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Social Media Safeguards: Protect Yourself as Information Sharing Increases

This guest post is written by Shelby Benkert, an intern at Vanguard Communications.

Unlike most college students, I tend to shy away from many social media networks. Facebook is my go-to in order to stay in touch with my friends, and I rarely use anything else. I do have a Twitter account, but I have never [...]

Curious New Additions to the 2010 AP Stylebook

Like a kid on her birthday, I always get excited about the release of the latest edition of the AP Stylebook. I love searching for new entries to find out how our use of language has evolved. In fact, I still have my very first wire-bound edition from journalism school, and it’s fun to see [...]

The Benefits of Integrating foursquare with Advocacy

Since the close of 2009, digital media analysts have pointed to location-based services as the next phase of social communication.  More and more people are migrating toward smart phone technology enabled with GPS - comScore recently reported that 45 million in the U.S. use smart phones - and location-based services are one more way to put these phones to better use.  [...]

Four Facts to Consider Before Using foursquare for Advocacy

In the past couple of months, the Web chatter on foursquare has increased steadily, with recent rumors suggesting that Yahoo is considering buying the company for $100 million.  Though foursquare launched its iPhone application at the 2009 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, the location-based social networking platform seemed to take off at this year’s conference.  While [...]

Using Social Media as a Listening Post During Brand Crises

Even for those who don’t own a Toyota vehicle, car drivers (and passengers) have been fascinated by Prius’ brake failure problems and resulting recall and federal investigation. Product recalls pose enormous PR and reputation management challenges for communicators. History gives us great examples of crisis communication successes, such as Tylenol recall in 1982, as well [...]