved Instagrams search feature by adding a tab in the top left corner.

Zynga's Draw Something Uses Brand Words in Game

Zynga's Draw Something is one of the latest apps to jump in the scene with 50 million downloads in five months. It is now working with brands to incorporate them into the pictionary-like game. Previously, the game only ran banner ads on the app, but with the new ad product brands have the opportunity to buy terms that users can draw. The NHL was one of the first to advertise on the app with terms such as puck, Zamboni, hat trick and slap shot. The league has taken these drawings and posted some of them to the official NHL Pinterest profile.

The new ad offering might be too late. Draw Something's popularity has declined among users in recent weeks. The number of active users has dropped from 14 million at the beginning of April to roughly 10 million now. What do you think of the new ad product? Think it's an effective way to integrate words associated with your brand inside an interactive game?

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