You can’t learn to ride a bike without training wheels. Does the same relate to Social Networking? Is it true that a child cannot be a safe and efficient Social Networker without actually using one? And who is it up to to teach the children about safe Social Networking? The parents, or the school?

In a recent report by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, they found that, “Although they weren’t asked this question, we suspect that most of the 91% of administrators who told the NCSA researchers that they block social network sites, are doing so because they believe it is in the best interest of their students, but there is a growing consensus among Internet-safety experts that blocking social media might actually have a negative effect on student safety.”

Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use was quoted saying, “There are some significant barriers in school to get to where we need to be because, in order to teach Internet safety in school, we have to teach it in context, and if we have these major barriers of getting Web 2.0 technologies into schools, then we’re not going to be able to teach these skills in the context of learning.”

What do you think? Should children be taught how to use websites like MySpace and Facebook safely in schools, or do Social Networking sites have no place in the school system?

I do believe that you cannot become a safe and responsible Social Networker without actually getting into Social Networking. You learn the ins and outs and what to share and what not to. Do you want to give the city you live in, or your full name? Even your full date of birth? Probably not, unless you’re doing business online, which a child shouldn’t be doing anyway.

I don’t, however, believe that it should be left up to the schools to teach our children how to Social Network. I think it’s completely the responsibility of the parents. Social Networking was blocked when I was in high school, and I’d certainly hope they would continue with that today.

I send my child to school to learn about History and Science and Math and English. You know, the ‘things we need to know that we’ll never use again’. If my child is taking some sort of computer class, I would hope that it would be about learning to use the computer properly, how to maintain it or build it. How to use certain programs, like Microsoft Office and Photoshop, etc.

The thought of a Facebook 101 class in school is absolutely ridiculous.

When setting up your Twitter account there are certain things to consider. Some people get on Twitter and don’t know what they’re doing. They make some really basic mistakes and end up causing a negative image of themselves or their brand.
People always ask themselves if social networking is good or bad. The fact is that just like everything else in life it can be used for the good or not. When using online social media you have to take into consideration how something might be perceived.

Making certain mistakes will bring the opposite effect of your marketing goals and hinder your social media campaign. Whether you’re already on Twitter or intend to be, here’s a simple list of the top 4 mistakes that you shouldn’t make when setting up your account.

1- Using a weird nickname instead of your name on Twitter.

Your name is the best thing to use when signing up for Twitter. By using your name you’re branding yourself as a person. Sometimes people put silly nicknames instead of their own name. There’s nothing really wrong with that but your real name will help others feel connected to you personally. If you have a name like dogman32 they won’t trust you as much and will have a hard time believing that you’re real. They might think you’re a spammer or an automated robot. Of course if you’re tweeting for a specific niche website, you can also use a pen name. But it’s always a good thing to have a pen name that others can somewhat relate to.

2- Using an avatar instead of a real picture.

As the saying goes: a picture is worth a thousand words. Using an avatar instead of a real picture is another common mistake. It’s so important for people to connect with you on a more personal level and know who you are. Take into consideration that your picture is what will be showing up in other people’s stream. They will see this over and over again. So you want your picture make a positive impact. Choose a close up of your face and make sure that you’re smiling . The only cases where putting an avatar would be a smart move is if you’re branding a company. In those cases an avatar with your brand logo may be a good idea.

3- Not really telling people about yourself in the bio section.

When setting up your bio section, make sure you tell people a little about yourself. You can also tell them what you’ll be tweeting about so that they can make an informed decision whether they want to follow you or not. If you’re in a specific niche you should put certain keywords inside of your bio section. This will facilitate your profile showing up in the results when people use the Twitter search option.

4- Not tweeting when your account is new.

When you get your account, write a few tweets in there. Also start interacting with others. That way those that come to your profile will see that you are about interacting with others and not just broadcasting your own stuff. Many spammers create accounts and with only 2 or 3 tweets and you don’t want to be confused with them. Don’t be afraid to show your personality and share good information through your tweets. If you follow these simple steps you will have a positive impact on Twitter and be able to make great connections.

Eren Mckay is a work at home mom to 3 boys. She loves to share baby shower themes ideas with others. She has created resources like these princess and the frog baby shower decorations to help others when party planning.

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I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon on Facebook recently.  My husband often posts videos of my son dancing, making messes or just being generally adorable.  When we check back a day or so after posting something, we’re anxious to see all of the comments from friends or family, but usually there’s only a few notifications, two from my  from my eleven-year-old sister-in-law (its at least amusing when she misspells a comment and  then comments about her misspelling, misspelling yet another word in yer explanation) and one from my mother.  When I share or post a video, however, I begin to get comments and “likes” almost immediately. In both cases, nearly all of the comments come from women, and in my posts, it seems my female friends (most of whom are friends with my husband as well) felt more comfortable commenting and liking.  My husband and I have a theory that while just as many of our male friends view our photos and videos, only women feel comfortable enough to express their feelings about it.

Yesterday morning, Com Score released a press release based off of their study “Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet,” stating that globally, 75.8 percent of all women, versus 69.7 percent of men, visited social network sites in May 2010; a 30% difference.   Okay, so women are on social networking sites a whole lot.  So what?  What I found more interesting was that although there are more male unique visitors on the interent, “women spend about 8 percent more time online, averaging 25 hours per month on the Web.”

Okay, so now we know that women spend more time online and visit social media sites more often.  So what?  How do these statistics prove that women are “shaping” the internet?

Extending beyond page rank and unique visitors per month, BlogHer collaborated with Access Blog Influence Engine (ABIE) to compare different measurement tools on single, weighted 100 point scale in order to determine women’s online influence and to create a list of the most influentail Mommy Blogs and Women’s sites. 

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Although its nice to recieve credit for all of our hard work online, am I the only one who’s not in the least bit surprised?  After all, the internet is just another form of communication, which is just another one of those things in which women tend to excel.

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I am not a morning person. In my household, we are professional snooze-button-hitters. Unfortunately, employers and crying babies aren’t really all that sympathetic to our ‘five more minutes’ pleas. In order to cope with this unnatural necessity to get up before eight am, I have created my Personal Power Up, which consists of four easy steps.  Free for an unlimited time, so read now and then read it again later!

Step One. The most essential step to my PPU begins the night before. Before you procrastinators begin to groan, just here me out. Its just one simple step: I absolutely must pick my outfit out the day before. If I don’t, I end up standing in my closet after having tried on three outfits that just don’t feel right and its already 8:34. Preferably, the outfit is cute and looks great on me, but we digress.

Step Two. The next step to my morning PPU, is simply to put on my glasses, open my window and stare outside at the growing morning light for a few minutes. This may seem silly, but the sun’s rays decrease melatonin (sleepy hormone) and increase serotonin (happy hormone). After absorbing a little bit of sunlight, I usually feel energized enough to slip out of bed and don the gorgeous outfit I chose the night before.

Step Three.  A wake up drink made with you in mind.  Tea, coffee, hot chocolate, lemonade, water.  My wake up drink changes daily, but the key here is that I make my husband make it for me.  I learned this from a good friend of mine, who made it her husband’s job to start the coffee pot before she even gets up.  Similarly, my husband is in charge of delivering my first drink at the kitchen table in the morning. I make his lunch, so I think its a fair trade.  It also gives us a chance to say a proper good morning to each other.
Step Four. If everything goes right, I’m up around thirty minutes before my baby.  This is just enough time for me to get dressed, enjoy my husband-made drink, and take on step four: morning pages.  Morning pages are 15 minutes of continuous writing. It helps me unload, especially if I wake up feeling stressed about the day ahead, or if I had a particularly disturbing dream.

Now I just need 2pm ppu and I think I’ll be set!

We recently had a look at Number Sense, a new iPhone math game designed for 4-8 year olds.  Our 6 year old saw the game and immediately started playing.  Needless to say, he definitely enjoyed the game, playing it for a good hour!

It is really 5 games in one:

BOOSTER BALLS
Helps your kids learn counting from 1 to 30 by feeding some monsters.

DO THE DOTTY
Simple but engaging connect-the-dots games that will help your kids recognize and memorize numbers in the right order.

NUMBERELLA
A super hero donkey (Drizzle is his name) is all you need to get kids to compare numbers, without objects, from 1 to 10.

FISHOONKA
This deceptively simple game uses a school of fish to demonstrate the concepts of greater than, less than and equal to.

TOOT TOOT TRAIN
From Chocolateville to Licorice Lane runs a train that relies on addition and subtraction.

In addition, every game has a unique reward.  If you brought your child to an arcade or fair, they would want a reward, so this game does a nice job of a similar effect.

Overall, we really liked the game.  The congrats type message after each round got to be a bit much for us adults, but the kids seemed to enjoy

(disclosure: we were given a promo code to try out the app, but this did not keep us from speaking our mind as to what we thought of the game as an unbiased opinion.)

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“When I took office,” said Bill Clinton, “only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web…Now even my cat has its own page.”  Indeed, over the course of the last two decades, the internet has gone from techie pet projects to a resource for the  privileged to a near necessity of business, if not life.  Whether you’re Bill Clinton’s cat, one of Facebook’s 500 million friends, or if you have twenty  minutes on the train  to and from your white collar job to blog on Blackberry, American personal and business lives and the internet have become inseparably intertwined.  If you’re company or work doesn’t involve some kind of online social media, said company may be in trouble!  There are dozens of ways to make (more) money on the internet, some more effective and lucrative than others.

Websites are one way to make money online, whether you have your own brilliant, unique idea or your building upon a previous idea and just need proper online representation.  According to Top Rank Online Marketing, the three marketing tactics readers will use most often are Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Network Participation, and Blogging.  So how does one going about doing such things and where/when does the money come in?

The idea is that you’ll have more hits on your site due to search engine searches relevant to your content.  To improve your site’s SEO, develop a glossary of keywords on your site (and blog, but more about that later) using a service such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker.   In a similar way, Social Network Participation (such as Facebook) is a way to connect 500 million people (about 13% of the world’s population)  with your product or idea.  Blogging plays a slightly different role for a website.  It gives a uniquely human aspect to a website.  Its a way for websie viewers to  So here’s the money making part: the content.  Either your site simply enhances a previously established business or idea, for which online marketing simply brings you more customers or patrons.  On the other hand, if your main work is the site itself, quality content and aesthetics, along with SEO development is pivotal.  Providing quality leads us to another money making possibility: website development.

Someone has to have the umbrella idea and delegate and manage tasks of web design, writing and programming, but there are millions of ‘menial’ jobs for writers, artists and experts online.  These types of online tasks can be taken on in as freelance work or as regular work.  Writing is probably the most common form, mostly in the form of blogging and article writing, but even photographers and musicians can sell their work online.

If you don’t think you have any particular talent or artistic ability to add, you can also make money simply with your time, filling out surveys and writing reviews.  Sound Out, for example, helps amateur musicians upload and edit their music for a small fee.  They also pay reviewers to listen to the music and put in their two cents.  Of course you have to be careful surveys and such, as they can be tedious and the pay is not always worth the effort.  Also effective is the use of an affiliate marketing program.

The best part about online jobs is the scheduling, so why not try a little of it all?  You never know if something fits until you try it on, after all.

American Girl is not merely launching their own charitable project. They are actively recruiting the widespread community of young girls to join them in their pursuit of good deeds. It is not about helping American Girl achieve a glorious goal, but a beautiful and innovative method of involving, inspiring, and encouraging these youngsters to spread the light.

To begin with, today American Girl is debuting Shine On Now, an interactive site that requires young girls to spread the word to as many of their friends as they can. Through their efforts, American Girl will donate up to $1 million in clothes, books, dolls, and money to four charitable organizations. The site offers those involved a downloadable kit to guide the young do-gooders in fundraising and volunteering for those charities, or charities of their choice.

Simultaneously, in honor of their shining stars, American Girl is launching a new virtual campus – Innerstar University – where young girls participate in fun and enriching activities to boost their confidence and strength. Since their inception, American Girl has focused on maximizing the potential of their customers, 3-12 year old girls.

Finally, American Girl is giving away a MyAmericanGirl to a most deserving girl! We are asking our readers to nominate a girl in their lives or in the community who embodies the bespoke charitable characteristics. In a paragraph, and without referencing the girls identity, please describe what it is that makes this girl stand out. We encourage you to include her outstanding activities and how she helps others in general. Based on your description, we will choose one girl to be awarded the doll, and will feature her right here on Social Media Mom!

The program ends July 31st. Please help us spread the word!

American Girl sent me free product samples as a part of my partnership in the Shine On Now^™ program. The opinions and content posted here is my own.

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I try not to be a networking site junkie, but since my recent move I have to admit that my online community of friends has been a staple for me. I just completed my first year as a mother, and having a network of expert mothers (Mom’s logging in at least 10,000 hours of nose wiping, vacuuming and lullaby singing) at my fingertips has been a lifesaver.

This week, one of my favorite networking sites, MetroImma, honored me as their “Mom of the Week“!  Although I love blogging and discussing all kinds of topics with my online peers, its rare to get such a direct vote of confidence from them.  I’m an educator by day and a stealth mom and blogger by night, so I sometimes feel I’m at the fringe of the blogging network, but being named Mom of the Week has given me  a huge boost of confidence!  If I didn’t feel as if I were part of the blogging community before, I certainly do now.

So what’s next for this official Mom of the Week?  I was considering trying to take over the world (yes I’m young enough to give a Pink and the Brain reference), but maybe I’ll just settle for writing this blog.

Social media can be great for meeting new people and exploring personal and business relationships. For one couple, however, Social Media really has changed their lives.

Here’s the wedding proposal:

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Here’s a video of the proposal:

Sara and Paul – otherwise known as @SurburbanOblivion and @PaulOFlaherty – are getting married. And the way they met is far from conventional. Sara and Paul did, in fact, meet online and are now hosting what Sara calls on her blog, Suburban Oblivion, a ‘Twitter Wedding’.

Living on opposite sides of the globe, their unconventional relationship began with a disagreement over a blog post, flourished through Skype calls and was heart-wrenching in its distance. Paul and Sara did, however, overcome the odds and the doubters and are tying the knot on June 19^th at 4pm Central time:

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In a manner harmonious to their online courtship, and engagement at a Tweetup, they are actively encouraging people to Tweet their way through the wedding, using the hash tag #Paul&Sara.

Twitter has fast become a way to make friends, influence others and share your opinion; now it is being used to allow people around the globe to share in the happiest day of two peoples’ lives.

Social media is a journey that society is just beginning, and as Sara and Paul take the first steps of the married lives together, through the power of social networking they can share it with those dearest to them, wherever they are.

A touching tale of two individuals brought together through social media just goes to show that however much we think we know about where social media may take us, we can never be certain where we might end up.

This has been a guest post courtesy of Susan Bryant of Winweb.com.

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From Napster to Kazaa, where there’s a will, music lovers will find a way.  In the mean time, it was frankly embarrassing how often I would simply YouTube a video just to listen to the background music…pathetic!  Introducing Fetchmp3.  As with all music downloading sites, fetchmp3 depends on a community of contributes and listeners to work.  It takes the audio from YouTube videos allows you to download it in a listener-friendly format.  This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for! Its embarrassing how often I’ve YouTubed a song in lieu of buying it.  Unlike many of those sites, however, Fetch is completely legal.  The catch? It may takes a few minutes to convert each video into an mp3 format and then download it onto your computer.

As a listener, I’m also enjoying Pandora’s Music Genome Project, among other online radio services, which have actually made my dish-washing experience half-way enjoyable.

On the artists’ side, however, social media and musicians seem to be a match made in heaven.  Spinner is a prime example of this, especially if you’re not looking for your Top 40 Pop Hits, but songs for songs from the more underground or underappreciated music scene.  These hopeful musicians give their music out for free in exchange for a little attention. Of course, MySpace Music and Facebook have spin-off versions, which are no less viable.

On the other hand, being an artists sometimes involves a little narcissism for which Social Media maybe stumbling block.  Linda Laban of Spinner wonders,”Even when it comes to your favorite pop star or rock band, is there such a thing as too much information?”

Indeed, of the 20 most followed Twitter accounts, 10 of them are musicians!  Of course, that maybe why celebreties are so loveable.  I’m not complaining, as long as the music keeps coming.