Success in social media depends on a boatload of factors… one of which is the spreadability of your content. So, make like peanut butter and reach more of your ideal audiences by following the three principles below:

Aim for your network’s network

First principle to consider when it comes to spreadability: Would YOU share the article / update you just wrote with YOUR friends (or tech savvy grandma Agnes)? Does it bring any value to your followers / readers or are you just going through the motions? Creating something worth sharing takes time, insight and effort. To do this successfully, a brand must understand who they are, what they stand for and who they connect with. Your tone and style of writing will naturally vibe with a certain type of audience. Are you comfortable with who your readers / followers are? Are you writing for the RIGHT audience?

Read more at http://www.soldlab.com/news/2012/01/17/Peanut-Butter-Manifesto:-Are-you-spreadable?/

Yammer, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise social networks, today released Ticker for enterprise, an activity stream that shows in real time what co-workers are doing in their enterprise applications. Users see actions taken both in Yammer and in third-party applications. Ticker dramatically accelerates the distribution of information through an organization, enhancing discovery and collaboration around business data and content.

As part of today's release, Yammer also strengthened its long-form content features, introducing Pages -- a next-generation wiki -- and improved file sharing. These features generate activity stories in Ticker as users create or upload content.

Yammer, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise social networks, has announced it has received $17 million in its fourth round of funding, bringing its total financing to $57 million. The Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya, led the round with previous investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners also participating. Palihapitiya will have an observer's seat on Yammer's board of directors.

Yammer has grown at a rapid pace. It has been adopted by over 100,000 businesses in 160 countries in less than three years, including employees at more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Major corporations such as 7-11, Ford, Southern Company, Shell and SuperValu have deployed Yammer this year, proof that enterprise social networking is entering the mainstream.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the sFund, a new $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services. Amazon.com, Facebook, and Zynga, the leading companies defining today’s social and online environment; entertainment and media leaders Comcast and Liberty Media and Allen & Company, LLC, have committed to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners. The sFund will provide financing, counsel, and relationship capital for a new generation of entrepreneurs to deliver on the promise of the social web.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites,” said KPCB partner John Doerr. “There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.”

The sFund will be led by KPCB partner Bing Gordon, former chief creative officer and longtime executive at Electronic Arts and board director of Amazon.com and Zynga. Gordon said, “Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy.”

“Social apps are viral, and when they hit, it often happens suddenly, and then they grow explosively. That’s one of the reasons the scalable, elastic, no capex, variable cost nature of Amazon Web Services is ideal for social apps,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “The top three companies that develop for Facebook all use AWS.”

Ever feel like you're talking to a brick wall on Twitter? That might be because 71 percent of tweets get absolutely no response from the world.

Toronto-based social media analytics company Sysomos scanned 1.2 billion messages that were sent in August and September 2009 to try and get some idea of the kind of conversations that are going on.

They discovered that more than seven in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world.

Of the remainder, just 6 percent get retweeted, and 92 percent of those retweets occur within the first hour. Multiplying those probabilities together means that fewer than one in 200 messages get retweeted after an hour's gone by. Essentially, once that hour's up, your message is ancient history.

 

The Colorado hotspot is the top U.S. destination for new tech companies largely because of a bottom-up revolution led by entrepreneurs

On a recent morning, a half-dozen young software engineers hunched over laptops at The Cup, a café on bustling Pearl Street in downtown Boulder. They were holding an informal meeting about a social networking app they're developing and seemed to be on a first-name basis with the parade of techies walking through the door.

An influx of entrepreneurs like these has changed the face of this Colorado city of 98,000, making it a destination for Internet startups. With the University of Colorado as an anchor and a backyard full of mountains as lifestyle bait, Boulder now has the highest concentration of software engineers per capita in the nation. It's second only to Silicon Valley in percentage of workers employed in tech, according to the American Electronics Assn. Best-selling author and urban development expert Richard Florida says it has the greatest concentration of the "creative class"—scientists, artists, engineers, and the like—in the U.S.

Twitter has more than 105 million registered users, co-founder Biz Stone said Wednesday.

America might be one of the youngest geopolitical nations around, but we’ve still got some interesting history to discover. Thanks to a partnership between Foursquare and the History Channel, some Foursquare users will learn a lot more about the history of their checkin locations over the next couple of months.

According to the History Channel’s brand new Foursquare page, the initiative was concocted to promote America, The Story of Us, “an epic 12-hour television event that tells the extraordinary story of how America was invented. It is an intensive look at the people, places and things that have shaped our nation, and the tough and thrilling adventure that is America’s 400-year history.”

Just two days after comments by Twitter investor Fred Wilson made third-party Twitter developers nervous about what the company might do, those fears have become reality: The company announced Friday that it has acquired Atebits, maker of Tweetie, one of the top Twitter apps for the iPhone (AAPL). According to a post by co-founder and CEO Evan Williams on the Twitter blog, the app will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and will now be free (previously, the pro version of Tweetie cost $2.99 to download). Developer Loren Brichter said on his blog that he is joining Twitter’s mobile team and will be developing Tweetie for the iPad.

Developers and other observers immediately started analyzing the purchase as soon as the news broke. Hunch Co-founder Chris Dixon connected Fred Wilson’s comments — which the VC blogger denied were about any specific future action by the company — with the Tweetie acquisition, saying: “Wow, weird coincidence! a Twitter board member blogged about killing twitter apps the same week Twitter released/bought 2 clients!” Engadget editor Nilay Patel said that Twitter buying Tweetie was “roughly equivalent to Microsoft building it’s own WP7 phone – bye bye, ecosystem.”

Former Engadget editor and gdgt co-founder Ryan Block said: “As of today, if your app depends on Twitter for anything other than identity or content syndication, you are officially on notice.” Some developers even formed their own unofficial “union” with a Twitter hashtag — the #unionoftwitterapps, and there is plenty of discussion pro and con about the deal on a Google (GOOG) group for Twitter developers. Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber wrote that “there’s going to be some heavy drinking tonight from developers of other iPhone OS Twitter API clients.”

Are you getting obsessed with tweets, uploads, and writing on your wall? See our checklist to be sure.

Here's a great article written by Kristin Burnham:

Answer these questions carefully (since denial is the first sign): Do you find yourself dreaming about status updates and friend requests? Does your TwitPic account chronicle your trips to the grocery store and cleaners?