Would you invite your parents to a party you’re having with your friends? Probably not, unless you’re maybe 35.

This reality helps explain why teens and college kids are spending less time on Facebook – their parents are there as well. This is obviously very bad for Facebook, which is having all sorts of problems since it went public.

I remember hearing teens I know tell me how they use Facebook less and have moved to new options like Twitter. They didn’t mention their parents, but the reason was obvious.

It’s not the only issue of course. Social media has made some teens much more careful about who they have around when they do stuff like smoke and drink, as everyone now has a camera on their phone. The times they are a changin’!!

Social media has forever changed the way that many businesses conduct marketing campaigns. In fact, it has changed how many companies perceive marketing in general. How? There are a number of ways but below are the top 5 ways that social media marketing has affected strategies that businesses choose to promote their products and services.

1. Social media has definitely affected the way that companies deal with their target audience. Because of social media, you can better understand what your audience wants and learn about these wants in real-time. Facebook and Twitter give you instant access to people in the here and now. You can find out what they want and give it to them all in just a few moments time.
2. You also have a direct link to your audience now. You can effectively cut out the middle man and deal with your customers on a more personal level. This allows for more straightforward conversations and enables your audience to be more honest with you about their needs.
3. Because you have the ability for real-time conversation, you also have the ability to measure your company’s progress much better. You can control your conversations and react instantly, giving your customers a more positive overall experience with your business.
4. It goes without saying that social media enables you to enjoy different strategies with regards to advertising. It also enables you to engage your customers and allow them to be part of the conversation. You are no longer speaking to them – you are now speaking with them. Community engagement is crucial when it comes to overall business success.
5. You can now influence your customers as an expert in your field. Through blogs and other social media interaction, you can provide your customers with information that they need. You have changed from a business owner to an influencer and expert which will tell your customers that you are serious about your business and know how to help them to solve their issues.

This article was written by Custard Media, the UK’s leading social media marketing agency.

Erin Andrews has advice for celebrities who decide to use Twitter. Andrews has a huge following, and she explains how famous people need to have thick skin to handle all of the tough comments thrown their way.

“There’s so many great things you can do with Twitter: get a message out; try to help people in need. I think the biggest thing you have to know with Twitter, and anything else from a blog to a newspaper, is that you just have to have a thick skin,” she said during a media luncheon for the 25th season of GameDay in New York last week. “You just have to let it roll off. You can maybe cry about it privately with your family. Talk about it by yourself. But you just can’t respond. It’s too dangerous.”

Tweet at your own risk.

Jeff Morgan isn’t too impressed with Shaq’s Twitter announcement that he’ll retire.

Shortly after the announcement – a 15 second video clip in which a cheery Shaquille said “I’m about to retire. Love you.” – the tech blogosphere lit up, thrilled that such a mainstream event had been announced over the web. Some said it “proves the power of Twitter.” But how? Perhaps the only thing bigger than Shaquille O’Neal’s physical form is his online presence. He has nearly 4 million followers on Twitter and 2 million Facebook fans. His real world celebrity status still exists on the internet – what is so powerful about that?

Check out the entire article. In the end, Shaq was hyping a new service called Tout which let’s you upload 15 second video clips and send them out on Twitter. It was really just a PR stunt, and in that sense it worked!

Is Twitter a good fit for you?

Some time ago, I did an article on deciding if Twitter is a good fit . While it’s a simple concept, it’s really something you should take a hard look at before you decide to jump on the social bandwagon. There is a great deal of work involved in developing a successful twitter presence, and before you dive into that amount of work, you should make sure you and twitter are a good match.

I Need to Tweet, now what?

I wrote a rather thorough article on running a successful twitter campaign, but the basic ideas are:

• Post things that are of general interest to your readership.
• Space your posts out so that you don’t fire them all off at once.
• Make your posts when the internet is most active.

  The problem is that it’s very time consuming to do the above. Luckily, there is a tool called “Pluggio” that does all of the above for you.

  Make your way to the links above for the full story on how to maximize your twitte coverage while minimizing your effort.

The shift from old media to new media is accelerating, and now more companies are using bloggers to help deliver their brand messages. Here’s an interesting example from Vaseline.

If you’ve been complaining about dry skin on the Internet, Vaseline may have heard you. With winter just around the corner, the brand is announcing a new advertising campaign for its Vaseline Intensive Rescue skin cream product, sold by Unilever. The campaign represents the first time Vaseline has used crowdsourcing to find product spokeswomen.

“The core of the idea here is to find women where they talk about this problem,” Anne Jensen, the senior brand building director for beauty care in the Unilever personal care division, said of the company’s decision to the scour the Web looking for women who were talking about their dry skin.

Vaseline worked with the New York office of the agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty on the campaign to restage the brand with things like new packaging and product improvements and to find women bloggers who could represent the campaign.

“Most Vaseline campaigns are rooted in real stories by real people. That’s what makes it authentic,” said Ashley Bekton, group business director at Bartle Bogle.

The agency worked with a subcontractor to crawl the Internet for conversations around words like “dry skin,” “lotions” and “skin issues,” and to scan blogs and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook for conversations people were having about those topics.

The company ended up selecting three bloggers who will write about their experiences and be spokespersons for the brand. Interesting stuff.

At least the approach is methodical. Some companies think they can hire a couple of interns to run Twitter and Facebook and all will be well . . .

You know Kevin Smith as a very successful movie director, despite the recent box office disappointments. He’s also become quite a force online, with a huge Twitter account and a very popular podcast – called the SModcast.

Wired recently caught up with Smith and he gave them a very funny interview in which he discussed his social media popularity.

Wired: But online, you can do just that, right? You seem to have amped up your Web presence since that movie.

Smith: Oh, I’m online all the time now. I’m not an outdoorsy type. Everything I do that’s not related to filmmaking or child-rearing or trying to fuck my wife is online. The medium of Twitter is built for me. I recently did a 24-hour tweetathon, and people asked me how I did it. I said, “The only difference between this and my normal regimen is that I let you know I was doing it.” I have 1.6 million followers—this army of people who think like me. There aren’t enough of us to invade a whole country, but we could probably take Quebec.

Wired: They’re numerous enough to put a book-length collection of your blog posts on best-seller lists and fill auditoriums to see you talk about whatever pops into your head.

Smith: Yeah, I used Twitter to sell out Carnegie Hall. My dream is to never have to take a real job again. If my next movie bombs and nobody ever gives me another dollar to make more, I wouldn’t care. I don’t need to do it anymore. I was never convinced that the film thing would last anyway. It just made me interesting enough to have a Web site.

Smith also discussed the tweetathon recently with Will Harris on Bullz-Eye.com.

I thought it was awesome. I’ve been training for it for, like, 15 years, though. We’ve been on the web since 1995, so I guess that’s actually 14 years. But I was ready. I was always curious, because I’ve spent hours upon hours on the web answering questions over the years, but the one that I’d never done was do it for 24 hours straight. I was kind of curious: “Can I pull it off?” And, alas, I could. (Laughs) It’s a mean feat. It’s not like someday my kid’s gonna be standing over my grave, and somebody’s gonna hang her a folded flag and say, “You know what? This is ‘cause he did 24 hours straight on Twitter.” But it’s just one of those little personal victories, like, “I wonder if I can do this.” And I did it. A stupid goal, but I accomplished it. Life’s all about…for me, at least…having very stupid achievable goals. That way, you always feel like a winner.

This interview also goes into great detail regarding Smith’s Smodcasts. The guy really gets this stuff.

This is a cool development. Bing will now have a search function for Twitter. It’s set up in a way that’s much easier to navigate than Twitter itself (no surprise). You can quickly see all the popular subjects like you see on Twitter, but the page lays out the latest tweets for each popular topic. If you click the topic, you see the recent tweets, along with links to the actual stories that are being sent around.

It’s very handy, and it’s nice coup for Bing over Google.

Twitter’s new feature is currently in Beta, so you’ll only have it if you’ve been invited, but the new Twitter Lists feature is creating quite a buzz.

ReadWriteWeb.com has a handy post explaining how all this works. The process is rather cumbersome, as you have to add people one at a time to the lists you create. You also have the option to make your lists public, so that can create some very interesting lists for others to follow. Getting on certain public lists will probably be the next status symbol next to the number of followers.

Also, each list can be followed as well, which will probably touch of a new frenzy as lists are created and followed.

It will be fun to see how all this develops. In was inevitable that Twitter would start adding more features, but the simplicity of the service has been one of its best qualities. Simple often works better, though that often changes when you have explosive growth. It’s a great problem to have, so get ready for lists mania!

Forbes has an interesting article about the web 2.0 situation in China.

Forbes: Facebook and Twitter have been blocked here in China since the unrest this year in Xinjiang, and some Chinese Twitter clones are blocked as well. Why is this the case, and do you see the controls loosening up in the near future?

Anti: Web 2.0 Web sites like Facebook and Twitter can offer the public firsthand information, even faster than a government news agency like Xinhua. In fact, the July 5 Urumqi riots news was spreading first on Twitter hours before the first Xinhua English news piece. The Chinese government believes that the situation in Urumqi and other cities would be out of control if they can’t control the information flow. That’s the basic logic behind their decision to block Twitter and other Web 2.0 Web sites.

But this wide-scale blocking costs a lot. Discontentment in cyberspace could lead more common Chinese netizens to try to protest if all of their favorite social networking, photo sharing, video and microblogging services are blocked in the long term. And this crazy-wild blocking also harms the investment environment, which now almost makes China a Web 2.0 hell for investors. So China may loosen up the blocking in some sense.

The political reasons behind this policy are fairly clear given the recent events in Iran. Yet the risks are huge for China’s social media and tech industries as mentioned above. Can China really expect to compete in a world where Americans and others use social media to revolutionize business, news and education? The Chinese run the risk of falling way behind.