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The Internet is such a wonderful thing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s brought us together today to talk about things like how social media affect your spending habits. That has to count for something, right?

The question isn’t whether social services on the Web influence how we spend money, but rather how they affect your habits. At the end of the day businesses can’t survive without making money, and that’s why we’re seeing a flood of social services that might push you over the ledge to buy that new shiny thing that you probably can’t afford. That’s how they’re going to make money, after all.

We’ve all seen how social media can influence our spending and I’ve had a recent example that illustrates this topic perfectly. A friend of mine posted a cool pair of Converse sneakers on Facebook that, get this, had Dr. Seuss characters on them. How cool is that? I clicked the link and saw that they were on sale. Without thinking twice, I purchased a pair of the shoes for myself and less than 3 days later, I was wearing them on my feet.

Social media totally affected my spending habits in that scenario and it did it in three ways; influence, information, and yes, indiscretion. Let’s take a look closely at each of these.

Influence

In the scenario that I explained above, I was clearly influenced by a friend of mine on Facebook. When I saw the link with a picture of the shoes I jumped at clicking on them because I trust my friend, she’s pretty good at finding cool stuff. If she took the time to post the shoes, then they’re clearly worth at least looking at.

The only thing that she posted along with her link was the word “WANT”. Clearly, these are shoes that haven’t just gotten her attention, she might actually buy a pair. She’s already gone through the process of finding the item, blessing them as “cool”, and then shared them out to her friends. All of the “hard work” was done for me, all I had to do was check them out.

Information

Along with the influence of a friend on a site like Twitter or Facebook, they’re giving you the information that you need before you take your credit card out to make a purchase. When it comes to sharing items for purchase on the web, you’re usually sent directly to the order page for that item. These are well thought out landing pages that companies are banking on sealing the deal once you visit.

What will you find when you visit one of these item pages? Information, and a lot of it. You’ll see how many other people “Liked” it on Facebook, reviews from others who have bought it, and tons of beautiful photos. All of the information you would ever need to make a purchase is right there. There’s no need to talk to a salesperson or do any comparison shopping because you have everything packaged up nicely for you.

Indiscretion

Once your friend has shared something and you’ve found the information that supports the originally perceived coolness of it, then it’s time to throw caution to the wind and buy the thing.

Indiscretion is the part of this that makes social media so valuable for companies when it comes to tapping into our spending habits. Our friends have a lot of influence over what we do, where we go, and what we buy. And rightfully so, we trust them and that’s why they’re our friends. Companies know that if they can excite someone about a product, it might turn into a slew of sales for them. Even if the original poster of the cool thing doesn’t buy the item, they’ve blessed it for everyone else.

Once my friends think something cool and the information I’m given backs that up, I will make some pretty foolish purchases. I’ve bought movie-themed items, video games on a whim, and well…Dr. Seuss sneakers. Why? Because the sales cycle was social and fast.

When you’re in a physical store it’s easier to come to your senses and save your money. But even then, I’ve tweeted while I was at Best Buy, hoping that my friends could validate a potential purchase for me with their inherent influence. That’s exactly how social media affects my spending habits, and even as I type it out, it’s unlikely that I’ll pass on the next awesome thing that one of my friends post online.

My generation, and generations to come, are pretty bullet-proof when it comes to advertising and commercials. Big companies know that and that’s why they’re investing in getting themselves into social discussions online. The only time I pay attention to commercials is during the Super Bowl and rarely will I make a purchase just because the commercial was cool.

That’s right, I trust my friends a lot and I’m not afraid to say it. However, it’s exactly what the next wave of e-commerce sites are hoping for and I’ll be preyed on because of it. But that’s cool, keep those Dr. Seuss shoes coming and I’ll keep buying.

Entrepreneur Jan Rezab talks with the excited confidence of a man who has the world — or at least the parts he wants — in the palm of his hand. And why shouldn’t he — he had started his first business by the time he turned 16, and now he’s the CEO of Socialbakers, a global social media analytics company which just opened its US headquarters in San Francisco (the fifth office, adding to ones in Prague, Munich, London and Paris).

Rezab says the company, founded in 2008, has been profitable since day one, and last year they received $2 million in funding. “I’m very success driven,” he says, “I really wanna make things work.” He’s young — only 25 — and he barely looks it. He comes to the interview early and well-prepared, in a suit and trademark rimless glasses. He says he’s also “vision driven,” which to him means pursuing “the right thing to do,” and making it easier for others — in this case, marketers — to see what the “right thing to do” is.

At its core, that’s what Socialbakers is: a tool to help marketers make the right decisions. “We believe that marketers are sometimes not making the right decisions,” he explains, “because they have bad data, or they don’t have any data.” Socialbakers aims to collect and provide the data, and more importantly, to make sense of it. “We’re trying to deliver the value of that data,” he says, “read it, for the clients.”

Beyond “listening”

Taking publicly available data and finding a way to sell it is nothing new. Social media makes it easier than ever to do, and the marketing industry is saturated with people trying to capitalize on that. But Rezab thinks most companies are going about it the wrong way: “The US social analytics market might seem penetrated,” he says, “when in fact there’s only social listening companies out there.” Social listening companies are those “that tap into a search stream and just download the keywords, download a particular keyword and their mentions.” “With Socialbakers”, says Rezab, “We’re looking at the competitive intelligence piece and the whole picture of it.”

An important elements of this is comparing social media profiles by category, so companies can see how they’re doing against competitors. “Before, for companies it was just about visitors on my website, maybe some impressions, right? And it was their own sites,” he says.

This all changed with with social media, which makes direct comparisons much easier. Rezab calls social media an element of earned media, a subset of marketing somewhere between paid media (advertising) and owned media (like a website) [not everyone agrees on these definitions: Forrester Research puts social media profiles under owned media]. For companies, says Rezab, earned media is “anything that [they] don’t directly control, that sits somewhere else, but [they] run it.”

Earned media, as he defines it, is huge right now. “Earned media is now mobile, you know, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest now, my god, for retailers, you name it, right? I mean there’s so many sites,” he says, “Somebody has to make sense of creating a unified set of metrics. And that’s what we’re doing at Socialbakers. Making sure we rank those companies, in the right category, and giving the proper metrics.’”

Another key element to providing the full picture is coverage of all major social networks. Socialbakers tracks statistics for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube, with advanced tools focusing on Facebook and Twitter. Rezab is open to supporting more platforms, as long as the data is publicly available and usable (they’ve been unable to track Google+ to the same extent as Facebook and Twitter because the proper APIs are not yet available). For platforms interested in partnering, he says “we’ll even help them create the metrics around what they do.” (Tumblr, we’re looking at you!)

But most statistics are still just “listening.” Rezab says a key element of Socialbakers is its engagement ratings. Instead of defining success by simple measurements of popularity like follower counts, Socialbakers tries to measure engagement with companies’ social media pages. This provides a more useful picture of how well a company’s social media marketing strategy is working, because “what is important is the quality of the fans and how they engage with your page.”

Engagement rankings are available for Facebook and Twitter, and are calculated daily by taking the number of likes, comments and shares or favorites, replies and retweets, respectively, and dividing them by the total number of fans on that day. Then an average is calculated, and that’s what Socialbakers calls “engagement.”

“Delivering actionable data, from our perspective, is critical to the market,” explains Rezab, “and delivering it in a centralized way,” with standard metrics. Simply put, Rezab sees Socialbakers as a tool to help marketers do what they do better, by showing them “what really works.”

Watch our video interview with Jan Rezab here:

“Because nobody knows the brand better than the marketers themselves,” he says, “and we keep giving emphasis on different studies, but really, the marketers know better. And when you show them that data, they suddenly know what to do.”

The engagement aspect is part of Socialbakers’ pro product; there’s also free data and rankings. The pro product starts at $50 a month to monitor one page, and goes up into the thousands for larger companies.

Socialbakers has more than 750 customers worldwide, with 60 in the US, a number it hopes to grow with the new US office. Including the free product, Socialbakers has more than 275,000 registered marketers.

“Typically the companies that started using Socialbakers went up in their engagement by 50–100 percent,” Rezab says. In larger markets where Socialbakers is very penetrated, like Germany or Turkey, “we look at the top 50 pages on the market, and we look at the ones who use Socialbakers analytics, and the ones that don’t, the ones that do have three times the higher engagement rate, on average.”

Data and creativity

Collecting data is pretty straight forward; it’s a matter of crawling pages and using APIs. The more interesting aspect — where Rezab and Socialbakers get to be creative — is with how that data is presented (when I ask him if there’s a creative element to his role in a data driven company, he answers enthusiastically: “Oh hell yeah.”).

Data’s only useful to most marketers to the extent that it can be effectively visualized. That’s very important to where Socialbakers is now, but even more so to its future. “For now, we’re tapping into maybe 5, 10% of the visualization potential,” says Rezab. In the case of actionable data (as opposed to creative data, like data relating to the elections or sporting events) visualizations can be improved, he says, by providing more data with less visualizations. “So taking 7 data sources and making one chart out of it,” he says, “That’s readable. That you get. When you look at it, you get the numbers, you look at the numbers, you look at the chart, you get it and you know what to do next. That’s actually quite an art.”

He gives the example of a new visualization they just created that shows “the amount of engagement by hours and days of week in a beautiful chart,” which condensed multiple charts into one. Before, making sense of the same data was a struggle. But now, “you look at this chart, and you see ‘aha!’, my heat point is between 11 and 4pm in the afternoon, from Monday to Saturday. And on Sunday it’s in the evening. And it’s like that for my entire market. Boom. Data decision, one chart, you know it all.” When a new customer starts using the pro analytics, Rezab says it should immediately make sense. “They open it up, they add Twitter pages, they add Facebook pages, they’re there,” he says, “they do not have to learn anything.”

Unsurprisingly, Rezab thinks analytics are key to brands, marketers and media organizations being able to make better decisions and optimize their investments, by knowing what content and what networks are most effective (he says right now, Facebook is leading in terms of marketing effectiveness). But his faith in data goes beyond marketing. He thinks everyone can benefit from data driven decision making. Someday, he expects social media analysis will be able to predict elections, equal to or better than current techniques like polling.

An emphasis on data driven decision making does not mean disregard for creativity, however. He thinks data can foster creativity. “Because ultimately marketing is about creativity,” he says,“But it shouldn’t be creativity-only driven. It should be data and creativity driven.”

Thinking globally

With offices in five countries and customers on every continent, Socialbakers is clearly a global company. But the company was founded in Prague in the Czech Republic (by Rezab and Martin Homolka, CTO, Jiri Voves, VP of Products and Lukas Maixner, GM for Candytech), and getting to a point where it could compete on a global level — against companies that started in tech hubs like San Francisco, (whereas Socialbakers is just now opening operations here) — wasn’t easy.

“To originate a startup from Europe is hard,” says Rezab. It involves bootstrapping, which Socialbakers did, starting with agency business before transforming into its current incarnation. “We had to make money since day one,” he says, “we had to eat rats for a year and a half, as founders of the company.” He says startups originating in Europe need to focus on “building a stable company with a good business model that will be profitable,” because many US investors don’t invest in certain areas of Europe.

Now, he says Socialbakers is getting an “amazing” amount of investment offers from important industry players in the US, because they’ve reached a level of relevance in the world. He says it’s just a matter of getting initial traction, but “not many companies get through that filter.” Fortunately, he thinks more will. He believes the Czech Republic just needs a “big exit” to put it on the map. “We hope to give it to the country,” he says, “and to support more entrepreneurship in a global way.”

For companies looking for a global market, he says it’s key to think globally from the start. “Build everything like you were physically [in San Francisco]. Just half of the day imagine you were there. And act as [if] you were there,” he says. “We don’t make it secret that we’re European, no way, we’re proud of it,” he adds, but for a company aiming for the global market, he thinks discounting the local market and local clients is the best way to scale.

Looking ahead

Socialbakers is already one of the worldwide leaders in social media analytics, and is doing especially well in Europe. But its footprint in the US is small, and the recently opened San Francisco office, and related hiring of Martin Huml as President and Chief Operating Officer and Katrina Wong as VP of Marketing, are an attempt to change that. “We have the data,” says Rezab, “and we just have the partnerships rolling out now, so it’s gonna be a good focus on the market, really get out there, show it to the advertisers, and make sure they love it… now’s the time to really pump out the US market.” For now, development will remain in Prague.

“You’ll be seeing some interesting stuff — product launches, feature launches, and partnerships being announced in the next sort of 12 weeks,” says Rezab. He mentions “the potential of crossing [currently covered social data] with other activities and platforms down the road,” and hints at improving social media management, which is something he thinks is lacking for teams and companies.

Overall, Socialbakers seems to be heading in the right direction: Recent research ranked social media engagement as the top priority for digital marketers in 2012.

Social everywhere

“Social media is not one platform anymore. It’s not a Facebook, it’s not a Google+, it’s a use case,” says Rezab. “We’ve all learned to be social, regardless of what. And that use case will never change.” He foresees a future where “social” is not a feature, it’s everything.

“I believe online will ultimately only be social, so we won’t call it social or online, it’ll be just ‘connecting.’”

Yuri Arcurs, artcasta, Oleksandr Kalinichenko and olly via shutterstock

In a blog post today, Facebook announced some new apps that are utilizing its Timeline functionality, all of them being media related. The company also reported some interesting statistics for those who have been using the Open Graph platform since it was announced in September at Facebook’s f8 conference.

With over 850M users, Facebook hosts a wide-range audience of users from every demographic. That’s precisely what makes the company so valuable as it enters its initial public offering, especially to advertisers.

One service that Facebook uses as an example is The Guardian, it says that The Guardian’s Facebook app has been installed over 5 million times. That alone is impressive, but the part that jumps out the most is that more than half of those using the Facebook app are 24-years-old or younger. The 18-34 demographic is the most hotly sought after demographic for any media company on any platform, be it the web or television.

It’s not just The Guardian who is seeing these types of results, Yahoo! News has said that its Social Bar app on Facebook has over 2 million daily users and the most active demographic is 18-34. What Timeline does for these companies is give it a piece of real-estate on a Facebook users profile to serve up content as it’s read and shared.

This bodes quite well for the massive social network as it should begin being publicly traded sometime in May of this year. People who wish to invest in Facebook want to know that it will be able to engage its userbase in content consumption and sharing which means that these media outlets are getting more eyeballs on its own advertising. While it remains to be seen how effective Facebook’s own advertising platform will be, the company is making itself an indispensable piece of the content distribution model for media companies.

By having a simple “Like” button on news and videos, companies can get the type of circulation that it can’t get elsewhere. Now with Open Graph, these same companies can take things a step further with their own apps. It’s a huge win for Facebook too, as content keeps people engaged, and engagement means people are staying put on Facebook rather than going elsewhere. If the Newsfeed became empty one day, its users would start surfing other sites.

Other apps launching with Timeline functionality today are: CBS Local: Los Angeles and New York, CMT, The Daily Show, GetGlue, MSNBC.com, and MTV News. These are all huge media properties and wins for the Facebook platform.

If advertising ever does make its way into the Newsfeed, those apps will probably include some type of revenue sharing with Facebook for displaying them, which will make shareholders very happy and more importantly, very comfortable with the future of the company.

If you watched the Super Bowl on Sunday you caught a pretty good show. From a football perspective, it was a pretty exciting game in the fourth quarter. The ads during the big game? Not so super if you ask me.

In one of the biggest yearly opportunities to catch a large audience staring at a screen for hours on end, big brands spent an estimated $3.5M each on Super Bowl ads. It’s the perfect time for innovation and interaction, especially using the Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, right? Wrong, big brands spending major money for ads aren’t so sold on using social media just yet.

According to analysis from Altimeter Group, 32% of the eighty seven ads displayed yesterday made no online reference whatsoever:

In what I’ll call “playing it safe”, it appears that most companies who did make reference to a presence on the Internet, chose to use their own URL rather than a hashtag or Facebook URL. Why is this? It has to do with controlling the message, obviously.

If I’m company and I’m spending a lot of money on the biggest television stage in the United States, there’s absolutely no way I’m going to ask millions of people to use a hashtag. There’s just no context to be had there and nothing to be gained. As we’ve seen with a recent McDonalds hashtag gaffe, it might actually cost you more money and brand integrity to defend something gone awry.

I’ve seen hashtags pop up on the screen a lot during television shows, and that’s the context that makes sense for me. If I’m watching a show that I’m really into, there’s a good chance that I’ll tweet something using its hashtag as a reference point and as a way to become a part of a larger conversation. For Super Bowl ads that cost so much money, there’s only one conversation to be had: did it suck or not? That’s not a question these brands want to ask, therefore they kept the social out of the ad.

In fact, the Altimeter Group points out that hashtags were only a part of 7% of the Super Bowl ads yesterday, and that doesn’t surprise me a bit. You can’t have a conversation without context, and I think that brands restraining themselves from using social media hooks and tricks as a way to seem cool is a good thing. These are “display” ads after all, and not interactive ones.

Apps aren’t just for startups these days, even NFL players are getting into the act. Newly minted Pro Bowl starter LeSean McCoy has launched his own app and took some time to talk to us about how social media has changed the way fans interact with their favorite stars.

McCoy’s app just hit the Android Market and lets fans read his tweets, Facebook updates, watch videos of his top plays, play puzzle games using his pictures, and more. The Philadelphia Eagles star has quite a following on Twitter, so a hundred thousand fans grabbing this app isn’t a crazy goal. The iOS version should also go live soon, we’re told.

We talked to McCoy about how social media has changed being a professional athlete:

TNW: How has social media changed being an NFL player?

LeSean McCoy: Social media has changed the landscape of marketing and engagement with fans for not only NFL players, but for anyone in the public eye. It gives us a chance to speak to our fans and supporters, on a level that wasn’t possible just a few years ago. With Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums, NFL players have been given the opportunity to really interact with our fans, regardless of time, location, or any other barrier that existed previously.

Social media has also given us the opportunity to build our own brands outside of the game and extend our conversations to different outlets and mediums, engaging our fans even further.

TNW: Does it ever freak you out how much your fans want to know about you?

LeSean McCoy: Honestly, no. I had heroes and people who I looked up to as well that inspired me to become an NFL player and I completely understand and feel blessed that people want to know so much about me. It’s an amazing feeling and I try to give my fans the best that I can.

This was the reason why making a mobile app with Conduit made so much sense. In one app, my fans are able to access my Twitter feed, Facebook updates, photo albums and they can even add their own photos that they take live from any of my games. It’s great to be able to harness technology to open up a new channel for my fans to get to know the real me.

TNW: Do you have any stories about social media that made you want to do something like have an app?

LeSean McCoy: There have been significant changes in technology in the past few years that changed the way people interact. I mean, we still receive fan letters, but the conversations that are happening online in real-time is something that not only NFL players, but anyone in the public eye should be made aware. I want to have a say in what kind of image I’m putting out there for my fans and building an app lets me speak directly to that audience. It gives me the ability to have conversations with my fans individually and collectively.

That means a lot to me, so naturally, creating an app was going to happen sooner or later. I’d like to thank the guys at Conduit for giving me the ability to do this.

TNW: Have you played the games on your own app?

LeSean McCoy: Yes, I’ve played the game on my own app and i think the fans will enjoy the overall challenge of the puzzle.

TNW: Are you an Android or iPhone guy?

LeSean McCoy: I’m a big iPhone guy since it keeps me connected to everything that’s going on. For that reason, I’m super excited for my iOS app to go live.

TNW: Mac or PC?

LeSean McCoy: I enjoy all Apple products so definitely a Mac, but because of my lifestyle, I think I’m going to have to go with an iPad due to its portability.

While we’ve heard a lot about businesses building their brands on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, pro athletes like LeSean McCoy are doing the same. It used to be that the only interaction fans could have with a player were chance encounters at training facilities or games, or purchasing their jersey. Now fans can have a dialogue with their heroes, and it seems to be a win-win for everyone so far, including LeSean McCoy.

➤ LeSean McCoy Official Android App

Customer support platform Zendesk has released some interesting details in a 2011 study and infographic. The study shows that businesses and consumers are both going to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to interact. It’s something that seems obvious, but has taken the better part of two years to come to fruition.

With brands getting a head start on accepting social media platforms as a useful means for customer support, the consumers themselves are finally getting into the act. However, the study shows that consumers would use these platforms to interact with businesses more often if they had a better grasp on how to use the tools. In fact, 76% of those polled said that they’d take to social media first if they had a better understanding of how it all works.

This means that in 2012, brands can’t simply flash a “Follow us on Twitter” or “Like us on Facebook” image on commercials or websites, they’re going to have to do a little bit of handholding if they want social media to make a big dent in how they handle customer support.

Here’s the full study from Zendesk, which shows that retail businesses are the most social media savvy (you can click here for the full-sized graphic):

It would be easy to argue that 2011 was the year of mobile photography. At the top of the app list facilitating this trend is Instagram, sporting over 15 million users. With the simple premise of taking a photo of something around you, throwing an artistic filter on it, dropping it into a stream, and beaming it to Twitter and Facebook, the app has built a gigantic community around itself.

Today, Instagram posted its first in a series of 2011 review posts, listing the top locations that people shared with their photos.

The top 15 locations showed heavy usage on the West coast, California specifically, with top spots being Disneyland, AT&T Park, and airports in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Here is the complete list of the top 15 locations people Instagram’d in 2011:

1. Disneyland
2. Suvarnabhumi International Airport (BKK)
3. AT&T Park
4. San Francisco International Airport (SFO)
5. Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
6. Hong Kong International Airport (HKG)
7. MoMA – Museum of Modern Art
8. Golden Gate Bridge
9. Metropolitan Museum of Art
10. Parque do Ibirapuera
11. Siam Paragon
12. Mission Dolores Park
13. Terminal 21
14. LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art
15. Times Square

While it’s not mandatory to post your location with an Instagram photo, I think it’s safe to say that major metropolitan areas and landmarks are the most photographed on the platform. It’ll be interesting to see where Instagram goes in 2012, will filters be enough for its hungry user base? So far, so good.

The holidays can be a difficult time for military families. With so many fathers, mothers, husbands, and wives stationed outside of the U.S., putting their lives on the line to protect their country, social networks like Facebook can be a priceless communication tool.

The organization Blue Star Families, which was created by military families to support other military families, guides people through difficulties that come from having their loved ones be in a sometimes dangerous situation so far away.

Facebook has teamed up with Blue Star Families to publish a social media guide, to help men and women overseas navigate social networking to keep in touch with their loved ones. This is a followup to Facebook’s “A Nation Thanks You” campaign that launched on Veterans Day this year. Nearly 60,000 people have used to app the give thanks.

This is a guide that is very close to Facebook’s heart. Don Faul, Facebook’s VP of Online Operations, is a former U.S. Marine and veteran, having served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had this to say about the partnership:

As a former active duty Marine, I understand how hard it can be to be separated from family and friends, especially during the holidays. Social media services like Facebook play an important role in the lives of service members and military families and are a particularly beneficial link between those stationed around the world and their families at home. Blue Star Families’ “Social Media Guide for Military Families” gives best practices and tips to help military families stay in touch every day and celebrate the holidays together, no matter where they are located.

While the guide is part how-to on using Facebook, it also helps service men and women with what they can and can’t post on social networks. Since their jobs are to protect the country, sharing their location, pictures, and stories publicly can damage national security.

You can read the blog post announcing the partnerships, co-authored by Blue Star Families, or read the guide below for yourself:

Social Media Guide for Military Families

Read about all things Facebook on The Next Web Facebook Channel

Hanna Phan wanted to work for online presentation service SlideRocket really bad. What she did to land the job seems obvious, but common sense isn’t so common as we know.

Phan actually used SlideRocket to get their attention.

SlideRocket lets you build presentations online, so Phan used the service for a little attention grabbing and message sending. The message was received loud and clear, apparently.

She tweeted the company’s CEO with her presentation which explained why she wanted to work for the company, and got a reply back almost immediately.

@chuckdietrich @sliderocket I want to work with you! Find my application here: http://portal.sliderocket.com/AIWCI/Iwanttoworkatsliderocket

An hour later, after Chuck literally walked off a plane, he replied:

@hannaphan @sliderocket AMAZING Preso! Let’s talk.

Here’s her presentation:

Needless to say, she got the job.

Job hunting can be a tedious job in and of itself, but if you know where you’d like to work, take some tips from Hanna Phan and eat your own dog food before you’re hired to do so officially.

Finding jobs at startups relies on your past experience, relationships with those at the company, and how passionate you are about what they’re doing. These things weren’t the case ten and twenty years ago. Finding a job relied on your past work history and your collegiate accolades.

So remember, the next time you want to work for that hot startup, simply use their service and figure out a way to get their attention. A tweet is worth a thousand words, and in this case, thousands of dollars worth of work.

When you’re visiting a city for the first time, you have a lot of options to help you find cool places to go. You can ask your friends and locals, or just surf around on the net looking for attractions.

One city Mayor has decided to utilize foursquare in hopes of becoming your Tampa tour guide.

Relying on the lists feature that foursquare provides, Mayor Bob Buckhorn and his office have generated expansive lists of things to do, see, and follow in Tampa, including city parks, attractions, dining and shopping, government buildings and public safety.

I’m in Tampa, now what

Politicians are using social media more and more these days, from President of the United States, Barack Obama, to Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker.

Tampa Mayor Buckhorn has taken social sharing to a new level though, becoming our virtual tour guide for the city of Tampa.

On top of hand-picking places to go while you visit his fair city in the state of Florida, the Mayor has left tips at specific venues, suggesting you try different things at restaurants for example. This turns touring around Tampa into a bit of a scavenger hunt. Nobody knows a city better than its Mayor, right?

Do you think more Mayors will get involved with social media, and specifically using foursquare in this way? I found it to be a perfect introduction to a city that I’ve never been too.

➤ Mayor Bob Buckhorn on foursquare