But using Yelp doesn’t end at listing your business. It’s important to use this site wisely and make sure people know they can find you there.

Don’t Be Shy About It

If you’ve ever been to a restaurant or other establishment that understands and uses social media, you may have seen a “people love us on Yelp” sticker in the window. In fact, some companies go as far as to show off the Yelp logo in menus, on invoices, and in email communications. This shows the world that they welcome good reviews, but aren’t afraid of the bad ones, either. The best part is that it’s all free – you don’t have to conduct a survey or pay any company to get those reviews. You simply say that you’re active and open on Yelp, and those reviews will come to you.

An added bonus is that reviews, good or bad, are something search engines like Google appreciate. The more your name appears on the Internet (or on Yelp), the better.

Talk to Your Reviewers

Even though Yelp isn’t exactly a social media website, you can still talk to others that review your business. You remain completely anonymous, so you can even have someone else do it for you if they have more interpersonal skills. If you have a bad review, or even a good one, replying and addressing the concerns or praise in the comment will help others that come to your Yelp understand what you’re all about. Even if you have a bad review or two, commenting to show people you’re actually listening will change the opinions of many people who come to read comments about your business.

Even if your business is completely Internet-based, you can still have Yelp – and you should. Don’t be shy about a bad review or two. Yelp gives you a way to handle them.

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Although not all ads are included in this new feature, many types of ads are. iOS, Android, and the mobile Web version of Facebook now allow you to click in the corner of an ad and simply “hide” it if it’s in your way. The desktop version of this feature has been available for almost half a year now, though Facebook notes that many people “don’t bother” to hide the ads in the first place. It’s even easier on the desktop version – simply click the “x” in the corner.

But this is just the beginning of the solution to “annoying Facebook ads.” Within the next month or so, Facebook plans to start offering the “x” out button not only for those ads on the newsfeed, but for those that try to get people to install more apps and for those ads that tell you that your friend has “liked” a page.

These features are going to find themselves on the iOS platform first with Android and the mobile Web following a few weeks later.

Facebook says it’s about giving people control over what they get to see on their feeds, and these new features are even more important because of the waning body of people who appreciate and use Facebook on a consistent basis. Targeting has become one of the main goals of the social media company, hence the announcement about “custom audiences” that should lower the number of “x-out” rates the site experiences by a significant amount.

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Trusted Contacts is a system that’s been tested since early 2011 but just recently hit mainstream Facebook. Though the feature is completely optional, Facebook does encourage all users to pick five most trusted contacts that can help you recover your account in case it’s locked for one reason or another. The social network sends security codes to these five friends if a lockout happens, and if three of them pass their codes along to you, you can access your account immediately afterwards.

“With Trusted Contacts, there’s no need to worry about remembering the answer to your security question or filling out long web forms to prove who you are,” Facebook said in their blog last week.

The biggest change to the feature since the testing began is that instead of selecting contacts you’d like to send a code to after you’ve been locked out, you choose your five Trusted Contacts long before you ever get locked out of an account. Your friends will receive notifications when you get locked out, and they can choose to share them with you.

Remember, you should only choose contacts you know you can trust. A good rule of thumb is to simply ask yourself if you’d allow that friend into your house with a spare key. If you would, then they might be a good trusted contact choice.

If this feature doesn’t work for you, you still have the option to answer your security questions in lieu of asking your friends for support.

Photo credit: Facebook

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But Tumblr, while it is a blogging platform, is also a social media outlet. This means that some things have to be respected if you are to succeed on this particular platform. Even so, sharing on Tumblr is easy because of how many millions of people you can reach simply by posting.

But in the beginning, try to avoid marketing. If you’re a person that’s used to marketing to people all of the time, then rethink your strategy before you come to Tumblr. The most successful Tumblr blogs are those that educate customers, hand out important customer service facts, or make an audience laugh. Focus on those things before you jump into marketing.

As always, make sure your content is quality. Tumblr requires an even more clever campaign simply because the people that use Tumblr are those who have seen everything. Most importantly, giving away things for free is a good place to start. Make sure the information you’re presenting your audience is information that not only makes you look like you know what you’re talking about, but intrigues your reader in some way as well.

Use long posts wisely. Unlike many other social media networks, on Tumblr long posts are actually a good thing. Sometimes these posts are walls of text and sometimes they’re charts, quotes, or infographics. Not only does Google like long posts, your loyal audience won’t mind sifting through one if the information is interesting (which means they’ll share with others, too).

The more you share on Tumblr, the bigger your audience and the greater your influence. All of this will mean better, more affordable branding for you.

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What’s the Email Address?

Although many hacking attempts now come from well-disguised email addresses, sometimes you can tell a scam just by looking at the email. A lot of scammers use third party services such as Yahoo! and Gmail to send emails that look convincing. Most professional emails are going to have the name of the website as the domain (IE, @facebook.com). A lot of scammers have gotten good at “spoofing,” which makes the email look like one from the official domain. In this case, it’s easier to check for the other signs of fraud below.

What’s the Sender’s Website?

If you think an email may be a fake, you can look at the website associated with the person sending it. If there are any links in the email, simply hover over it to see the URL. If the email says it’s from Facebook but the URL doesn’t lead there, it’s likely a scam and should be deleted immediately. In addition, any website that reroutes you from the original URL is also likely a scam and should be avoided at all costs.

Can You Call Them?

Every legitimate company can and will have a number you can call to verify the email was actually sent by them. Encourage your employees to always call when they are in doubt. Even if the email appears to come from you, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t call you to verify if you made a mistake you don’t usually make or linked to a strange URL that asks for private information.

This information and diligence, paired with the understanding that legitimate companies will never ask for money or passwords over email, will save you company some hassle it doesn’t need to deal with. Remember to remind your employees of these rules every quarter, and you should succeed at ensuring in imparting important knowledge to your employees.

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Not only did the hacker(s) make off with personal information like names and emails, but encrypted passwords and birthdates were also successfully stolen.

LivingSocial, owned partially by Amazon, has around 70 million customers worldwide. There are divisions of the company all around the world, including in South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand. However, all of the other divisions remain unaffected because the accounts were on different servers.

Although there are a billion or so people on the internet, this attack and successful data farming could potentially have made off with details for .5% of the users on the Internet. Of course, this could mean compromised credit cards, but also compromised passwords, which would result in huge problems because of the reuse of passwords across the Internet. “You should be changing your passwords immediately,” said Robert Hansen, director of Product Management at WhiteHat Security.

Tim O’Shaughnessy, director and LivingSocial CEO, recently sent an email out to users: “We recently experienced a cyberattack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.” He followed this statement up with the same advice that Hansen offered – change your passwords in as many locations as you can if you used the same password on LivingSocial that you did on other websites.

However, it appears most financial data, such as credit card information and numbers, managed to avoid the stolen data checklist. LivingSocial stores data for credit cards in a separate location, one that the hacker did not find.

LivingSocial is not alone in having their data stolen. In the past few months alone, Evernote, Zappos, LinkedIn, and individual accounts on Twitter have all suffered from hacking attempts. Financial institutions have also suffered DDoS attacks over the last few months.

If you’re using the same password for your bank accounts that you are using for Facebook and other social websites, now is a good time to start changing them. A different password for your email account, social media websites, and bank accounts is recommended.

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Money

Of course, harnessing the power of bookkeeping software is a good idea, but a program shouldn’t be free to do everything on its own. Computers make mistakes, and finances could, at the very least, be misfiled as things that they are not. In addition, without the human touch, payments can go out too late or too early, leaving you to answer to those companies. A human eye – or two – is very important when it comes to your finances.

Messages Delivered to Customers

Although some auto-responders are fine, especially those that simply say that a message has reached you and when a customer should expect a reply, having scripted responses for everything is very risky. Spend some time on the emails you write to customers, even if you’ve said the same thing to a hundred different people before. In addition, make sure any ad campaign you have going targets the people it’s directed at instead of being generic and “spammy”.

Social Presence

Yes, some things about your social presence can be automated, like scheduling tweets or blog posts a few days or weeks ahead of time. But not everything on social media is meant to be automated. You need to target your audience and add that “human” quality to your posts to really harness the power of the word “social” in “social media”. Make sure that everyone gets a customized response on your blog, and that you always reply with thought as well.

Automation can make your life much easier, but make sure you use it sparingly so it can help your company grow in the long run.

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The shareholder okay was the last step in a long merger process that included okays from Federal Communications Commission and the US Justice Department as well as approvals from the boards of both companies. The deal, which has now been finalized, is expected to close May 1^st – less than a week from now.

“This is a major step for Deutsche Telekom,” Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann said publically in his statement on Wednesday. “We have accomplished a lot in the USA recently, for example our network modernization and the new T-Mobile USA management team, which has seen considerable success. And we have finalized the contracts with Apple and MetroPCS. The merger with MetroPCS is extremely important, since it enables us to be more aggressive in the USA.”

In the merger, it was decided the two companies would keep the T-Mobile name, but the flexibility and devices of MetroPCS are expected to come with the company.

Some of the benefits expected can be summarized with one word: flexibility. Not only will T-Mobile now be offering no-contract monthly plans and SIM-only options, MetroPCS users will be able to tap into T-Mobile’s strong LTE network by simply upgrading their phones.

“A combined T-Mobile and MetroPCS will unite two companies with one common vision: challenge the status quo and deliver exceptional wireless experiences for our customers. As America’s Un-carrier, we will redefine the wireless industry,” said T-Mobile’s CEO, John Legere, in a recent statement.

Those who have invested in MetroPCS can expected a little over $4 in cash returned to them in addition to a total of 26% of the combined company. Deutsche Telekom, the company that now owns both T-Mobile and MetroPCS, has decided to hang onto the addition 74%.

If you have either T-Mobile or MetroPCS, be prepared for big changes in areas that include pricing, plan availability, device choice and network coverage.

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This is because Facebook has decided that they are going to remind everyone that’s on Facebook that there is, in fact, another way to communicate: through Facebook messenger. One use of the dots on Facebook now is to indicate the “presence” of someone who’s actually online at the moment and can be chatted with in real time. The tiny dot turns green when you hover over it to initiate a chat with someone, and with one simple click you can successfully begin to talk to someone who’s online.

The test right now of these dots is limited, and Facebook designers aren’t sure if the feature is going to roll out across the entire site just yet. In addition, the feature, much like the “reply” feature introduced a few weeks ago, is desktop only. In fact, many of the new features are planned only for desktop until further notice.

It seems that Facebook just wants you to communicate with the people you can communicate with when they’re around to talk to, which flies in the face of critics’ opinions lately of the increased ad activity on Facebook, including the new “pay to talk to someone you’re not connected to” feature.

Keeping Facebook users tied to its messaging, Newsfeed, and entire website is incredibly important for the company since research shows the younger generation is beginning to navigate away from Facebook to other more popular websites, such as Instagram and Twitter.

The dots have also been used in the notifications drop down to indicate “read” and “unread” notifications.

More features are in the works, but Facebook has yet to reveal them to its users.

Photo credit: Facebook

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Social.com is part of an acquisition the company recently made of Buddy Media, a company that publishes content.

Now, there are three services that describe the Salesforce experience: Radian6, which “listens” to fans of your social media pages and shoots back statistics; Buddy Media, that publishes interesting content on social media pages; and social.com, that is described as a “self-serve application” that can be used by companies, retailers, brands, and even advertisers themselves to help with managing social ad campaigns as well as developing them.

Salesforce says this is the first platform that connects social media ads with CRM tools so that the ads can be monitored, adjusted, and changed using the real-time data Social.com provides. Salesforce says that up until now, there hasn’t been any viable way to connect campaigns on social media platforms with real-time conversational data. And them Social.com was born.

Though Social.com isn’t in full bloom just yet, the beta seems promising. In about ten minutes, a company or individual can set up a social ad campaign that includes targeting metrics, where the campaign is going to be delivered, and budgeting options for those who may not have the amount of cash that may be required to run a full campaign.

Gordon Evans explained a little more about the idea behind Social.com at the product demo yesterday: “The idea is that we’re trying to bring agencies a lot closer with brands to make these campaigns easy and efficient.”

Social.com is ready to take on clients as of today, but most of the features that define the site, such as real-time updates on your campaigns and CRM integration, aren’t set to launch until early summer.

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