The precise rituals of the Olympics hold learnings for all brands

To gain and retain customer trust, brands have to focus on ethical online design in their apps

As the festive season approaches, we can think about gifting differently

The marketing playbook frowns upon short-term gains — unless backed by sound research 

The RBI’s firm stand on the issue of softening of interest rates and how banks reacted.

The National Housing Bank has issued guidelines to housing finance companies on stamp duty and other charges, reports K.A. Martin

With the first phase of the Metro Rail to be operational soon, Nidhi Adlakha and Vishal Menon ask residents if the consequent real estate price rise is justifiable, considering other infrastructure remains unimproved

Increasing the FSI need not be the only solution to make housing affordable, argues A. Venkatasubramanian

There may be no fresh reductions in home loan lending rates, at least not until the first quarter of the next calendar year.

It is an anxious wait for the Budget and the fiscal new year.

The implications of the recent rate cut by the RBI

Mr. Wang and his team created the microscopic data recorder by taking advantage of CRISPR-Cas, an immune system in many species of bacteria.

The 19-year-old State-level gymnast from Madurai suffered shoulder dislocation twice

‘State government has to acquire land and hand it over to Centre’

Indian vaccine manufacturers and regulators have changed the way they conceive, test and evaluate vaccines, emboldening them to apply emerging technologies to old diseases and experiment with new ways to inoculate

None of us will ever be able to read all the articles and blog posts we had like to, and RSS feeds can be an incredible source of information overload. WebWorkerDaily highlights tools and tricks that can help make RSS more relevant.

We have waxed lyrical about Yahoo! Pipes before and how Pipes can create a master feed, fetching all your news feeds and filtering them, but the topic is well worth a revisit.

With a particular emphasis on making the flow of information more manageable and more relevant to you, GigaOms collaboration blog WebWorkerDaily singles out Yahoo! Pipes for its robust filtering by various criteria and PostRank, a service that gets the top posts (by engagement score) from a particular feed. You can use PostRank and Yahoo! Pipes together to find only the most popular posts from your favorite blogs and then filter them by your keywords.

Fiery Feeds is better prepared to meet the needs of that kind of user thanks to a pair of important additions: full-text search and saved searches. Throw in optimized iPad pointer support, plus a new native article rendering option, and the latest Fiery Feeds update is a compelling one.

Last week, we ran a few polls in the newsletter to learn more about how marketing goals vary between social media platforms. You may use a platform to accomplish many goals, but there is most likely one goal that you both have invested in and have consistently seen a great return on that investment.

We selected four common social media marketing goals to focus on:

Brand Awareness
Lead Generation & Sales
Customer Service
Community Engagement

Instagram and Facebook were the first two platforms we selected for the polls. Given the immense user-base of both platforms, plus the diversity of interests and communities found on each, it's not a huge shock that brand awareness took the lead in both of these polls.

Today, we have several modes and tools for consuming news. Browsers such as Opera, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge offer news integration right on their respective home screens. News providers are reaching more readers via social channels, which can get overwhelming at times. If you are an RSS feeds lover, like many others on the GT team, there are a few worthy RSS Feed reader apps for iPhone. Feedly and Reeder 4, which was launched last year, are two of the best RSS readers on iOS.

Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat get all the buzz in the social media investing world. But Pinterest has sharply outperformed them all in 2020.

Social Marketing Predictions for 2020-2025

During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a discussion was being held about the content moderation policies of various platforms and the impact of the recent US General Election. When Senator Lindsey Graham asked both Jack and Mark about their opinion whether their platforms can become addictive for the users, both answered differently.

As per Jack Dorsey, (like any other tech) social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook can make users addicted to continue using them. His opinion is in line with the opinions of several psychologists also who say that these social media networks give the users a sense of well-being by giving them a feeling of connection with others. One post after the other, and the urge of users to keep returning to these platforms to see newer posts one after another is like a trigger for their dopamine centers in the brain. And that is why psychologists believe that all social media platforms tend to become addicting for their users.

However, Mark Zuckerberg is of a different opinion. He stated in front of the Senate Committee that he believes that all the research regarding this matter is still inconclusive, and no one can say for sure if the social media platforms are addicting or not.

Think about learning. We all experience learning differently. Most of us took part in one or other forms of formal education — took a course, went to university or even attended a workshop. More often than not, we associate learning experiences with these formal settings. However, that’s not always the case; learning occurs throughout one’s life and well beyond the classroom.

In a world where social media is becoming part of our lives, it’s more relevant than ever to explore its potential as a learning and teaching tool. Research shows that social media and mobile devices can support learning and create a positive impact on both educators and learners.

As social media companies increasingly take on the role of free speech arbiters, they need to ensure their policies offer transparency and the types of checks and balances government relies on.

Social media companies do not want to moderate speech. They want to show you ads. Mark Zuckerberg famously told Senator Orrin Hatch as much in 2018 when asked about how Facebook makes money. But as advertisers and the people populating these ad-based platforms began to demand an online experience that was more heavily regulated to mitigate abusive behavior, platforms like Facebook were thrust into a quasi-governmental role. That’s a huge expansion in responsibilities for a company that just wants to show users ads. Predictably, it has not been a smooth transition.