Best Tumblr Blogs To Follow

Tumblr is a unique blogging platform (and social network) that is ideal for short-form content. The blogging platform makes it easy to contribute visual content like photos or videos as well as other types of media such as quotes, text, and links. Posts can be tagged, making them easily discovered. The user interface allows you to “follow” blogs, “reblog” content, “like” posts, submit content, and interact with the authors easily. The reblog feature in particular combined with short-form content (often very visual in nature) contributes to the of ability of its content to go viral.

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Power Outage at Super Bowl XLVII: Brands Respond on Twitter


SuperBowl 47 was put on hold by a 34 minute power outage in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, leaving the football game in the dark. Brands reacted quickly over Twitter as fans flocked to the social network for entertainment and to investigate the situation.

The use of a “second screen” is becoming commonplace during television viewing. Nielsen reported in 2012 that 85% of tablet owners watch television and use their tablet at the same time. Since conversations about brands and television are already happening on social networks with high mobile usage like Twitter, it makes sense to backup marketing efforts and take advantage of discussion. This is especially true during high-profile events like the Super Bowl, where social media usage is at an all time high. Events like the power outage during the Super Bowl present a unique opportunity for brands to behave in a light-hearted, humorous manner in order to gain exposure.
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Are You Biased? Research Says Blog Comments & Search Engines Alter Perception

According to an article published in the journal Science entitled “Science, New Media, and the Public” by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele, blog comments and the autocomplete suggestions provided by search engines (such as Google Instant results) may produce a psychological bias that alter the way people interpret and make sense of scientific information on the Internet.

As mentioned by Brossard and Scheufele, non-traditional sources of information such as blogs, have become a primary source of information about science for people; with around fifty-percent of Americans relying on them instead of other online sources. Additionally, ninety-percent of Internet users in the United States depend on search engines to discover this information.

Considering these numbers and the importance of scientific knowledge to society, an obligation may fall upon online publishers to make sure that their readers are presented with accurate information, and are subject to as little bias as possible. It therefore may behoove publishers reporting on science to take the necessary actions to mitigate the bias their readers will face by disabling comments, providing an alternative means of discourse, or altering other site features.
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Learn About Social Media ROI from an Epic Twitter Debate

Below is a heated conversation that transpired between Dan Zarrella and Olivier Blanchard over an article written by Zarrella and published by the Harvard Business Review. Zarrella’s article, entitled “How to Calculate the Value of a Like” presents a formula for placing ROI value on a Facebook like. Blanchard claims the formula is too much an approximation and is not very useful. Blanchard explains gives an example how he to attribute ROI to a social media campaign, but Zarrella is concerned about data leakage. Both Blanchard and Zarrella are brilliant minds in the social media industry, but can’t seem to agree on this topic. I recommend reading this discussion, as one can learn a great deal about assessing the ROI of a social media campaign in the process.

See the Twitter debate bellow (presented with Storify):
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