Facebook will go public today on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The company is expected to be valued as high as $100 billion (yes, with a B). Six years after its founding, Facebook has taken the internet by storm. In our household, we couldn’t think of going through a day without updating or checking everyone else’s updates on Facebook. Facebook has embedded itself in our lives and our relationships. Facebook has helped change the world by connecting so many people from around the world. Yet as huge as Facebook is, it is still not allowed in China. Check out this video from Kapitall about today’s Facebook IPO. Will you be buying some shares?

Watch this video on YouTube.

infographic courtesy of bestcomputerscientdegrees.com

If there is one complaint from every adult young or old, rich or poor, is that there is never enough time. We are an impatient society. We demand fast food, fast talk, fast cars, and a fast internet. We do not have the patience to wait for a slow website. Despite the increase in internet speeds, so too have the features web sites provide taken ever more bandwidth to provide. Today when we are moving from a desktop internet to a mobile internet, we are doing it all over again…worrying about site load time. Every second longer you make someone wait for your website to load is costing you customers. This infographic from kissmetrics shows how much your slow website could be costing you.

What day and what time of day are people most likely to be receptive of your marketing? Someone advertising pizza at 7AM might do better to promote their pies closer to 4PM. What time of day is best to send an email promotion. It depends on the promotion, but this infographic from kissmetrics.com gives us some valuable information to use when sending our next email blast. What is your experience as to what time works best?

Pinterest is making a huge dent in the cyberspace of social media. Launched a little over two years ago, the photo sharing site has exceeded 15 million users and more importantly is commanding an ever increasing share of time spent on social media. Research is showing that users spend more time on Pinterest than Twitter, Linkedin and Google+…………combined. This infographic from Tamba shows how Pinterest is outperforming Twitter and even Facebook for purchasing power.

The 2012 Presidential Campaign is in full swing already, pitting Mitt Romney against incumbent Barack Obama. Obama was seen in 2008 as having the edge over John McCain through his use of the existing online and social media of the time, such as MySpace and email marketing, while the McCain campaign concentrated so heavily in traditional broadcast mediums. That is a mistake the Republicans are not likely to repeat. Politicians and political parties on both sides of the aisle will be using online and social media in all new ways in 2012. From Facebook to Twitter, from Linkedin to Pinterest,  this will not be an election we will be able to hide from online. How do their constituents see social media however? This infographic from Online Colleges shows how right, middle and left use the internet and view content presented on it.

feature photos courtesy of AP

Don’t we all wish we were the ones to come up with a seemingly simple concept and turn that idea into a revolutionary product that takes the world by storm? That’s exactly what the Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger did when they created Burbin in March of 2010. Practically none of us has heard of Burbin though. We know the product as Instagram. From a seed of $500,000 the company was recently purchased by Facebook for a cool $1 billion. Here is an Instagram timeline by the folks at visual.ly showing the amazing growth of the photo app company.

There are several fallacies involved in decreeing the end of the blog. First, there are over 158 million blogs on the “internets”.  You are reading one now. You are also reading one if you ever go online to look at the Huffington Post, Drudge Report, TMZ, Engadget, Mashable, The Daily Beast, or Gawker. Hubspot found that companies who actually blog (versus companies that just have blogs) increase their leads between 67% and 88% depending on whether the company is B2B or B2C (respectively).

Why are so many companies abandoning their blogs? It turns out most of those who have given up on blogging have done so because it actually involves work. Just having a blog doesn’t cut it. Do you think that just putting in the newest hot product will suddenly double your sales, or might you have to actually work at promoting your business as carrying that hot new product?

Where are people going who are giving up on their blogs? They are moving to Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest. The funny thing is, the same lack of effort writing a regular blog post won’t make your Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Pinterest page a success.  You would no more run one radio ad and if the people didn’t stream into your business conclude radio to be a dead medium. As with any marketing effort, frequency is the key.

People are also forgetting one of the main reasons most businesses want to blog. While it would be nice to have a thousand plus readers to my blog, I don’t expect it and don’t write for that. I write a regular blog for my site so that Google and other search engines find me and list my new page in their indexes. Over time, all those blog post and pages add up and bring new visitors to my site day after day, week after week, month after month. If you don’t have the time to blog, hire someone who does. We write blogs for several dozen businesses on a regular basis. So too do other web marketing firms. There is no magic pill to make anyone tall, skinny, or beautiful/handsome. There are no magic beans to the fabled castle in the sky. There is no magic shortcut to internet success other than hard work.