Niche audiences inhabiting "long tail" sites present something of a dilemma for marketers: desirable because they're highly engaged, their relatively small numbers (on any one site) nevertheless make it difficult to achieve scale. Martini Media is hoping to change that with a series of new ad programs offering rich media ads with story-telling capabilities on a variety of niche sites, including those with a high proportion of affluent audience members.

There is something in the current round of social media war that's distinctly reminiscent of later-era Japanese monster movies, when the various monsters started battling each other. Like an unexpected twist bringing Gamera into play against Godzilla, the Anonymous storyline is now crossing with the Mexican drug war storyline. Anonymous is (are?) angry at the Zetas cartel, based in the Mexican state Tamaulipas, over their kidnapping of an Anonymous supporter who had denounced some of the cartel's many criminal activities. The collective is demanding his release, and threatens to expose the identities of police officers, journalists, and others on the …

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 …