Over a century old, the Sierra Club is America’s premier environmental non-profit and one of the most well respected advocacy groups around. Not surprisingly, they’re doing a great job of leveraging their following and creating a vibrant social media presence.

Facebook

Sierra Club has done a great job with their landing page. It’s topical, to the point, and powerful. Users immediately see the copy “Beyond Oil” and a call for Americans to take action and move beyond oil. Below this is an email capture form, and links to join Sierra Club and see current actions. The layout is simple and user friendly.

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It is a common misunderstanding that social media networks like Facebook and Twitter are only accessed by the technology savvy millennium generations. In fact, a look at the data shows this is simply not true. Facebook, the mega-giant juggernaut of the social media world, is actually one of the most demographically diverse of all social media sites. It has super-ceded the niche markets of other networking sites and has seemingly reached out to all ages.

For Facebook and its users, this is not unexpected, but in the general public there is a common misconception that social networking is dominated by young adults and teenagers using gadgetry to get in touch with their friends.

Of course, large populations of exactly these types of users swarm to social media sites, but in no way shape or form do they dominate the spectrum (as seen in the age distribution graph).

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Sometimes it’s the details that matter most. Most new Twitterers will consider their profile picture, their bio, the sorts of content they will tweet etc., but how about the number and timing of tweets? Too many tweets and you’ll lose followers; too few and you risk diminishing the effectiveness of your account.

So what’s the ideal number? It depends, of course! You’ll notice that the most followed Twitter users are celebrities who often Tweet many times per day, but widely followed brands tend to keep the number down. Users are interested in brands’ news and are ready and willing to be engaged. However, users are not as willing to sit through 15 tweets a day from Starbucks as they are from Ashton Kutcher. Brands should typically stay under 5 tweets a day, but the exact number depends on your goals, and what you’re trying to achieve through Twitter. More Information…

There’s been a lot of talk about Facebook in past months, even more than usual with the announcement of the social graph and their new privacy policies.

Facebook has undergone countless changes to its privacy policy. Typically, Facebook creates a change, there is a modest outcry, then people forget about it and wall posting reverts back to normal. However, this time around, the outcry appeared to resonate more deeply. The sentiment that Facebook cares about Facebook first, and its users second, is spreading. As Farhad Manjoo argues all the naysayers will soon get over it and start using Facebook as usual.

But will this always be the case? Is Facebook too big to fail?
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Don’t be fooled by our name … we offer services beyond social media, such as web design. One of our web design projects just went live and it looks awesome, so check out www.dtlaresident.com and forgive our gloating! DTLA is a new community happening in downtown LA that includes gardens, shopping, restaurants, a shuttle and more! Considering we love communities (especially online) we’re proud to have helped create the online face of this fabulous new community.

At last month’s F8 conference, while everyone was busy sticking like buttons on everything they could get their hands on, I was intrigued by a smaller innovation. An RFID card that allowed you to “check-in” at different places in the conference.

Facebook was clearly indicating it was going into the location space, and yet what everyone was excited about was the Open Graph. Over the past few weeks the buzz about Open Graph hasn’t let up. Studying the project has gotten me more excited about it. Especially as it relates to the rise of the semantic web. However, I still believe that Open Graph will not have one-tenth of the effect on the world that Facebook Places (the name of the now formerly announced Facebook location project) will have.

If you’re new to the social media phenomenon, here’s the goal: build trust and authentic connections with your customers. Social media has collapsed the barrier between brand and customer and allows companies to have a discussion with consumers. Many companies strive to develop an army of brand evangelists, groups of people who voluntarily sing the praises of an organization. A friend’s opinion is of course, infinitely more compelling than an advertisement or testimonial on the back of a package.

While social media gives companies a powerful new tool for developing brand evangelists, these devoted followers are nothing new. While at a rest stop in central Oregon a few weeks ago, I passed by a group of Harley Davidson enthusiasts. Not only did every member of the group have their own Harley, every one of them was wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt. It’s incredible just how deeply the brand is linked with this group’s identity. Harley Davidson has a fleet of mobile advertisements rocketing around the country.

So what do these much prized brand evangelists look like on the Internet?
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you’ve heard about the 4^th Gen iPhone fiasco. If you haven’t–stop reading, and go here. Quick, before something else that’s been blowing up online happens and you miss it.

Now that we’re all caught up, let’s back to the issue at hand: why do people keep taking their super-top-secret things when they go out to get smashed? (Harry Potter script, anybody?)

What I think is interesting, and a little more relevant, is that when the lucky iPhone-finding individual stumbled across the discovery, the news didn’t break on the NYTimes or AP or any of the big dogs. It was the blogs Engadget and Gizmodo who busted the fake 3G case off this story.

According to Alexa, traffic to Gizmodo exploded last Monday when the pictures and info were posted. And as the story spreads, and the rest of the internet catches on, new news about how Gizmodo acquired the iPhone ($5,000 changing hands), speculation on whether that was legal, whether the whole deal was a controlled leak, and a whole lotta talk are happening.

It’s just one of those moments where you sit back and think, “Thank you, internet.” Despite all the crap out there, there are moments where the internet really shows its ability to break news, to share information and really hunt down who said what, who paid whom, and who’s getting fired because of this whole mess.

And if iPhone-gate doesn’t instill that same wonder in you, check out Mashable’s list of extraordinary twitter updates. That should do it.

TEDxUSC 2010 was this Tuesday, and I had the good fortune to be able to attend.  It was a fantastic event, nine hours of performances and innovative stories.

What was truly amazing for those of us in tune with social media is the huge role the Internet and social media, played in the event.

The whole TEDx brand wouldn’t exist were it not for the Internet. For those not in the know, TED talks are a pretty big deal, big conferences bringing in big names to give big-idea talks.

TEDx is essentially a franchise, an opportunity not explicitly organized by the TED people, but an event sponsored and hosted by an independent organization. It uses the TED name, and online talks to carry the spirit of TED in a smaller scale.

It literally would not be possible were it not for the Internet, and the TED talks are a perfect example of the noble calling of the Internet: the sharing of ideas. I mean, that’s TED’s motto after all: Ideas worth sharing. The ideas, and the filmed talks, were posted online, and viewed by thousands all over the world. Inspiration followed, and the TEDx brand, allowing events from USC’s big, well-orchestrated hooplah to a videos projected onto a side of a building in Africa.

Without the Internet, the great stories from TED might not have spread. Without the ability to stream their videos, a lot of the TEDx events wouldn’t be possible. And without twitter, I wouldn’t know exactly where every blogger was sitting in the audience.

It was fun following the #TEDxUSC hashtags, with everyone tweeting how excited they were, twitpic-ing the views from their seats.  TEDxUSC was nice enough to set up a section of blogger seats, complete with power strips. Ultimately, new friends were made not just through handshakes, but through retweets and replies. I connected with a blogger, a fellow student, and the director of a short film shown at TEDxUSC, to name a few.

TEDxUSC knew that their talks were inspiring and filled with great ideas. The ideas were ones worth spreading that day. And they openly encouraged the spread of those ideas through handshakes and introductions, but also through quickfire sharing online.