An article, “Five Lies About Social Media Marketing,” came out a couple of days ago about some of the “erroneous assumptions” cropping up regarding how companies should use social media marketing. This got me thinking. We must continuously look at the trends to understand the rapidly evolving landscape and judge for ourselves what works best for us.

How each business uses social media varies. Ideas about the “right” way to do things are always changing. One article may tell you to target your fans’ friends on Facebook while another gives you a laundry list of “dos.”

According to other expert articles featured in such publications as PCWorld and Computerworld, new social media networks like Google+ are added to the mix all the time, battling for your attention. Understanding their impact on current and emerging social media practices and the way your business communicates is vital.

And don’t forget the blog. Here’s a great read on the “Top 5 Reasons Why Blogs Deserve Our Respect (and Are Important for Business).” Done well, blogging allows us to build awareness and our reputation, share ideas and connect meaningfully with audiences.
The bottom line is this: We should educate ourselves on the full range of opportunities and possibilities for social media. Armed with knowledge and insight, we can then make informed decisions on using ideas and practices most relevant to our goals, rather than just the newest and most novel out there.

“Since the early days of Modernism, the interplay between art and music has given considerable impetus to the development of new art forms.” And so begins Barbara Johns’ highly illuminating essay about that very interplay, although she really could have given a tip of the hat to Alex Steinweiss who passed away this week at 94. A large contributor to 20th-century audio-visual culture, he revolutionized how albums were packaged and sold by simply putting covers on them. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, where image is everything and manipulated for the hard sell, but this innovation saw massive sales increases. As Eye magazine notes, “He was just as much a pioneer of corporate branding insofar as he gave a major recording company a distinctive identity.” Alex Steinweiss changed the way people saw music, forever.

Back in 1939, those hard shellacked 78s were covered in brown, tan or green paper and in the words of Alex (how auspicious of him!), “Who the hell’s going to buy this stuff? There’s no push to it. There’s no attractiveness. There’s no sales appeal. So I told them I’d like to start designing covers.’’ And he did—thousands of them. The art of the record sleeve had been born. His eye-catching covers, initially only for Columbia Records, used stylized imagery combining motifs from folk art, art deco and cubism as well as his own hand-drawn lettering. He single-handedly started a whole new design form and industry.

His account of starting out is fascinating, even inspiring and his influence is still with us. As Art Director for Columbia, he hired Jim Flora as a commercial artist who himself defined the 1940s-50s-era jazz album cover like no other. Today’s pop surrealists/low-brow artists such as Tim Biskup, Mark Ryden, Shag, Shepard Fairey, to name but a few, can trace their artistic evolution back to the Steinweiss/Flora era. Not to mention album art began to be taken seriously in other musical genres. Where would we be without classic rock covers of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis, Peter Saville’s iconic images for Joy Division and New Order or the countless sleeve designers whose visions populate so many fabulous Best of and Worst of lists alike?

The Steinweiss legacy lives on, Taschen produced a weighty retrospective and an “art-star tribute exhibition” was shown not that long ago, acknowledging that these early commercial artists created something that deserved to be enjoyed on its own terms—as fine art. In the age of intangible downloads and music-streaming, long live Alex Steinweiss—the original music image-maker.

In a landscape where many companies are struggling for the biggest possible piece of the consumer wireless market, Leap Wireless has made great strides in the past year. They expanded their device offerings in response to growing smartphone demand, went from regional to national coverage, introduced a groundbreaking music subscription service in a market that has, for the past decade or more, been dominated only by Apple, and made it all happen for their “True Rate” all-inclusive pricing plans. I know… it sounds like we’re advertising, but we’re not. We think they’ve done some great things, and we helped bring their story to their stakeholders with an online annual report designed to deploy in both Flash-based and non-Flash-based environments. Check it out at leapwireless.com/ar2010—and by the way, it’s mobile compliant!

The battle for web supremacy took a new turn this week with the official announcement of the long-talked about Google+, the search engine giant’s latest foray into the social networking space. But unlike Google’s previous and ill-conceived attempt, Buzz, Google+ has generated some early excitement, with tech-savvy early adopters wrangling for invitations (including buying them off ebay for upwards of $75/pop) like they were Willy Wonka’s golden tickets.

So what exactly is Google+? The short answer is that it’s a social network, with a lot of similarities to Facebook. But it also has some interesting features which are all grounded in the concept of connecting with and sharing different information with different circles of friends. Yes, creating groups and lists is nothing new. But Google+ does it in a way that is more intuitive and fun. It also represents somewhat of a new approach for the company. Rather than organizing the Internet by information as Google has famously professed to do in the past, Google+ organizes it around people. Specifically, targeted groups of people that you already know through tools like group video chatting, texting, photo sharing and (of course) searching for content. And perhaps its coolest feature is the toolbar that will appear across all Google properties and allow you to easily share content with your circles of friends across the web.

As social networkers have grown (47% of adults now use a social networking site) and people have discovered that most of their Facebook “friends” don’t really qualify as friends in the traditional sense, Facebook is suffering some growing pains. The social web, in many ways, is just like high school. Once practically everyone was a member of the Facebook club, the cool kids moved on — to other sites like Twitter, by creating private Facebook profiles under different names that only a select group of “real” friends know about, or else by just not posting anything of consequence or as frequently — leaving news feeds all over the world with primarily Farmville updates, offensive political rants from distant cousins and chain letter-type status updates.

Which is where Google+ has been smart. They are launching Google+ slowly, and by invitation-only. And just like high school, nothing makes people want something more than knowing that not just anyone can have it. Now whether or not they will experience long-term success and truly become a Facebook Killer once the initial “new car smell” wears off remains to be seen. But as this week’s $35 million sale of former social networking giant MySpace shows, anything is possible.