Over the past month, I've met a number of people whom we all need to understand better. Right now they call themselves members of the class of 2011 or 2012 or 2013. Pretty soon we'll be calling them "boss." Throughout several events and guest lectures, I met students at Yale's School of Management, New York University, and my alma mater Binghamton University. I was supposedly there as a hybrid of a professional and professor, sharing my personal experience working in digital media and the latest social media trends. Each time though, I felt like a student. As my homework assignment, …

I've spent part of the week haunted by the specter of the Winklevii. You know the ones - the identical twins - immortalized in "The Social Network," who just can't give up the ghost on feeling they deserve more of Mark Zuckerberg's cajillions? Here's the Cliff Notes version of the beef they have to pick with Facebook, which was partly detailed in the somewhat true parts of the Oscar-nominated movie:

I listened to all the social media chatter after last week's post on social media trends, and I heard you loud and clear: five trends aren't enough. Brilliant social marketer that I am, I'll share five more.

When you compare the clean, linear, cause-effect nature of paid search to social ads, it's easy to come away thinking there's still much work to be done. In a world full of discussion about whether Google or Facebook is on more of a juggernaut, it's worth noting that in social advertising, it's not a simple matter of picking good keywords and letting the algorithms do their work. Still, a body of knowledge is forming about how ads in social contexts are working -- including a study, released yesterday, that measures what its makers call the Social Activity Index.

The digitally social world is moving so fast that as spring shows itself, it's time to smell the roses. Here are five trends to get excited about right now, with five more coming soon.

Sheesh. There are a lot of topics an enterprising Social Media Insider could write about today. I could go on and on concerning:

You're invited to an awards show, or perhaps you pay a considerable enough sum to attend. Where would you rather be, in the room with the celebrity entertainers and everyone accepting the awards, or in the basement? Or would you rather follow along at home?

As I write this, an interesting signpost in the advancement of social media and paywalls is upon us. To continue my theme of absolute obsession with The New York Times' new paywall, today I want to talk about whether Twitter has, or should, shut down the Twitter feed @freeNYTimes. It's an automated account that promises to tweet a link to every article in the Times, using the paper's own API to make the trick happen.

Some time between an earthquake rattling Japan and Operation Odyssey Dawn launching to protect Libya from itself, my world was consumed by a mere four letters: SXSW. In the metaphysical sense, it seems so remote now that I wonder if South by Southwest actually occurred. In the more practical sense, this marks the start of a yearlong process to determine how much it mattered.

our topic today is The New York Times' just-announced digital subscription policy, because now we finally know how at least one great media property will try to eat its cake and have it too when it comes to monetizing content while at the same time making it shareable.