Here's what exciting things you missed this week:

• Google Retail Stores Rumored to Be On the Way - Google is reportedly opening physical retail locations that would let customers get their hands on the latest Google products, and they'll be coming just in time for Google Glass.
• Burger King Twitter Hacked - Hackers took over Burger King's Twitter account on Monday. The cyber tricksters changed the fast food company's avatar and name to "McDonalds" and sent a McFlurry of questionable and offensive tweets. This BK tweet leads us to believe Anonymous is behind it? Update: Anonymous confirms.
• Posterous Will Close on April 30 - Posterous, the once-popular blogging platform that was acquired by Twitter in March of last year, will close its doors for good on April 30 to "focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter," says their announcement.
• Twitter Now Reducing Some Tweets To 117 Characters - Starting Wednesday, any tweet sent with a URL will be reduced to 118 characters, or 117 for https links.

Join Sandra Lopez, Marketing Strategy Director at Intel for an exclusive webinar on February 20th at 10am PT/1pm ET. Sandra will share the story of how Intel engages internal and external social influencers to achieve multiple goals including:

• Help consumers choose the best tablet for them and their lifestyle
• Create over 1 million social actions with a single piece of influencer content
• Create over $5 million in earned media value 

You will also learn how SocialChorus helped Intel to leverage word-of-mouth marketing through social networks to develop earned media that is more authentic and less expensive than traditional advertising, and how it can work for your brand.

Register now, this is a limited space event.

Do you plan on attending this webinar? Let me know what you think afterward!

I absolutely love the HubSpot eBooks! I've posted about a few of them in the past. They're so incredibly easy to follow, a quick read, and always relevant to current trends... oh yeah, and they're free!

The recently published eBook boasts:

The biggest mistake marketers make with Twitter is not realizing its full potential as a way to bring in more revenue. In fact, 42% of companies have acquired a customer via Twitter. And now that Twitter's new mobile video app Vine has been added to the mix, there's even more to measure.

Yes, Twitter is a place for engagement with followers; but it’s also a channel for generating leads and driving new sales for your organization.

Our ebook, with a foreword by Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, explains how to use the social network to drive real business results. In this ebook, you will discover the different stages of optimizing your Twitter and Vine presence for attracting leads and customers.

More specifically, this 61-page ebook will teach you how to:

• Optimize your Twitter for brand awareness & search 
• Jump start your Twitter lead generation strategy 
• Incorporate Vine into your Twitter strategy 
• Measure the ROI of Twitter and Vine

Tomorrow Social Media Today is hosting a free online seminar called Build Your Own Ambassadors: How to Identify and Activate Brand Influencers.

Reaching the right online voices can make crucial differences for you brand and your sales - but the customer with the most Facebook friends or Twitter followers isn't necessarily the trusted authority that your company needs to recruit. How can you find and incentivize the influencers that will actually make a positive impact for you online?

Join us as we discuss the value of a devoted customer community and the influencers among them. What does it take to convince influencers to become passionate about your brand, and to spend their energy advocating for you? How can you reward them? We'll explore these and other vital questions:

• How many influencers do I really need? 
• How do I thank my key influencers especially while making all my customers feel appreciated? 
• To which incentives do influencers respond well? What turns them off? 
• When can I tell that my influencers have proven worthwhile?

Click here to register and to learn more about the speakers.

The exclusive, live webinar from Social Media Today is sponsored by SocialChorus and will be held on February 19th at 12pm EST / 9am PST

I won't be able to attend but if you do, please drop me a line to tell me what you think!

Here's what you've missed this week:

• Apple 'has team of 100 engineers working on iWatch' - Apple's experimental watch project may be more advanced than previous reports suggested, with Bloomberg now claiming Apple has about 100 engineers working on its rumoured iOS timepiece.

This webinar notice showed up in my email today and it sounds interesting so I figured I'd share it with other curious minds...

Top Five Enterprise Mobility Trends for 2013
Date: Thursday, February 14, 2013
Time: 1:00pm

BYOD and HTML5 were two of the top enterprise mobility trends in 2012. With mobile app development spending anticipated to grow by 50% this year, what trends will define enterprise mobility in 2013?

Marc Rosenbaum, Verivio's Director of Product Marketing, will discuss key mobility trends of 2013 including:

• BYOD and consumerization of IT are here to stay – what does that mean for enterprise apps?
• How iPads are reshaping the organization
• How will mobile security requirements evolve as more data moves to the cloud?
• Why multiple apps will be the norm
• Back-end as a Service is everywhere, but what does it really mean for the enterprise?

Here's what you've missed:

• Instagram Launches Web Feeds - Instagram introduced its first web feed, meaning users can now scroll through filtered photographs to their hearts' content — all from their PCs. Some feel this will poison Instagram's mobile intimacy.
• Twitter Hacked - Twitter issued a blog post late Friday announcing a possible security breach and live attack that may have given hackers access to 250,000 users' information.
• iTunes Reaches Milestone: 25 Billionth Song Sold - It took Apple almost 10 years to reach this milestone and as a reward the customer of the 25 billionth song is receiving a special gift.
• LinkedIn Hits 200 Million Members - Although LinkedIn reached this milestone last month, they just released a snazzy new infographic that explains their global reach.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Today when I went to update my status on Facebook, I noticed there was a new feature you could add to your status on top of a picture/video, geotag, or person/place/group/page tag. You can now add "how you're feeling" and "what you're doing".

Besides finding these redundant (because aren't those the things you're supposed to write in your status?) I also found them reminiscent of the good 'ol days... and by good 'ol days, I mean LiveJournal.

I love LiveJournal. Through LJ I learned to code websites, edit photos, and manage my first online community. But all that is another story for another day.

Now if you don't know what I'm talking about:

LJ has been offering it's users the ability to add their current location, mood, and music to their entries for quite some time now--at least 10+ years (with exception to location).

I couldn't find my LJ password to get a screencap myself so I borrowed this gem from Google Images.

Doesn't that resemble the changes that we're seeing on Facebook?


Regardless of who did what first, how do you feel about these changes to Facebook?

I'm hoping that we won't start to see an influx in people just updating us on what song they're listening to or beverage they're drinking even more than they already do. But only time will tell!

In our past 29 shows of Social Media Meltdown we have gotten in-depth with current social media issues. Now we would like to take a step back and give our viewers some intuitive beginner’s guides to various networks. Our first in the beginner’s guides series is LinkedIn. In this guide we will examine the reasoning behind joining LI, how it differs from other social networks, how to use it to find a job, and how it can “up” your networking game.

• The first article written about TheFaceBook.com in The Harvard Crimson
• The history of Facebook
• 18 Facebook gems that no longer exists

Last night's Super Bowl was full of million dollar commercials, dancing divas, a blackout... and, oh yeah, some football.

I didn't watch the game (because there were too many good chick flicks on) and even though I'm all over the internet, I still haven't come across who won. I haven't looked too hard but I feel like it would be plastered over my FB and Twitter feeds. The only thing I know about last night's game was that Beyonce and the rest of Destiny's Child rocked the house and that there was a power failure in the stadium sometime after halftime.

The other thing I haven't heard much about was the commercials. Usually the morning after the Super Bowl is when everyone analyzes the million dollar advertising spots but I'm still just hearing about Beyonce and the blackout.

It's for these reasons that I'm giving Oreo an award for best tweet of the Super Bowl.

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

No overly priced Super Bowl spot, no months and months of planning and producing -- just a spontaneous comment during an unpredicted moment.

 It was retweeted 14,420 times and favorited 4,884 times! And all it is is a witty four words with a picture of an Oreo cookie in the dark.

Absolute genius!

Here's what you've missed this week!

• Twitter's new video-sharing app Vine has a bit of a porn problem - And some of it made it to the very top of the feed this morning as an "Editor's Pick." Seems likely that Apple will yank the app until Vine installs better safeguards.
• YouTube To Shut The Door On YouTube Create - At the end of this month YouTube Create, a resource on YouTube’s website featuring third-party apps like Xtranormal, WeVideo, GoAnimate, Vlix, Magisto, Stupeflix and other video creation tools, will be shutting its doors.