Each week, Social Circles brings you the biggest news from behind the social networks. Keep up to date with the latest trends, breaking news, and expert analysis from across the web.
This week’s wrap-up includes Facebook’s new technology newswire and Groups app, a mobile meme generator courtesy Cheezburger, and a study that shows Americans spend more time looking at mobile devices than television screens.
Each week, Social Circles brings you the biggest news from behind the social networks. Keep up to date with the latest trends, breaking news, and expert analysis from across the web.
This week’s wrap-up includes increased government requests through Facebook, increased focuses and outputs from brand engagement on social visual content, a LinkedIn lawsuit, and Facebook’s fundraising effort to fight Ebola.
Each week, Social Circles brings you the biggest news from behind the social networks. Keep up to date with the latest trends, breaking news, and expert analysis from across the web.
This week’s wrap-up includes the web’s newest platform which promises to pay users, updated privacy measures for Canadian military personnel, and Facebook’s new app which takes mobile users back to the days of chat rooms.
As part of a new segment, I’ve compiled the must-read social media stories from around the web in one simple list.
This week features another enormous photo hack, Twitter further mimicking Facebook, and asks whether Ello is already a thing of the past. Without further ado, here’s the top 5:
Launching a hashtag to promote your brand often provides great potential to expand your reach, connect with fans, and use the power of the masses to help build up reputation. But as Ottawa’s Carleton University found out today, it also provides rife opportunity for subversion.
The school launched a new public awareness campaign this morning to celebrate its 75th anniversary, that follows the theme “Distinctly Carleton.”
As part of the launch, Carleton revealed a new website (as well as a special campaign page) and unveiled massive portraits of famous alumni like former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, writer Lynn Coady, journalist Nahlah Ayed, and Ravens basketball star Philip Scrubb, among others.
Part of the launch also included a hashtag campaign.
Save the Date for #DistinctlyCarleton! Oct. 15 at 10 a.m. River Building Atrium #ottnews pic.twitter.com/PLDMz5NwuJ
— Carleton U News (@CUnewsroom) October 8, 2014
It didn’t take long for students and faculty to give the hashtag an entirely different meaning.
Bullying students #DistinctlyCarleton
— Lauren Montgomery (@LO_montgomery) October 15, 2014
Destroying a community garden? That’s #DistinctlyCarleton
— Kelly B (@K_elly_B) October 15, 2014
Spending a gazillion dollars to restart a football team while cutting departmental budgets (not Sprott of course) #DistinctlyCarleton
— Christian Belisle (@Crizco91) October 15, 2014
In the streets of Hyderabad, a city in south India home to some six million people, journalist Manju Latha Kalanidhi pulled out his bucket.
Unlike hordes of Canadians, Americans, Brits, and others who have been filling their buckets with ice and water, Kalanidhi filled his with rice. After loading it up, he didn’t dump it over his head – instead, he donated it to the country’s poor and hungry population.
Dubbed the #RiceBucketChallenge, the spirit of giving is in the early stages of sweeping the nation. So far, the campaign’s Facebook page has received over 54,000 Likes.
These four steps make up the #RiceBucketChallenge. a campaign starting up in India.
The team behind Thrill, a start-up dating app, took to the streets to participate, and their video gives a good example of what this new campaign is all about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbLROtlZXVg
As reported by Reuters, other companies institutions are also trying to get more people involved. The Indian Institute of Management has already participated, while AirAsia India said that its senior management will complete the challenge next week. As more companies join on board and send out nominations for others to join, the hope is the campaign will continue to snowball.
When planning a summer road trip, the first thoughts shuffling through your mind might consist of destinations, routes, and estimating how much your wallet will suffer in rising gas prices. Before too long, though, you inevitably wind up filling up the iPod or frantically burning and marking CDs – the relationship between road trips and music is one of those unbreakable bonds.
That connection led O’Reilly Auto Parts, a chain headquartered in Missouri with more than 4,000 stores across the U.S., to place their brand in relatively unexplored land.
The company launched their own ultimate road trip playlist on 8tracks, which so far has generated over 20,000 plays and about 500 “Likes.”
If you’re not familiar with 8tracks, it’s an Internet radio outlet that allows users to upload “mixes” of songs, which can be streamed online for free through a unique licensing agreement.
Remember that one friend from the 90’s who you’d ask to burn the latest Nelly single, and he’d turn it into an expression of art and spend countless hours creating the perfect mix? 8tracks is a site that draws all those people, as well as DJs and music producers, to one place. You get the added bonus of finding, and listening to, these playlists for free.
Kyle Brown 