More Employers Using Social Media To Promote Their Companies

More than one-third (35%) of employers in the U.S. use social media to promote their company, according to a new CareerBuilder survey.
Twenty-five percent of these employers are using social media to connect with customers and find new business, while others are using it to recruit and research potential employees (21%), or improve their employment brands (13%).

"As communication via social media becomes increasingly pervasive, organizations are harnessing these sites to help achieve a variety of business goals," said Jason Ferrara, vice president of corporate marketing for CareerBuilder.

"Social media allows organizations to communicate in ways that didn't exist ten years ago, promoting their services and brands while also supplementing their recruitment strategy."

Businesses of all sizes and types use social media to promote their companies. Twenty-nine percent of organizations with 500 or fewer employees use social media, followed by 38 percent of companies with 501 to 1,000 employees and 44 percent of companies with more than 1,000 workers. Breaking it down by industry, leisure and hospitality led with 57 percent using social media to promote their business, followed by IT, (48%), retail (43%) and sales (41%).

When it comes to managing social media, 43 percent of employers have their marketing departments take care of their social media strategy, followed by public relations (26%) and human resources (19%). Twenty-five percent of employers have 1-3 people communication for their organization, while 7 percent have 4-5 people handle the work. Eleven percent have six or more people communicate for their company via social media and fifty-seven percent said they did not know.

Workers who come across company pages on social media sites shared what they would most like to see, including:

*Job listings-35%

*Q&A or fast facts about the organization-26%

*Information about career paths within the organization-23% source: webpronews.com/topnews/

Apple Posts Record Quarter at $15.7 Billion

Apple has released its third quarter financial results. This reflects fiscal 2010 third quarter ended June 26, 2010.

The company boasted record revenue of $15.7 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion. This compares to a year ago, when Apple reported revenue of $9.73 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.83 billion.

Obviously Apple has had some big product launches this year that largely contributed to revenue. The company sold 3.47 million Macs during the quarter (which was a record in itself), as well as 8.4 million iPhones 9.41 million iPods, and 3.27 million iPads (which were only launched during the quarter).

"It was a phenomenal quarter that exceeded our expectations all around, including the most successful product launch in Apple's history with iPhone 4," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "iPad is off to a terrific start, more people are buying Macs than ever before, and we have amazing new products still to come this year."

"We're really pleased to have generated over $4 billion of cash during the quarter," added Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer. "Looking ahead to the fourth fiscal quarter of 2010, we expect revenue of about $18 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share of about $3.44"

Apple's gross margin was 39.1% compared to 40.9% a year ago. International sales accounted for 52% of the quarter’s revenue.

The entire release can be found here

Are YouTube Users Part of Google's Rumored "Google Me" Social Network by Default?

Over a year ago, Google announced that it would start requiring all people signing up for YouTube usernames to have a Google account. Now they're going to start requiring all users of YouTube that signed up prior to that to connect their accounts to Google accounts as well.

Here are the reasons Google gives for connecting YouTube accounts to Google accounts:

- Improved account security. The Google Account system is robust and will help reduce spam across the site; users will get a slew of security and safety features that Google has spent the past decade developing.

- A single account system. This may not mean much to anyone outside of the YouTube engineering team, but behind the scenes it’s extremely complicated to support two different account systems. Having all users on the same account system not only simplifies matters, but more important, it makes it much easier to use Google technologies to keep the site running smoothly (over two billion views a day and counting), as well as introduce new functionality.

 There has been a lot of talk about Google working on a new social network (often referred to as "Google Me"). We still don't know exactly what that's going to be all about, but when people assess the success/failure of Google's social media efforts, they often overlook that Google owns YouTube, which is essentially a giant social network (albeit one that revolves around video). Not everyone uses YouTube as a social network, but the more people that have Google accounts, the more people Google will be able to claim as part of its broader "social network".

As we have discussed numerous times, Google itself could really be seen as one giant social network, with different products representing different features. If you have a Google account, you are part of that social network, regardless of what "features" you may or may not use.

“Deadliest Catch” Game To Launch On Facebook

The Discovery Channel has partnered with social game company Hive Media, to develop a game based on the television show "Deadliest Catch."

The social media game is set to be released in November on Facebook. The game will be available only in North America.

"Deadliest Catch has always been one of our favorite Discovery Channel shows," said Brian Laing, CEO, Hive Media.

"The perils of the Bering Sea and the camaraderie shared by the ship captains and crews makes a great platform for building a social game."

The "Deadliest Catch" game will allow players to be captains of their own crab boats and navigate the Bering Sea to cast and harvest pots while attempting to profit in a dangerous environment as they work their way to the top of the leader board.

"Integrating the series into a branded social game is a great way to give Deadliest Catch fans an ongoing interactive experience," said Elizabeth Bakacs, Vice President of Licensing for Discovery Channel.

"We look forward to working with Hive Media to bring the real-world adventures of Deadliest Catch to social gaming."

The Facebook game will follow the launch of the Deadliest Catch console game this fall. It will complete a three part interactive gaming experience for Deadliest Catch fans, also including a mobile game. source: www.webpronews.com/topnews/

Hitwise Predicts Move Into Gaming For Google

Google's never been a predictable sort of company. Its focus on green energy, support for the Klingon language, and decision to set up beehives on corporate property are just a few examples of unusual behavior. But if Google acts in a rational manner, Hitwise believes the company will enter the gaming sector.

This isn't a random guess. In response to Google's acquisition of ITA Software, Heather Hopkins wrote, "We at Hitwise have been waiting for such an announcement for some time. In 2006 when Google Finance was launched, we looked at the top downstream industries from Google and noticed an obvious gap: Travel. Then again in 2008, when Google Health was launched we did the same analysis and pointed out the same gap."

And now that Google's filled the gap, Hopkins concluded, "[T]he next biggest downstream industry from Google.com is Games and Google does not yet have a presence in that industry. Stay tuned..."



The one problem with this prediction might be if Google thinks it already gave gaming a shot in the form of Lively. Lively didn't come close to entertaining the average person, though, instead flopping in obscurity.

NASA Adds New Features To Its Website

NASA has introduced new features to its NASA.gov website in an effort to offer better navigation and make it easier for users share information on Facebook and Twitter.

The new features on NASA.gov include:

*We added images to the 'What are people interested in?' box on the homepage.

*We changed the navigation on the homepage multimedia box so that the options are clearer within each panel of the box.

*We swapped the 'Connect' and 'About NASA' buttons in the top navigation bar to reduce confusion since we found several users intuitively saw 'Connect' and thought 'Contact' since the words are similar and that's a more standard placement for contact information.

*We pared down the 'Share' options at the top of pages from a list of hundreds to four-options which then expand out to the full list.

* We tweaked the information we provide when you share our pages on Facebook so that it shows a image to illustrate each page and video.

NASA also said it plans on updating its Twitter box on the homepage to make it easier to know where tweets are coming from. The agency is adding more Facebook and Digg integrations so users can "Like" its pages without sharing them on social networks. NASA said it will announce the improvements once they go live.