But, alas, I was wrong.

John Mayer’s newest Music Video, Paper Dolls, features Joanna Rohrback, who shared her moves with the world, and will likely help John Mayer in driving his new video viral.

To promote the product the SloMo Guys decided to fired a crossbow through a line of Dr. Pepper 10 bottles, naturally.

They captured the results in an awesome video.

Just beyond the ballpark’s centerfield wall sits @Cafe–a new way to engage San Francisco’s fans to their social media outlets. In October of 2012, the San Francisco Giant’s surpassed President Obama in Klout scores. The Giant’s “get” social media.

The cafe  is built around a 12 by 4 foot screen that streams Giant related posts from Twitter and Instagram, from fans and players around the world. In the cafe staffers track the internet content that comes in, and approves or denies it for posting. A charging station allows tech obsessed folks to charge their phones so they can post yet another Instagram pic, and obviously, there’s coffee to give you your caffeine boost.

It’s a pretty big move for the giants, it’ll be interesting to see how other teams follow suite.

Inside the @SFGiants brand new ‘social cafe,’ billed as a sports first-of-kind: https://t.co/AW3eCwFy9F

— Sam Laird (@samcmlaird) June 17, 2013

There’s no denying the Giant’s have an incredible social media presence, and they’re clearly doing something right.

Crowdfunding is a new, and rapidly spreading trend. Crowdfunding occurs when the masses work to fund an idea, a dream or product. Such practices have become pervasive on across the internet, with websites such as Kickstarter, & Indiegogo keepin’ ‘em hot.
BestAccountDegrees.net

A Social Media presence can level the playing field between the leaders and followers.

So what makes the difference between a following of 400 and a following of 400,000?

Celebrities and other public figures always have the upper hand, their fan bases are HUGE, and ever growing, businesses have to grow their brands organically and put thought and strategy into their social media approach.

Here are 4 more rules for Social Media Success-specifically with the entrepreneur in mind.

1. Produce quality content.

If you want to make a difference and make your mark you have to produce quality content. Generate your own content and be a leader in thought. Then, be willing to share other’s content. Help a sister out, and they, too will lend a hand. Share content, @mention other brands and influencers and give credit where credit’s due.

2. Be open and engaging.

On social media, it’s important to be available to your audience. You need to develop, not only a presence, but a personality. If someone tweets at you…tweet back. If you’re still small, you can-and should make the effort to reach back out.

The upside of the time-consuming engagement efforts? Loyal, devoted fans and followers-people who will tweet, retweet, like, share and recommend your content.

3. Define your niche.

On social media, you can produce and curate a hodgepodge of content, covering everything from sports, to fashion to engineering- or you can try to specialize in a a few specific content areas. There are far too many voices in Social Media to let yourself blend in with the crowd. Hone in on a subject, and own it.

4. Embrace each social network’s unique culture.

Every social network has a very unique culture. To make the most of each platform, embrace the differences, as opposed to sharing identical content from cross platforms.

Twitter is for engaging with individuals, retweeting, mentioning people and creating relationships. Twitter is for conversation.

Facebook is for relaying information. On Facebook, you should post less frequently and find different ways to engage. Post about events, share albums. You don’t want to bombard folks with information, they already see way too much content on Facebook.

Pinterest is for sharing ideas, inspiration and motivation. Instagram and Vine are best used to help to stablish your brand identity-the people who are a part of its success and the daily happenings of your company.

Be sure you’re keeping the network’s culture in mind.

Check out our interview with these guys, who have made a pretty awesome tool, and it looks like this is just the beginning for the Coffitivity Brand.

 How did you come up with this idea?

The idea was a “right place, right time” kind of scenario. My business partner Justin Kauszler and I both work in academia at Virginia Commonwealth University and as such, we tend to read a good amount of nerdy research and white papers. I stumbled across one citing a moderate level of ambient noise as conducive to creativity and I told Justin about it. To be honest, we really thought nothing of the paper at first – it was just good information to bank. Not too long afterwards, we spent a week or so rebranding CycleStay, our first (now on hold indefinitely) startup, and happened to be getting epic work done in and out of several local Richmond coffee shops. When Justin got back to his day job after a long weekend of coffee shop grinding, he knew that something was missing from his work environment. Recalling the paper I read, he knew the problem had something to do with sound and ambience. At that point, he decided that if he couldn’t go to the coffee shop, he’d have to bring the coffee shop to him.

Why did you decide to dedicate yourself to this idea, and launch a business? When did you launch it?

The idea popped up around mid January of this year and it took a month to build. We launched officially on March 4^th. Funny enough, when Justin bounced the idea of Coffitivity off of me, I told him it was a terrible idea. Even so, he was committed to making the project happen so I was on board. Justin mostly saw this as a great opportunity to dive into coding. Neither one of us was a technical co-founder at the beginning of this project, but Justin leaned on some great resources like our developer friends, Code Academy, and Lynda.com to learn how to build the site. This was really just one huge experiment for us. We designed a product we knew we’d use (we knocked out the audio first, so we actually used the Coffitivity recording to design and build Coffitivity) and we’ve found that there are a million people across the world who connect with coffee shops the same way we do. Improving the way we work and create awesome things is something that resonates with tons of people. We feel like we’ve built into a tool that tackles that pretty effectively and that makes a great business in our eyes.

Do you plan to launch different sound environments?

Absolutely. We’ve got a couple different tracks in the back pocket that will be coming to the site as soon as some of the functionality of track selection is flushed out. We’re also working on a few angles to get raw audio from different countries. Imagine being able to hang out in a little French or Italian café from the comfort of your home or office!

How do you plan to bring in money with Coffitivity?

We’ve got a few ideas on that front. Right now the site is free and we plan to keep most aspects of that consistent. We do, however, plan to charge for some of the new premium features we’ve got coming out pretty soon.

Any exciting updates to anticipate in the future?

Yes, yes, yes. We’ve got iOS AND OSX apps on the way and we’re excited about both. The Mac app sits in the menu bar and stays out of the way unless you need it and the iOS app will allow you to mix your Coffitivity in with your iTunes playlists. Best of all, you’ll be able to use both apps offline! We’ve also got some e-commerce coming to the site. We’re exploring some interesting partnerships, so hopefully you’ll see some merch and items for sale from us here pretty soon.

What are your must have apps?

The usual suspects – Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps. I also use Path, Pinterest, and Facebook Pages every day. Internally to the team, we use Hangouts for discussions and Asana for project management and Snapchat and Vine for fun. Probably a no-brainer, but the Beta Coffitivity app gets some solid use too.

Apple or Android?

I’m an apple guy, as is our designer, Nicole, and Tommy, our second developer. Justin for whatever reason is still on Android. Haha.

What do you enjoy most about your day-to-day work life? 

I’d have to say I/we love the fact that it doesn’t feel like work. We really enjoy interacting with each other as a team and as friends and on top of that, we really believe in what we’re building. That makes for the best work environment anyone could ask for.

When your company “makes it” what’s one thing about the startup life that you will NOT miss.

I think we’re all in a place where we won’t miss needing to work other jobs to pay the bills. We all certainly love our day jobs, but it’ll be nice to work them on our own terms.

Check out Coffitivity on all of their Social Outlets!

Website

Facebook

Twitter

Unlocking the Truth, a metal band composed of twelve year old Malcolm Brickhouse and eleven year old Jarad Dawkins will make it, one of these days. Watching this video, from The Avant Garde Diaries you may find yourself doing a double take-the words and outlook from these kids sounds like its coming from two 30 year olds, not 6th graders.

These kids are dreamers. They want to become famous, and play their music for one reason only- because they like it. Jarad discusses the flack he receives in school for his hobby and fashion choices, but declares that his love for drums and writing music allows him to express himself.

These kids are just…awesome. To find pre-teens who are more certain about what they want to do with their lives than most twenty-somethings is inspiring, and makes me want to shout their name from the rooftops.

Jarad even discussed that in addition to school, practice and writing music, he is also writing a book. A book that depicts a kid who is bullied in school but turns to his music, becomes rich and famous while the bullies become homeless. Do I see a biopic in the future?

Whether you like Metal music or not, these kids’ passion, determination and can-do attitude is one to be commended, and shared.

The band has already written two albums, Madness and Paranoid, respectively, and recently auditioned for America’s Got Talent. They also manage to keep up good grades in school.

So watch out, folks – two smart, young metalheads from Brooklyn are coming to a town near you in the near future.

Unlocking The Truth – Malcolm Brickhouse & Jarad Dawkins from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo.

For their ongoing Late Night Hashtags segment, Late Night host Jimmy Fallon asked his viewers to use the hashtag#DadQuotes on Twitter to tweet a weird, funny or embarrassing thing your father has said. In this hilarious clip, Jimmy reads his favorite #DadQuotes tweets on air.

Let's play the hashtag game! Tweet a funny, weird, or embarrassing thing your dad has said and tag with #dadquotes. Could be on our show!

— jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) June 12, 2013

Hashtags originated on Twitter for a reason–to engage in conversation, improve search for specific content, and immediately track trending topics. Twitter limits your posts to 140 characters, meaning, you have to be careful of the hashtags you post, so your tweets still make sense. 140 characters encourages users to think long and hard about how they want to communicate their thoughts, opinions or senseless ramblings. This character limit helped to control #hashtag frequency.

#ChillOut

When Instagram released hashtags, they became the norm, and soon things got OUTTA CONTROL, every post contains a #hashtag, and without a character limit, folks type till the end of time to make sure they come up in as many searches as possible. Abusing the system? Yes. Definitely.

Can’t decide between 10 different hashtags? You don’t have to on Instagram.  #People #Tag #Things #Like #This #ALL #DAY #LONG.

These things get out of hand. Aim for 2 hashtags, maybe three…You may think that #ohmygodthisrainisawful is an appropriate hashtag, but no, #rainyday will do. Hashtags should be words or phrases..not sentences.Store that one as a general Rule of Thumb.

I assure you I’m not full of hashtag hatred. I’ll admit, some made up hashtags are funny. Personally, I prefer #shitsbananasbananas to #ridiculous even if the search options diminish greatly…you know, to 0. 

#Relevant?

Just how relevant is it all anyway ?

Facebook just released graph search for a reason. It’s an in depth search module that pinpoints keywords (among everything else)…so what-really-is the purpose of hashtags on Facebook? Sure, it’s easier to share from Instagram and Twitter; but in terms of an actual tool, it seems a bit redundant.

#YourPointIs?

The original use for Hashtags is not yet obsolete, but it has evolved into something that is certainly more popular (particularly amongst young people), but also far less productive. On Facebook, they’re existence may be “fun” but is it really useful?

When hashtags are no longer used to find terms and filter content, won’t their existence be more of a bother?

Feel’s like every other app under the sun has been created, so why’d it take Microsoft so long. Microsoft has ever so quietly launched its 

version of Office for iOS. Currently, it’s not available for iPad, and hou need a subscription…so it ain’t all great.