Employees sometimes take to Facebook and Twitter to discuss work-related matters — and employers usually don’t like that. But according to federal regulators, employers don’t have a say in the matter. In fact, regulators are passing down orders indicating employers have to scale back on policies that limit what their workers can say online. Continue reading Do Employees Have the Right to Discuss Work on Social Media?

Google uses targeted ads and so does Facebook. But it turns out that Amazon’s treasure trove of 152 million customers’ data is at the top of the digital heap. “Since last year, the world’s largest online retailer has been packaging information on what it knows about consumers so that some marketers can use it to make split-second decisions about where to buy ads online and how much to pay for them,” reports Technology Review. Continue reading Will Amazon Generate New Ad Revenue with Customer Info?

Analytics provider Next Big Sound has released its State of Online Music report, which provides a detailed look at how social networks, streaming services, online radio and digital downloads are impacting the way consumers discover and share new music. Online growth was staggering in 2012 with a 45 percent increase in new plays, 67 percent increase in new fans and 6 percent increase in new profile views. Continue reading Next Big Sound Tracks Online Music Discovery and Sharing

President Obama signed into law an amended version of the Video Piracy Protection Act, which will allow Netflix and other rental services to integrate viewing data with social media sites. Customers must consent to the shared data, which will share data related to watching, rating, and saving on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Netflix hopes the integration will increase viewing hours and customer subscriptions. Continue reading VPPA Update Enables Netflix to Share User Data on Facebook

The relationship between Hollywood and Facebook may be showing signs of strain. While the entertainment industry was quick to embrace the social network as a marketing tool, major studios are now expressing doubt. “Some industry executives are increasingly skeptical that Facebook ads and promotional campaigns that ask users to ‘like’ a movie can deliver big box-office returns,” writes the Los Angeles Times. Continue reading Studios Question the Value of Marketing Movies on Facebook

“The launch of two new features into the Open Compute hardware specifications on Wednesday has managed to do what Facebook has been threatening to do since it began building its vanity-free hardware back in 2010,” writes GigaOM. These new features mean Facebook has “blown up the server,” says the article, adding that the server has been reduced “to interchangeable components.” Continue reading Facebook Features Could Lead To End Of The Server Business

As we reported earlier this week, Facebook’s new Graph Search allows users to find answers to questions by searching their own connections and personal network instead of going the route of a traditional open Web search a la Google. According to Variety, the new search tool has the potential to “give media companies more firepower to leverage the social network for content discovery.” Continue reading Facebook Graph Search to Open New Doors for Media Companies

On Tuesday, Facebook announced its new feature called Graph Search, which “promises to transform its user experience, threaten its competitors, and torment privacy activists,” according to Wired. It allows users to “dive into the vast trove of stored information about them and their network of friends.” While it is fundamentally different from Web search, it also has the potential to transform it. Continue reading What the New Facebook Graph Feature Means For Web Search

Facebook has announced a new tool for searching all of the social network’s content for items tailored to your profile. Called “Graph Search,” it will also incorporate Bing search results. “Graph Search is meant to answer very specific questions like ‘Who are my friends in San Francisco?'” explains Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It rolled out in a limited beta yesterday. Continue reading Facebook Returns to Roots: Launches Beta of Graph Search

The second annual Year End Stats Report from social media intelligence platform Trendrr indicates that 2012 saw a major surge in social interaction involving TV programs, with significantly increased chatter across Twitter, Facebook and various social apps. Growing interest in social TV chatter was also evidenced by the recent Nielsen announcement to create the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating. Continue reading Report: Social TV Chatter Sees Dramatic Increase in 2012

According to sources briefed on the company’s plans, Facebook “is set to unveil a new video-ad product in the first half of next year in its largest attempt to date to attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers,” reports Ad Age. Those same sources said the company will “offer video advertisers the chance to target video ads to large numbers of Facebook users in their news feeds on both the desktop version of Facebook as well as on Facebook apps on mobile phones and tablets,” according to the article. Continue reading Facebook to Aim for TV Dollars by Delivering Video Ads to News Feed

While Facebook’s upgraded Nearby local search feature may threaten Foursquare one day, the current Foursquare product still performs much better than Facebook’s, according to GigaOM. Facebook has a much larger reach (600 million mobile users compared to about 25 million for Foursquare), but offers an inferior search feature. The Facebook feature uses friends’ check-ins, recommendations, and likes to help users find local places, but because most Facebook users do not check in or interact with local businesses on the social network, the feature does not work optimally. This feature could be valuable if Facebook could convince more people to use check-ins and recommendations. Continue reading Nearby Local Search from Facebook is Not Quite a Foursquare Killer

Facebook will offer improvements to its privacy settings by the end of the year to allow users to change and understand their privacy settings without going to a remote privacy settings page.

The social network will provide a dropdown box on “almost every page,” reports The Atlantic. Facebook will also include messages alongside posts to help people understand who can see the specific status update or picture.

Changes to the privacy settings are intended to help people understand who can see content, and to help users target and remove inappropriate or unwanted content.

The changes will not affect Facebook’s data sharing, and Facebook will continue to leverage user data to build targeted advertising.

While The Atlantic classifies the changes as mostly “cosmetic,” it still says they are important because simplifying privacy control could help Facebook gain user trust.

After two months of testing, Facebook Gifts is rolling out publicly to U.S. users. TechCrunch predicts that Facebook could earn between $127.5 million and $1.02 billion per year with the social commerce product.

“It lets people choose a friend, often someone who’s birthday or wedding it is, and give them a real-life gift or gift card,” explains the post. “At first it only allowed a few users to access the beta, but then let the service grow organically so anyone who received a Gift gained the ability to give them. It dropped another couple tens of millions of users into Gifts in late November, and now is finally publicly available so anyone in the U.S. can give to other people stateside.”

Since the social network currently touts roughly 170 million U.S. users, the earnings potential is massive. TechCrunch maps out this potential based on number of users and an assumed average gift amount, and speculates that Gifts could account for 3 to 24 percent of the social network’s annual revenue.

“Basically, Gifts will complement Facebook’s advertising and gaming revenue but won’t replace them,” suggests the post. “If it made $510 million a year, that would be $3 per year in additional average revenue per user in the U.S. That would nearly double the U.S. ARPU from $3.40 to $6.40.”

Of course, if successful, these numbers could increase dramatically with an international release.