I am NOT Maverick Marketing Sydney

The number of Facebook friends you have is correlated to the size of your amygdala, the center used to process the memory of your emotional reactions in your brain, according to a new study published in Nature Neuroscience.

The volume of your amydala has been connected to the size of the circle of those you come in contact with even with nonhuman primate species before, so Kevin Bickart and his coauthors took the idea and tested it out on people who interact with people on Facebook.

Using 58 adults with varying sizes of Facebook friends, the scientists figured out how many people each individual involved in the study regularly interacted with.

Then, they determined how many different groups of Facebook friends the person was in contacted with. Those two data points were compared to the volume of the amygdala and hippocampus, the later of which should not change in size depending on the size of the social network.

The results showed that the size of a person’s amygdala increased with more friends and more complex social networks.

So much for saying that people you interact with on Facebook aren’t really your friends. And, even if we might not know them personally, our brains are definitely making an emotional connection.

Read People’s Reactions Over At Time.

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Myspace, once a leader in social networking before the ascendancy of Facebook, is trading its social networking focus to target the music, celebrities, movies, television, and games that Gen-Y’ers love the most.

The company announced on Wednesday that it is launching a beta site that will be based on this shifted focus.

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Learn more at The Next Web.

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The growing popularity of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook is encouraging financial services organisations to start interacting with their customers using these channels.

In the past couple of weeks, ING Direct launched a soft social media campaign in tandem with the introduction of Charles – the orangutan that replaced comedian Billy Connelly as the face of the bank. Customers can access Charles’ Facebook page through the bank’s home page and leave comments.

“Charles can chat with people through the site and he is also on Twitter,” says an ING spokesperson. “Our social media campaign is more of an experimentation exercise and we’re leaving it to grow organically.”

Read more at the Sydney Morning Herald.

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TWITTER is developing a penchant for keeping its CEOs’ tenures as brief as its 140-character limit.

Evan Williams has become the second Twitter co-founder to step aside after a two-year stint, making way for a colleague considered to be better suited for steering the next phase of the company’s rapid growth.

Known simply as @Ev on Twitter, Williams intends to focus on product development while continuing to work for the company.

The change in command at the privately held company turns over Twitter’s leadership to Dick Costolo, an early investor who was hired as chief operating officer a year ago. Since Mr Costolo’s arrival, Twitter has moved into larger offices in San Francisco to accommodate a payroll that has swelled from a few dozen people to about 300 employees.

Mr Costolo, 47, also has played a key role in devising an advertising for Twitter as it tries to make money from an online audience that ballooned from 3 million registered users when Mr Williams became CEO in 2008 to 160 million now.

A recent redesign of the Twitter website opened up more opportunities to sell ads without disrupting the stream of messages by creating a new pane for photos, video and other information, including marketing messages. Williams oversaw the website’s new look.
In a joint interview, Mr Williams and Mr Costolo said they believed Twitter had reached another critical juncture that called for different leadership skills.

More at News

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If you’re using Twitter, you’ll probably agree that it is tough to find good quality people to follow and even more difficult to get interested and engaged people to follow you.

The guys that developed Socialoomph, a tool designed to assist the management of Twitter accounts and communications, have developed an answer.

They call it FollowerHub.

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Positive language about learning new things and serving the self-interest of readers is the most common characteristic of blog post titles that get shared the most on Twitter, according to new analysis posted on the blog Smart Data Collective.

Essentially the analysis sought to identify which words or phrases have a positive versus negative bearing on what is likely to get your content tweeted.

The author, Greek data mining consultant Themos Kalafatis, found that the words increase, socialize, automate and manage appear most in posts that prove popular.

Terms including write, talk and trust appear to have a negative weight on the likelihood of a post being retweeted.

With this information, an analyst may then identify why such words tend to commonly exist in popular Social Media posts.

Here are some insights :
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If you’ve ever wished celebrities like actress Demi Moore or tween-star Justin Bieber would follow you on Twitter, now’s your chance — but you’ll have to cough up some cash for the privilege.

EBay Inc. is hosting a charity auction called TwitChange, through which people can bid to have celebrities follow them, retweet their posts or tweet their username on Twitter for three months.

Money raised from the auction, which runs through Saturday, will go to aHomeInHaiti.org and its efforts to rebuild the Miriam Center, which is based in Haiti and houses special-needs children.

More than 180 celebrities are involved in the auction, ranging from Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine to actor Zachary Levi.

As of late Monday, Dana White, president of mixed-martial arts group Ultimate Fighting Championship, was in the lead with $15,600 after 86 bids. Levi, who plays a computer nerd implanted with spy secrets on NBC show “Chuck,” was behind him with $14,900 raised.

Both auctions offer to follow the winner on Twitter for at least 90 days, repost one of the winner’s own postings and broadcast the winner’s username to the celebrity’s list of Twitter followers.

There were also plenty of celebrity Twitter opportunities below $100: A listing for comedian, talk-show host and actor George Lopez to retweet a message from the winner was going for $38 after 19 bids. A listing for rapper Snoop Dogg to do the same rose to $67.55 after 7 bids.

Source: The Associated Press

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Have you met Apple Ping? A social network for music?

At Apple Ping, you can follow your favourite artists and friends to discover the music they’re talking about, listening to and downloading.

An update to iTunes now allows you to interact with Ping directly from your music player, instead of having to make a visit to Ping itself.

So now you can recommend songs to your friends, and see the music they recommend, at the same you’re actually listening to songs.

While Ping lives in a quarantine from other social media, it’s only a matter of time before it integrates into Facebook and Twitter.

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With so many brands trying their hands at location-based marketing campaigns, one has to wonder: Is Foursquare really effective as a platform for bringing in new business? McDonald’s seems to think so.

Head of social media,  Rick Wion, admitted that McDonald’s was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare ingenuity.

McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.

The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as checkin bait to lure in potential diners. The bait also worked to attract the media’s attention and resulted in more than 50 articles covering McDonald’s Foursquare special.

The campaign worked in both digital and real world capacities. Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for checkins, and 600,000 online denizens opted to follow and fan the brand on social media sites.
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