In the Harvard Business Review blog, blogger Umair Haque suggests that social media causes relationship inflation. Social media vehicles lead to a greater number of relationships, but they’re “thin relationships” that devalue our concept of what a relationship is. Overall, it's a fascinating perspective, but I think Haque misses a couple points.

Social clatter ™ is a Pomegranate-coined term that describes the social "noise," or overabundance of content, being created by social media.  In today’s article, I’ll explain this term and explore the social media landscape that created it.

As Pomegranate’s resident Social Media expert, it was high time I got my hands on a smart phone.  I had been contemplating the iPhone for some time, with little motivation to move forward.  Born and raised on a PC, I never really jumped on the Apple train, having been quite loyal to my Microsoft-based products for a good portion of my natural-born life.  Some would see this as a curse.  I might have to agree.
 
As a loyal Verizon customer since 1999, I began the search for a new phone.  I owned an LG Voyager for about a year but wasn’t feeling satisfied with its performance; it was time to break-up and move on.  I started casually dating the LG EnV touch, but that relationship was short lived, leaving me with a bitter taste in my mouth and a jaded outlook towards media-based phones.  I was determined to put myself back out there and meet the love of life; a phone that was, by definition, perfectly seamless for all my social networking and data management needs.  Blackberry?  Droid?  Eris by HTC?

A few weeks ago I published a post about the fundamentals of social media for businesses.  In this post, I’ll look at some examples of envelope-pushing innovations in commercial social media-- Ad.ly, and 'Off The Wall' from Resource Interactive.

There’s a lot of talk about how businesses are leveraging the influence of social media, but I haven’t noticed any real nuts-and-bolts explanations about how it’s all being accomplished.  So this aritcle explains the business benefits of a few different social media vehicles-- Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter-- and walks you through the set up.

Wondering how socially successful your company is?  Believe it or not, there is a way to measure the amount of sociability your brand has.   One company, Virtue, has created an algorithm called the Social Media Index™ (SMI) that provides a visually depicted measurement of your brand’s online conversations, including status updates, videos, photos and blog posts.

This past year, we’ve observed a growing trend of live streaming concerts online at popular social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook. All of these concerts were free to watch, including big name music artists like U2 and Alicia Keys.

Why do such well-known, mega-successful bands do this sort of thing when they can easily draw huge crowds of fans willing to pay good money for tickets? Believe it or not, there is a method to the madness.