How Many Social Media Sites Should Your Business Use ...

I help businesses of all sizes learn how to better incorporate social media into their marketing efforts and grow their business and cultivate fans. ?Perhaps the most common question I hear (especially from small businesses) is ?How active should we be with social media??

The problem is this: ?Too often in this space, companies are told that they need to ?be everywhere? when it comes to social media. ?They are told they need to keep and maintain a presence on every major social media site, plus any ?emerging? one. ?Because you never know when today?s ?shiny object? will become tomorrow?s Facebook.

Ok so let?s say you are a small business that has 5 employees, and you can only have one of those employees devote 4 hours a week to social media. ?If that one person is asked to spend those 4 hours a week maintaining 8 different social media sites as well as a blog, what type of results do you think they can expect?

The crappy kind.

The worst thing you can do as a business is to spread yourself too thin with social media. ?If you are ON a social media site, your customers are expecting you to be there and be engaged there. ?So my advice to businesses is to do less with social media, not more. ?I would much rather see you only use 2 social media tools and use those two tools well, versus trying to use 10 different tools, and failing at all of them.

For reference, I use social media to help market and grow my marketing consulting business. ?Almost all of my social media usage to that aim is reserved for just two tools: ?This blog, and Twitter. ?I?m not active on Instagram or Pinterest or really even Plus. ?Why? ?Cause I am one person and can?t be everywhere.

You can?t either. ?If you want to decide if you should be using a social media tool, ask yourself two questions:

1 ? Are my customers using this site? ?If they aren?t, then you probably shouldn?t be either. ?If they are, then ask yourself?

2 ? Are my customers using this site to talk about my business and/or the products/services my business creates? ?If they are, then you should probably be using that social media site/tool. ?If not, then you probably shouldn?t be there.

That?s it. ?And if it turns out that you can find 5 social media sites that fit this bill, then you need to prioritize the sites in order of importance for your business to use. ?Then see how many of those 5 sites you can find time to maintain a valuable presence on.

But if you really want to use social media effectively, think about using fewer social media tools, not more. ?Start out small, and nail that, then you can expand into using more social media tools if it makes business sense to do so.

So the next time your boss worries about using social media and thinks that they can?t afford to ?be everywhere?, tell her I said its ok to start small. ?The world will not end tomorrow if your business doesn?t launch an Instagram account today

Source: http://www.mackcollier.com/how-many-social-media-sites-should-your-business-be-using/

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IRL: Chromebook Pixel and AlienBees' ABR800 Ringflash

Welcome to IRL, an ongoing feature where we talk about the gadgets, apps and toys we're using in real life and take a second look at products that already got the formal review treatment.

Sure, the Chromebook Pixel is expertly constructed, but you won't find more than a sentence about that here. Nope, we'd rather talk about its blazing fast LTE speeds. As for our copy editor Philip, he doesn't write for Engadget often, but when he does, it's about camera gear.

Filed under: Misc, Google

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/3rD-bsbhxsc/

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10 Things to Know for Monday

Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Monday:

'BY HOOK OR BY CROOK, WE WILL BRING MORSI DOWN'

Massive crowds of protesters hit streets in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, aiming to show that the country has irrevocably turned against its Islamist president.

WHO'S LEVELING NEW SURVEILLANCE ACCUSATIONS

Key allies are threatening sanctions against US over report of covert listening devices installed in European Union offices.

THE MIRACLE ON THE HUDSON, ACT II

A helicopter carrying four Swedes on a sightseeing tour of NYC makes an emergency landing on the river, with all escaping unhurt.

OBAMA: AFRICA MUST FOLLOW MANDELA'S VISION

The president calls on Africans to focus on expanding opportunity, promoting democracy and supporting peace.

WHY FEDERAL MARRIAGE BENEFITS WON'T HELP EVERYONE

Many middle-income couples should get welcome tax breaks. But those at the top and bottom could face big increases.

HOUSE TAKES UP IMMIGRATION FIX

Legislation reaches the Republican-led House, where conservatives could face primary challenges if they appear too lenient.

SESQUICENTENNIAL FOR CONFEDERACY'S HIGH-WATER MARK

More than 200,000 are expected to swarm the south-central Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg over the 10-day period commemorating the Civil War battle.

SOUTHWEST SIZZLES AS TEMPERATURES SOAR

Death Valley, the hottest place on the planet, reaches 127 degrees. Phoenix hits 119, with more heat forecast.

NO BUCKS MEANS NO BANG FOR JULY 4TH

Fireworks are canceled at a number of military installations because of budget cuts and furloughed workers.

A WHIFF OF TEAR GAS AT BRAZIL SOCCER FINAL

Police battle thousands of anti-government protesters outside the stadium in Rio hosting the Confederations Cup.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/10-things-know-monday-104352258.html

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Gay marriage opponents ask Supreme Court to reimpose California ban

By Steve Gorman and Alex Dobuzinskis

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Opponents of gay marriage filed a long-shot petition on Saturday with the Supreme Court asking the justices to immediately halt same-sex weddings taking place in California since Friday, when an appeals court lifted a 5-year-old ban on gay matrimony.

Marriage ceremonies of gay and lesbian couples went ahead after a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco removed its stay of a trial judge's order declaring the gay marriage ban, known as Proposition 8, unconstitutional.

The stay had been in force while the decision striking down Prop 8, a state constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2008, was appealed to the Supreme Court. Political supporters of the measure were left to appeal the case because state elected officials declined to defend it.

But the justices on Wednesday ruled Prop 8 proponents lacked legal standing to defend the ban, a decision that left the trial judge's ruling intact and paved the way for gay marriage in the state to resume.

The Supreme Court had said its ruling would not go into effect for at least 25 days, the amount of time normally given the losing party, in this case, Prop 8 backers, to seek a rehearing of the matter.

But California Attorney General Kamala Harris publicly urged the appeals court to lift its stay sooner than that, and on Friday the 9th Circuit did so in a surprise move that prompted a flurry of hastily arranged same-sex weddings up and down the state.

Harris herself officiated the very first one, a ceremony in which one of the two couples named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Prop 8, Kristin Perry and her fianc?e, Sandy Stier, exchanged vows on a balcony overlooking the grand staircase at San Francisco City Hall.

Dozens more couples lined up on Saturday at City Hall as officials kept the doors open to accommodate gay and lesbian couples eager to tie the knot.

The scene was upbeat but subdued, with many couples casually dressed as they waited to obtain marriage licenses. The calm was punctuated about every 15 minutes by loud clapping when a wedding ended, as family and friends of a newly wedded couple joined in applause with marriage license applicants.

City Administrator Naomi Kelly said at least one couple came from as far away as Texas.

One pair of San Francisco newlyweds, Ken and David Miller, who have been together for 24 years, said they decided to seize the moment on Saturday out of concern that the window for same-sex nuptials could somehow close again.

"We knew how the courts can play games and pull the plug," said Ken Miller, 60. "But the courts are closed over the weekend and the city was open, so we thought we should do it."

In their application asking the Supreme Court to overrule the 9th Circuit and reinstate the gay marriage ban, opponents argued the appeals court had jumped the gun in lifting its stay.

The Arizona-based group Alliance Defending Freedom argued that the 9th Circuit lacked authority to act when it did, and that it violated the terms of its own stay requiring the ruling remain in place "until final disposition by the Supreme Court."

'WEAK ARGUMENT'

But the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which sponsored the federal court challenge to Prop 8, issued a statement insisting the 9th Circuit acted under its own "broad discretion" to issue its stay in the first place.

"Now that the Supreme Court has decided that the injunction against Proposition 8 must stand, it was entirely appropriate for the 9th circuit to dissolve its stay of that injunction," the alliance said in a statement.

Foundation lawyer Ted Boutrous said Friday's move was hardly unprecedented and that appeals courts had acted similarly in previous, lower-profile cases without drawing attention. Prop 8 supporters, he said, "should hang it up and quit trying to stop people from getting married."

Margaret Russell, a constitutional law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law in California, told Reuters the petition by Prop 8 backers had little chance of success.

"The 25 days isn't a final date. It's a period of time, and the 9th Circuit has the right, actually, to act within the 25 days," Russell said. "They lost the case, so I think that's a weak petition and a weak argument."

Daria Roithmayr, a University of Southern California law school professor, said she expected the petition to be dismissed.

With the federal appeals court action on Friday, California became the 10th state, in addition to the District of Columbia, where gay marriage is legal. Laws legalizing same-sex marriage are due to go into effect in the coming weeks in three more states - Delaware, Rhode Island and Minnesota.

About 18,000 gay couples were previously married in California during a five-month window in 2008 after the state Supreme Court swept aside an earlier ban but before Prop 8 was passed in November of that year.

In August 2010, then-U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker declared Prop 8 unconstitutional following a three-week trial that marked the first challenge in federal court to any state law barring same-sex matrimony. It was his injunction against further enforcement of Prop 8 that had remained stayed by the appeals court pending resolution of the case.

The renewed tolling of wedding bells for same-sex couples in California capped a historic week for gay rights nationwide. The Supreme Court on Wednesday also struck down a U.S. law that denied various federal benefits to married gay couples.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman and Alex Dobuzinskis; Writing by Steve Gorman; Additional reporting by Patrick Creaven in San Francisco and Lawrence Hurley in Washington; Editing by Eric Walsh and Eric Beech)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-petitioned-reimpose-california-gay-marriage-ban-000509450.html

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Mark Munoz shows off slimmed down physique for UFC 162 after ?turning to food for comfort?

Last summer, Mark Munoz was knocked out by Chris Weidman. Then he had to recover from a foot injury sustained while training for the Weidman bout. It was a rough turn of events for a fighter who had title shot hopes and who had been on a four-bout winning streak.

He turned to what so many turn to for comfort in tough times -- food. Munoz talked about his struggles on his website.

Battled through injury, self-doubt, and depression. I turned to food for comfort and what I found was more heartache. A never ending cycle of ?eating because I was sad and sad because I was eating.? I had to find peace and comfort in my faith in God, He shaped my life.

In the above picture, Munoz showed off how far he has come since January of this year. He went from 261 lbs. to 199 on June 27, which is not far from his fighting weight of 185 lbs. It's an impressive turnaround for a 35-year-old fighter.

This Saturday, he'll fight Tim Boetsch at UFC 162 with a whole new physique. It's his first chance to get back on the winning track after the loss to Weidman, who will fight for the middleweight belt on the same card. Will his newly healthy body make a difference? Make your pick here.

More popular MMA stories on Yahoo! Sports:
? Frankie Edgar not afraid to change weight classes again
? Ronda Rousey: Coaching 'TUF' has been emotionally taxing
? Make your UFC 162 picks today!

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/mark-munoz-shows-off-slimmed-down-physique-ufc-161839097.html

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Identifying climate impact hotspots across sectors

July 1, 2013 ? One out of 10 people on Earth is likely to live in a climate impact hotspot by the end of this century, if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. Many more are put at risk in a worst-case scenario of the combined impacts on crop yields, water availability, ecosystems, and health, according to a new study.

It identifies the Amazon region, the Mediterranean and East Africa as regions that might experience severe change in multiple sectors. The article is part of the outcome of the Intersectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP) that will be featured in a special issue of PNAS later this year.

"Overlapping impacts of climate change in different sectors have the potential to interact and thus multiply pressure on the livelihoods of people in the affected regions," says lead-author Franziska Piontek of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "This is why we focus on multisectoral impacts around the world, which turn out to be felt in developed as well as developing countries."

The study is the first to identify hotspots across these sectors while being based on a comprehensive set of computer simulations both for climate change and for the impacts it is causing. Modelling groups from all over the world collaborated under the roof of the ISI-MIP project to generate consistent data. This is an unprecedented community effort of climate impact researchers worldwide to elucidate the risks that humankind is running. It aims at laying a new foundation for future analyses of the consequences of global warming.

"Now we looked for instance into the water availability during the last thirty years," says co-author Qiuhong Tang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "We took as the threshold the water availability only undercut by the three driest years. When the average water availability in our projections under global warming sinks below this threshold, we call this severe. So what today is considered extreme could become the new normal." This is the case in the Mediterranean.

The combination of multiple different impact and climate models increases -- even though this at first glance seems to be a contradiction in terms -- both the robustness and the spread of results. "We get a broader range in projections of future crop yields, for example, when we recognize assumptions in both the climate and the impact model processes. However, locations with strong agreement among model approaches are more reliable hotspots than those identified by a projection based on just one model with all its underlying assumptions," says co-author Alex Ruane of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "It allows for a risk management perspective -- in the hotspot parts of Africa, for instance, even small temperature rises can lead to additional losses that many small farmers simply cannot afford."

The study takes a conservative approach with regard to model agreement. To make allowance for the large spread of results, the scientists also computed a worst case-scenario, based on the most worrying 10 percent of computer runs. This assessment shows a large additional extent of multisectoral climate impacts overlap, with almost all the world's inhabitated areas affected.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/hnQKbSJHqcw/130701151604.htm

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Intergalactic magnifying glasses could help astronomers map galaxy centers

June 30, 2013 ? An international team of astronomers may have found a new way to map quasars, the energetic and luminous central regions often found in distant galaxies. Team leader Prof. Andy Lawrence of the University of Edinburgh presents the new results on Monday 1 July at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in St Andrews, Scotland.

If a star passes too close to a giant black hole found in the centre of a galaxy, it will be shredded by the strong gravitational field. This produces a flare-up in the brightness of an otherwise normal looking galaxy that then fades over a few months. In a large scale survey using the PanSTARRS telescope on Hawaii, Prof. Lawrence and his team studied millions of galaxies to search for this rare effect. They did find flare-ups but with very different behaviour to the 'star shredding' predictions.

Instead of seeing a fade over months, the objects they found look like 'normal' quasars, regions in the centre of galaxies where material is swirling around a giant black hole in a disk. But the quasars in the survey were not seen a decade ago, so must now be at least ten times brighter than before. Monitoring with the Liverpool Telescope on La Palma showed that they are also changing slowly, fading over a timescale of years rather than months.

The biggest surprise however was that the quasars seemed to be at the wrong distance. Measuring the characteristic shift in lines found in the spectrum of the quasars allows astronomers to measure the speed at which they are moving away from Earth. Knowing the way in which the universe is expanding enables scientists to deduce the distance to each object.

In the new survey, the quasars are typically around 10 billion light years away, whereas the galaxies that host them seem on average to be about 3 billion light years distant. The distances are rough estimates, so it could be that the estimated galaxy distances are completely wrong and that they are actually much further away. The black holes in their centres have then have flared up very dramatically, explaining why they seem so bright. But past studies of thousands of well-known quasars have never shown events on this scale.

If however the estimated galaxy distances are right, then Prof. Lawrence and his team believe they are looking at a distant quasar through a foreground galaxy. Normally this has little effect on the light of the quasar, but if a single star in the foreground galaxy passes exactly in front of the quasar, it can produce a gravitational focusing of the light which makes the background quasar seem temporarily much brighter.

This "microlensing" phenomenon is well known inside our own Galaxy, producing a brightening when one star passes in front of another. (It is for example also now being used to detect exoplanets). Microlensing may also be the cause of low-level "flickering" seen in some quasars. But this is the first time it has been suggested to cause such giant brightening events.

Prof. Lawrence sees real potential in this newly-discovered effect. "This could give us a way to map out the internal structure of quasars in a way that is otherwise impossible, because quasars are so small. As the star moves across the face of the distant quasar, it is like scanning a magnifying glass across it, revealing details that would otherwise simply be impossible to detect."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/dx2MD1m0pB4/130630225229.htm

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