Image by tres.jolie How’s your Instagram account treating you now? Feel better now that Instagram restored some of its original terms of service, and recommitted to observing permission marketing norms with photos? It seems like every four or five months we experience some outrageous Internet drama where tech and marketing bloggers declare the death of a brand. Instagram, Chick-fil-a, Netflix, Walmart, etc. have all been condemned for some egregious act of anti-socialness. And then of course, the brands don’t die, and in most cases correct the wrong, recover, and prosper. In the case of Netflix, they are making more money than ever before. Yet the “Instapocalypse” was different. Like other faux deaths, the network’s daily user losses seem to be …

Image via Federal Computer Week Imagine someone working in a government security clearance environment (defense, international affairs, homeland security, etc.). They need to balance their workplace restrictions and national security with their desire to chat with friends online. Multiply that individual by hundreds of thousands of people, and their personal smartphones with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest apps loaded up. Welcome to the federal government’s current nightmare. And it’s not just the government, but also the many contractors serving it throughout the country who have to adhere to the same restrictions. Geoff Livingston on Google+

Later today I will guest lecture at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business on the general state of social media for the Social Technology Marketing MBA class. I usually write out my thoughts before speaking. Here’s what I’ll be talking about today. Please comment if you’d like to suggest something, I’ve got a few hours to cram (yikes!). 1) Social Media Gets Bigger We have entered the post adoption phase of social media in America. Even a significant minority of senior citizens use social media. As of February 2012, one third (34%) of internet users age 65 and older use social networking sites such as Facebook, and 18% do so on a typical day Pew Internet. Now that businesses realize …

Image by ~ Sandy ~ This year’s Millennial Impact Report shows that anyone doing business in the United States needs mobile communications as part of its portfolio. Without mobile any business or nonprofit’s growth strategy is dead in the water. An astounding 77% of millennials use a smartphone to access the Internet, says the report — well above the general adult population’s use. This is literally any business or nonprofit’s future stakeholder, if not their current one. Geoff Livingston on Google+

The following is a narrative version of my 15 minute speech at the 2012 Innogive Conference today. Last Spring those of us at Razoo began analyzing mobile web solutions. There was a big debate because traffic was in the low single digits, but partly as a result of reading Chuck Martin’s Third Screen, we decided to offer a web based mobile version of the web site and donation platform, and an iPhone app for fundraisers. The Third Screen showed that almost every company or organization that goes mobile sees a surge in mobile traffic usually above 10%. This 10% rule was illustrated over and over again with case studies. We launched mobile at the end of 3Q, 2011, and just …

SxSW starts next weekend, and the whole sector will be focused on the immediate future of the Internet. It seems fitting that the fifth “Future of the Internet” survey was released last week by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. More than 1,000 people participated in the study, including me. From the report’s executive summary: “Technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020. They said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the …