Yahoo Lets Ladies 'Shine' on New Community Site

Yahoo has launched a community-oriented site geared to women of all ages, reports CNET.

"Shine," part of a company-wide attempt to build more vertical content destinations, also aspires to challenge femme-centric giants like iVillage and Glam Media, which court ad dollars across myriad popular niche sites.

More here

Shine

Musicians take social networking into their own hands

50 Cent has more than 1 million friends on MySpace, but if the rapper ever decides to leave the social network, he'll be leaving behind those friends, too. So like a growing number of artists, he's started his own social networking site.

On Thisis50.com, fans can create profiles and friend lists just like on MySpace, but 50 Cent has direct access to the site's users and their e-mail addresses.

More here

Online Communities and Brands - Our New Hometowns

Some interesting thoughts on brands and online communities, and why they tend to be clunky, unusable messes.

More here

White Paper from StrawberryFrog

Yet another compilation of do's and don'ts for social media marketing. It does however, come with a preliminary case study of Scion's social networking efforts.

More here

Sochial Networking

Here's a clever, and subtle, use of social networking by a marketer. Every day, Facebook designs a new gift that users can send to their friends. Lexus is currently running "The power of H" campaign. So Facebook and Lexus designed an h gift. For every h sent, Lexus will donate to Earth Pledge.

The Social Club for The Anti-Social

Rockstar Games is about to launch a social network where gamers can track their achievements against other players. It'll even get Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 players on the same (web)page. It's called Rockstar Games Social Club. Though I think it should be called GTA+.

More here

The Rise of Social Search

As more and more people spend more and more time on social networks, they have less and less time to spend on b2c sites. How should marketers react? Here's a "search engine" point of view:

Part one