Tag: Linked In

SCOTUS Was Probably Too Busy Today for Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn, & Yahoo

It’s reasonable to believe that the U.S. Supreme Court only had one item to mark off on its to-do list for today, the last day of the term: make a decision on President Obama’s health care law. Given the gravity of the court’s ruling, the internet has been buzzing about little else since the decision was announced shortly after 10AM this morning. While proponents and opponents alike vociferously add their comments to the discussion currently being waged on the innernets, the monumental SCOTUS decision had some collateral side-effects to a few of the top tech companies who were left empty-handed as they awaited a decision on an unrelated case.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Yahoo, among companies from other industries, had filed a brief with the Supreme Court earlier this year related to a lawsuit filed by an Ohio woman against the title company, First American Financial Corp., that handled her house purchase due to allegations that it violated the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. She hadn’t actually incurred any direct harm from First Financial’s dealing with her bank but she staked her case on the premise that the company violated the federal law and, thus, she sued for monetary damages.

According to Kashmir Hill of Forbes, the appeal is what piqued the interest of the aforementioned tech companies because, given all of the legal matters involved with online privacy, the companies have a particular interest in what it calls “no-injury lawsuits,” which would include class action lawsuits.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Yahoo joined forces to file a brief [pdf] in the case urging the Supreme Court not to allow people to sue them for breaking federal laws when those people suffered no actual injury. Specific federal laws that folks tend to get these companies on are the Electronic Communications Act, the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act — all laws designed to protect the privacy of your communications.

While the companies had a vested, albiet self-preserving, interest in this case, they were all left empty handed today as the Supreme Court changed course and decided to not make a ruling on the First Financial case.

Meanwhile, Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Yahoo will have to find another hardly related case to hitch themselves onto in order to try to preclude any possible lawsuits stemming from potential violations of privacy law. The collaboration of several big tech companies to try to attach themselves to this particular case about real estate dealings is somewhat puzzling because it really does require a detailed imagination to relate the two topics. At any rate, if these companies felt they could broadly interpet a SCOTUS decision that overturned the ruling against First Financial, there are likely many other lawsuits and appeals that the companies will likely try to poach for their own cause.

[Via Forbes.]

June 28, 2012
Google+ Is from Mars, Pinterest Is from Venus

So every webpage you visit these days is required to have a minimum of twenty social media buttons so that visitors can send updates of their internet activities shooting across the web for all to see. I bet you didn’t know that. Tweet, Like, +1, Pin, Stumble, inShare, Digg, post to Reddit (along with a million other ways to share stuff online) – you probably do at least a couple of these things. But have you mentally indexed certain sites for certain content or purposes? Whether you know it or not, you have.

A new study from The Search Agency peels back the skin of the social media onion to find out what places people have designated as their online playgrounds and what places people try to church it up and keep it professional. Some of the results won’t come as any surprise to you, such as Reddit being the place where people go to get their jollies whereas LinkedIn tends to be the professional niche of the net. See, not so surprising, is it? However, that’s merely the first layer of the big old Vidalia internet; the good stuff is many layers deeper.

For instance, the ladyfolk of the internet, of whom there are tons, haven’t really taken so much to Google+. Search Agency found that there’s over twice as many guys +1’ing on the social network than there are women. More, Google+ is also where the students and software engineers tend to hang about.

As for referral traffic driven through social media sites, Pinterest is like a giant sperm whale gobbling up a mouthful of squid because it drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. Facebook, of course, is the king of referral traffic, but StumbleUpon, which has been quietly indexed as a place people like to go for some good times, is the second highest source of referral traffic after Facebook.

The data collected by Search Agency provides some good direction if you’re looking to market to a particular niche of people. Sure, Facebook and Twitter provide an easy outlet to fire a scattershot of content across a wide swath of people, but if you’re interested in fine-tuning your aim, you might want to focus on a site like Pinterest or Google+, depending on what you’re target audience is.

“By taking a closer look at the dominant audiences on popular platforms, we thought we could show a clearer vision of where businesses should focus their social media strategy on based on each site’s best-selling points,” said David Carrillo, social media manager at The Search Agency. “As marketers, we understand the importance of sewing our efforts in the most effective places.”

So have a look and see if you see yourself reflected in any of the social media profiles that Search Agency has compiled. Groups of people in the physical world always self-segregate into cliques, so why should the internet that all of these people from the physical world reflect anything different?

Social Sharing Button Playground brought to you byThe Search Agency

May 23, 2012
Statista Reveals Tech Company Earnings Per Employee

Statista has come out with some interesting new figures about how much money a company generates per employee based on their reported figures. I know this is the technology age, but these figures are huge! Below are the bar graphs they put together to help us see the breakdown:

I would be interested to see what employees make at these tech firms. It’s interesting that these few companies can generate so much revenue. I can’t help but wonder about the larger manufacturing and service based corporations. What does their per employee breakdown look like?

February 7, 2012