It makes sense for businesses in the hospitality industry to pay close attention to social media feedback, as lodgings are one of those consumption categories that tend to elicit strong reactions from customers, both good and bad, which have a way of making their way online (ecstatic over the chocolate on the pillow, pissed off about the mildewed towels, etc.). But it's harder to effectively respond to social media feedback, especially for large hospitality chains where some establishments may be operated as independent franchises.To help hotel owners and managers stay on their toes with social media, Medallia, which creates customer …

Salons are naturally social places, but that didn't always translate into an effective online social presence -- at least until L'Oreal stepped in. L'Oreal USA Professional Products Division partnered with Buddy Media, which creates enterprise social software, to provide salons with access to a suite of social media tools to connect with customers and expand their businesses via social media.

The last year has seen a number of social media sites launch which are explicitly positioned as alternatives to Facebook, offering more privacy, more control over sharing, and less advertising. The latest such site to receive a lot of press is Unthink, which recently announced that it has raised $2.5 million in venture capital funding from Douglas Bay Capital.

At this point Google is starting to resemble your impressionable, enthusiastic friend who becomes enthralled by every passing trend, obsessively acquires all the accoutrement, then gets bored a couple months later before finally moving on to the next big thing. This mercurial personality type can be recognized by the piles of disused equipment filling their house and garage: rock-climbing, yoga, mountain biking, parasailing, snowboarding -- one by one, they come and go. The only problem with this, of course, is that it costs lots and lots of money.

Americans love their social media and they love their mobile devices. No surprise, then, that they love to access social media via their mobile devices, according to the latest figures from comScore's MobiLens service, which shows that 72.2 million Americans accessed social networks or blogs on a mobile device in August 2011 -- up 37% from 52.7 million during the same month in 2010.

Convergence is out of control, in a good way (although sometimes it makes my head hurt). The latest example of super-convergence is Shoptopia, a place-based retail network in malls which combines online, mobile, social and place-based channels in a giant media vortex that totally surrounds shoppers, allowing advertisers to interact with consumers before, during and after the shopping experience.

Online business networks focusing on minority groups are springing up all over the place, including dedicated networks for women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and other groups whose members can benefit from peer connections. The list now includes a social network for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender businesspeople, dot429.com, which might be described in shorthand as the "gay LinkedIn" (429 spells "gay" on a cell phone key pad).

The complexities of discovery, the process whereby lawyers winkle out evidence pertinent from the opposing side, are the subject of law school courses and legal journals. And discovery is getting even more complicated with the rise of social media, which presents new challenges for lawyers across many different types of legal dispute. One of the biggest challenges, according to the "2011 Mid-Year e-Discovery Update" from law firm Gibson Dunn, is the issue of authentication -- that is, making sure that evidence extracted from social media is real, and also hasn't been tampered with (knowingly or unknowingly) by changes made since …

Don't call it a "micro" blog: Twitter continues to grow by leaps and bounds, in terms of number of users and tweets per day, as well as other measures like frequency of log-ins. However the average number of tweets per user appears to have mostly held steady -- although that may be changing in recent months. The total number of accounts registered on Twitter, worldwide, has steadily increased from around 75 million in January 2010 to 145 million in July 2010, 240 million in January 2011, and 300 million in May 2011. Assuming growth has continued on this trajectory, Twitter …

The protestors in New York City and around the world are pretty clear about their feelings, but not so much about their aims. "Occupy Wall Street" and its myriad sister movements to "occupy" various locales are an expression of anger and, in some cases, outright hostility towards the global financial system -- sentiments which resonate with the frustrated middle-class to a degree unthinkable even a few years ago. But as many commentators have pointed out, there is much less agreement about what, exactly, the protestors are demanding. Could social media help the protestors formulate a common platform?