Collabo.com

Want a great deal? Check what your favorite brands are posting on Facebook and Twitter. Interacting with consumers through social media is becoming increasing more vital to corporate marketing strategies. The ability to globally broadcast praises and complaints about companies and brands has businesses very active on social networks.
 
“All the departments have gotten some sort of feedback from customers online. We benefit and our customers benefit,” says Amber Talbot, online public relations specialist for Scottrade. Talbot builds relationships with customers by monitoring what is being said about Scottrade online. The ability to search in real-time through Twitter allows companies to track keywords related to their brands and trademarks.
 
Starbucks spokeswoman Bridget Baker says, “It’s a great way to connect with customers. It’s where the people are.” Starbucks has almost 250,000 followers on Twitter and over 3 million fans through Facebook. This week Starbucks is giving away 800 coupons per hour for pints of ice cream to Facebook fans.
 
Scottrade and Starbucks also leverage the power of YouTube to offer customers educational and promotional videos.
 
MasterCard posts company news through Twitter, Victoria’s Secret and Gap provide original content for their Facebook fans, Zappos frequently tweets and posts specials from it’s 6pm.com discount site, and Southwest Airlines is active on the above mentioned along with Flickr and LinkedIn.
 
These are just a few examples of how social media networks are becoming important tools for businesses and consumers to communicate and interact.

Source: US News

Potentially bad news for smaller image sharing apps such as Twitpic and Posterous as Flickr (finally) adds a new feature which allows users to tweet their photos. Also this week Twitter modifies their user interface to give us more control of who we follow and who follows us.

To share photos from your Flickr account directly to Twitter you must first authorize the two services to communicate with each other through your account; standard for many Twitter applications. Now you can easily send shortened http://flic.kr URLs from the “Blog This” button on your photo pages or mobile device. Enable “Upload by Email” in your Flickr settings before you attempt mobile photo sharing.
 
Twitter tweaks it’s user interface slightly this week by enhancing features on the Following and Followers pages. Twitter now gives us two new ways to view our tweeps. A compact view gives us a clean overview of users listed on our follow pages, while the expanded view shows us a user’s last tweet along with their location. A new drop-down menu delivers quick access to @ mentions, direct messages, unfollow and block.