TrackMaven has analyzed more than 17.5 million social media posts from more than 17,000 brands in order to provide a listing of the best times to post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.

At last week’s RightsCon in Brussels, much of the talk was about “fake news” and what to do about it.  I was on one of several panels devoted to the topic and found the conversation enlightening.  Here’s what I said and some of my reactions from the panel. The panel’s title was “Resisting Content Regulation in the Post-Truth World: How to Fix Fake News and the Algorithmic Curation of Social Media.”  So, unsurprisingly, the panelists largely agreed that the government should stay out of the way. I met no resistance when I said that freedom of expression means that governments should not determine what is or and what is not fake news; that’s a path to censorship, and we don’t want to go there. I also got buy-in from my second big point, which was that Internet platforms are playing and ought to play a crucial role in controlling the spread of fake news. This role has two distinct components.  Platforms ha ...

A new research report in Publishing Executive shows that B2B publishers and distributed content—content hosted on external platforms—are not sharing the love. The results say that most publishers are only considering a distributed content plan, and none have a thorough one.

Every publisher uses social media but few are actually making money on it. During a recent Connectiv Digital Media Council meeting, Farm Journal’s VP of digital sales, Jim Arnold, showed how the company was able to turn its data into action and actually monetize social media.  “We’ve seen the future of digital, and from product delivery to sales strategy, it’s all about data,” he said.

"The biggest thing people don't understand is that quality content is so important to marketing to anyone under the age of 40 right now. Anyone in that demographic discovers a business for the first time by either: (A) Google searching or (B) finding their content on social media. If you are not crushing it and focusing on the content that you put out on the most important social platforms, you're going to become mute and obsolete..."

Government officials and onlookers have properly inquired into what social media platforms are doing to stop the spread of terrorist content on the internet.  And, social media companies for years have maintained complex, nuanced and evolving policies and practices that allow them to identify this content and act responsibly in the face of enormous challenges, particularly to monitor their networks and work to expeditiously remove it. Going a step further, a group of leading internet companies announced yesterday the formation of a partnership to combat terrorism online.  Specifically, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube—and potentially other companies to be joining in the future—have come together to help curb the spread of terrorist content online, announcing the decision to create a shared industry database of “hashes” — unique digital “fingerprints” — for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or ...

Last week on July 14, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) USA hosted an interesting and, unfortunately, once again, timely panel discussion entitled: “Content and Conduct: Countering Violent Extremism and Promoting Human Rights Online.”  Courtney Radsch from the Committee to Protect Journalists ably moderated and asked pertinent questions throughout the conversation.  Yolanda Rondon from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Matt Mitchell from Black Lives Matter provided a civil rights perspective.  J.D. Maddox from the State Department described what the U.S. government is doing to combat online violent extremism abroad.  I was on the panel to give SIIA’s view, which is informed by our diverse membership, which includes content and social media companies. Rondon and Mitchell eloquently described the potential dangers and dilemmas faced by policymakers in determining how ...

There used to be such clear boundaries between our home and work selves. But now the most successful Twitterers post about both, and I recently read a Washington Post Q&A with Lori Goler, Facebook's head of HR, that strongly encourages more two-way openness.

"We always include the Twitter handles when we're listing our speakers [in marketing or online]," said Matthew Cibellis, director of programming, live & virtual events, Education Week. He spoke during a recent SIPA webinar titled Best Practices in Social Media Marketing: Boost Engagement, Traffic and ROI. (Members are encouraged to access this and other webinars on the SIPA site.)

"We use [social media] a lot as a listening tool. We're watching what others are talking about...and also to hear what people say they need. That's where it can help with something like product innovation. If you hear people talking about wishing they had a materials list for something, for instance, that's when you know that maybe you need to write a book or article about that topic, or maybe develop a webinar." — Lauren Jonas, assistant executive director, National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), in a Q&A on the Folio: site