RepEquity BlogRepEquity Blog

Earlier this month, The Dachis Group launched the Social Business Index, a compilation of data that illustrates how social or influential brands are online. By assessing different indicators on a real-time schedule, businesses are ranked by their level of social influence, much like Klout does currently for individuals. Some of the businesses included in the service’s beta launch are Coca-Cola, Google, Time Warner, and Nike.

Since the service is still in beta testing, I was only able to look around the website and test a limited number of features. Even though my exploration of the service was restricted, I think The Dachis Group does an excellent job of describing Social Business Index to those whose companies are not yet members. Each company is displayed through a snapshot, which provides its current ranking, change over the previous week’s ranking and its raw score. Company employees, when logged in, have access to a more detailed list of actions and statistics. Companies can also earn accolades like “Top Performer” in their respective categories depending on the industry’s ecosystem and the company’s dynamic signals. Continue Reading…

Girls rule and boys drool. A Rebtel survey released this week reports that women are more likely to use social media to connect with friends, family and colleagues more than men. The survey, which polled 2,361 U.S. adults over age 18, showed that 68% of women use social media to stay in touch with friends compared to 54% of men.

Interested in attending a social-media savvy university? The website Student Advisor reports that Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Notre Dame are the top-ranking social media schools in the U.S. The schools were rated on the number of tweets sent from their official Twitter account each day, how quickly the school responds to student requests made via their official Facebook page, and more. Visit Student Advisor for the full list.

Our favorite inter-office chat service, Skype, announced this week that it aims to connect one million classrooms to enhance the educational process through its Skype in the Classroom program. To date, they’ve signed up 16,000+ teachers and educators. Continue Reading…

This year, Facebook has announced plans to honor the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In addition to streaming “9/11: 10 Years Later – An Eveining of Rememberence and Reflection” from the John F. Kennedy for the Performing Arts, Facebook has added an application that allows people to share memories and reflections from Sept. 11, 2011 and create profile pictures or status updates memorializing the date.

This week, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo confirmed that the site now has 100 million global active viewers. However, only 60 percent of those active viewers are actually tweeting.

Google offers expanded to five new cities this week including Austin, Boston and D.C. Anyone suffering from daily-deal overload yet? Continue Reading…

As our world becomes more technology-dependent and interconnected, surfing the Internet as a private individual has become more and more difficult. Take a minute to think about it.

For many people, the first website they visit online is Facebook. Once a Facebook member has signed in, he or she stays logged in, even after navigating away from the page. In some instances, this is convenient; many news sites now require a commenter to connect to their Facebook account before adding their opinion on the article. This adds credibility to each person’s comments and prevents individuals from hiding behind anonymous accounts when making cruel or extreme statements. But who wants a Facebook wall full of third-party notices about which stories a user commented on, liked, or shared with others? Issues could arise if someone were to comment on news articles at work or home that presented a conflict of interest with their career or discussed controversial topics. Since the two would now be linked, Facebook is helping to push a user’s information to an increasing number of people.

The same goes for Google. Once logged in, the user stays connected to the email/search engine giant unless he or she explicitly chooses to sign out before going to another site. When switching between Google’s multitude of sites (Docs, Blogger, Google+, etc.) it’s nice not to have to log in ten different times over the course of a day. But as we mentioned in a previous post, if a user is constantly searching Google while logged in, the search engine will start to learn users’ preferences, which will affect what appears on search results. Being a “neutral” Internet user while logged in to Google and Facebook, as well as other social media sites, is virtually impossible. Continue Reading…

Each day, Facebook users share four billion items, including photos, status updates, videos and links. Summify has started calling the over-sharing happening on social networks each day the “Sharepocalypse.”

Thirty-four percent of external referrals to Facebook pages come from Google, Bing or Yahoo. These search referrals comprise about 9.5 percent of total traffic on Facebook pages and, not surprisingly, Google holds the highest percentage, accounting for 27.57 percent of external referrals.

In sweet tech news this week, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have replaced their player’s bulky playbooks with iPads. The decision was made in approximately two minutes, or 1/30^th of the time it takes to play a football game. Continue Reading…