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Google has added another executive with retail experience to its Google Glass management team. Late Thursday night, the company announced that Ivy Ross will become the first Head of Google Glass — the person in charge of the overall Glass division. Ross will start at Google on Monday (May…

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Your company has a culture. This isn’t news. Some cultures express themselves consciously, written on signs plastered to hallways or found on your website. Others subconsciously, hidden away in the minds and work processes of its employees; an unofficial, unspoken, culture that permeates an organization.

SME Digital (the agency arm of Social Media Explorer), prides itself on its “Work from Anywhere” culture. Our team is free to work from anywhere across the globe (provided they can find a strong internet connection and be available for client calls). I’m currently writing this post from a rental in Victoria, Canada, where I’ve been staying for the past couple weeks. Not going to lie, it’s a pretty wonderful experience and adds, for me, a unique level of value to the company. And that value-add is exactly why we have “Work from Anywhere” as part of our culture.

Strong, positive organizational cultures bring with them a host of added benefits. They empower teams to produce exceptional work; they can reduce turnover rates and can even supplement lower salaries/bonus structures. Likewise, a negative company culture can flat out destroy a company. It can lead to low productivity levels, petty theft, negligence, apathy and other destructive behaviors or actions.

Working in an agency environment, I have the privilege of partnering with some fantastic companies. Most of which have positive company cultures and a few others negative cultures. These negative cultures aren’t obvious on day 1. It’s not like any of these companies had a poster in their break room that said, “Only work as hard as you need to to not get fired.” Instead, the negative culture of a company would manifest itself through the everyday actions and conversations of team members, delayed responses, cancelled phone calls, missed project deadlines. Of these …read more

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Is that potato a spitting image of Winston Churchill, or is my brain just playing tricks on me?

In today’s Mashable Minute, Elliott Morgan uses his face to explain “pareidolia,” the sensation responsible for why we think we see faces everywhere

Oh, and be sure to check out yesterday’s episode. It’s about killer robots, y’all

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G1GKJu5epo&w=560&h=315] …

More about Face, Social Media, and Youtube …read more

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Pinterest is best known as a destination where people can share affordable wedding ideas, dip recipes, and inspirational quotes pasted over photos of white sand beaches. But a small number of Pinterest users also swap how-tos on building bomb shelters, storing food, and emergency medical care—for “when there are no doctors.”

Meet the preppers of Pinterest

These are people who anticipate financial, environmental, or biological catastrophe, and are actively preparing by stockpiling food, medicine, weapons, and other tools for survival. There are pinboards for every type of prepper.

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More about Apocalypse, Pinterest, Social Media, Doomsday, and Survival …read more

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Who wants things removed from Google under the newly declared “right to be forgotten” in the European Union? A convicted cyberstalker, an attempted murderer, a politician, a business with bad reviews and a pedophile are among those making such requests to Google. Yesterday, the BBC…

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Aiming to aid brands with their in-the-moment marketing, Spredfast today announced the release of Spark, a new social media dashboard that enables users “to tune into timely moments and conversations the minute they start.” We’ve well documented the trend of newsjacking —…

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Adrian Wong still lists himself as a “professional daydreamer” on LinkedIn, but he’s just left Google[x] where he was a lead electrical engineer on Glass to start “Building the Metaverse” at Oculus VR. Wong had been at Google since December 2010 following a stint at Sandia National Laboratories, but now he’s working at Facebook’s latest mega-acquisition. A… Read More …read more

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Pinterest bills itself as “the world’s largest human created collection of things,” with more than 30 billion pins on 750 million boards. It’s a treasure trove of data about user interests that Pinterest digs into to serve more relevant related content to Pinners. Today, it shared some…

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While social networking holds a great deal of value for any organization, it’s essential for nonprofits. When working with the often limited resources of a nonprofit organization, sometimes creative solutions are needed to tackle everyday business challenges — and social offers a great way to reach huge audiences without much of a marketing budget.

“Social media has enabled many smaller organizations to achieve more visibility and support than otherwise, simply because they can more easily reach a wider audience,” explains Shari Ilsen, Director of Engagement with VolunteerMatch. “The fact that social media can instantly and authentically connect people from across the world has changed the nature of nonprofit and volunteer engagement. It’s no longer necessary to stick close to home to find supporters.”

Making Volunteering Social

VolunteerMatch, a nonprofit dedicated to matching up the right volunteers with the right charities, is all about making connections between good people and good causes — and this community-minded philosophy makes it a great fit for social media success. “Social media helps us connect with new people who might not know about us and strengthen our relationships with those who already do,” says Ilsen. “We have a lot going on, a lot of ways for people to get involved with what we do and with each other around volunteering.”

VolunteerMatch isn’t just a tool for making social connections work: it goes beyond simple matchmaking to provide resources for volunteers, socially responsible businesses, and nonprofits. This kind of added value makes VolunteerMatch shine on social channels, where it highlights both its own content as well as information from around the web that’s relevant to its users. “Everything is part of our over-arching strategy of ‘Provide Value,’” explains Ilsen. “We only post if it’s useful for someone in our audience. We keep it light, engaging, approachable, and focused …read more

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Earlier this year, Facebook introduced a more streamlined look for News Feed and Pages. While the latter made it easier for admins to access the features that are important to them, the News Feed revamp put an even greater emphasis on the images you share. As a result, brands have had to abide by a fresh set of image-sizing guides.

Although you’ve likely already made the necessary adjustments to your Facebook Page’s cover photo and profile image, the visual content you’re uploading might not be optimized for News Feed. In this article, we’ll review the sizing requirements for your Page’s assets and provide best practices for sharing News Feed-optimized content.

Cover Photos and Profile Pictures

It can be frustrating having to tweak your cover photo and profile image every time Facebook makes a design change, but working with the recommended heights and widths ensures that your Page looks fantastic.

The current size of cover photos is 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. Uploading an image that’s smaller than these dimensions will result in stretching to meet the larger size. This means that an less than ideal version of your asset could be displayed. As a general rule, cover photos must be at least 399 by 150 pixels.

To ensure the fastest load times for your Page, your upload should be less than 100 KB. If you’re cover photo includes your logo or text, you can improve the quality of your image by using a PNG file.

Profile pictures are square and display at 160 by 160 pixels; however, the photo you upload must be at least 180 by 180 pixels. Uploading a square image is recommended, otherwise rectangular images will be cropped to fit a square.

Creative Examples

If you’d like to get creative with your cover photo and profile picture, the latter is located 23 …read more

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The Guardian recently asked five feminists whether sexism has become more prevalent in the digital age, or simply more visible? There is no doubt of its growing visibility on Quora.

Last month, one male Quora user’s “first ever post” was to the Rage Against Quora blog — created for “questions, answers, policies and design issues that really annoy you.”

The post, titled Dear Men @ Quora, points to the site’s increasing problem with misogyny. Quora’s growing community of women are repeatedly subjected to sexual discrimination, denigration, sexual objectification and even stalking.

The post’s author appeals to Quora’s male-dominated community to start behaving like “gentlemen” and calls for “all men to stop this kind of behavior.”
A few days ago I came across this question:

Women on Quora: What are the issues that women face when writing on Quora today (March 2014)? What should Quora do about these problems?

The revelations made here are absolutely shocking and embarrassing.

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The most shocking was Alia Caldwell’s situation, in which her online stalker actually moved near her and coerced her to leave her hard-worked-for home.

After reading this, I was shocked that these kinds of things have happened on Quora. In many of the cases I’ve read here, men continued to make advances even after being explicitly told NO.

We all came to Quora to gain knowledge, to know things we never knew existed. We did not come here to harass women and stalk them or be harassed and stalked.

The first comment under the post is by Rage admin Tatiana Estévez, who says, “We’re definitely considering all the issues that have come up on this page.” Still, until SocialTimes contacted the site on Tuesday, there had been no official response from Quora regarding what specific steps the company is taking to deal with the issue.

The …read more

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The Handsome Family‘s gothic Americana music has a timeless sound. That’s one of the reasons HBO’s True Detective series used their tune “Far From Any Road” in the opening credits. The haunting song sounds like it could’ve been recorded in any year between the mid-1960′s and now.

What’s the secret to their classic sound?

Well, like most compelling recordings, it’s a combination of good writing, a memorable performance, and magical production.

Brendan Doherty, writing for the website Pyragraph, recently interviewed Brett Sparks of the Handsome Family about the band’s creative influences and recording secrets.

One part of the interview I found particularly interesting was Sparks’ tips on reverb. Asked how he’s able to get such an immediate, present sound while also keeping things spare, Sparks says:

I record in a small very dead space. That helps.

As far as intimate goes, let’s just say I’ve been through my cavern reverb phase. That’s distancing. These days I try to use reverbs that are small. Small to medium rooms or plates. Lately I have also been tending toward using more convolution reverbs. These are “real” reverbs generated from impulse responses (IRs) of actual spaces. Kinda like sampling. So you can put the reverb IR from the Ryman Auditorium (former home of the Grand Ole Opry) on your vocal if you choose. There are hundreds of online IR libraries. I especially love the samples of classic studios.

Don’t forget: You can EQ your reverb. If it’s too bright and diffuse, many reverbs have an EQ feature so you can dampen the “space.”

A good, simple way to get presence is through the use of predelay. <a target=_blank rel="nofollow" title="Predelay is a parameter on a reverb unit" …read more

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