Social Media Strategies

New York City public schoolteachers may not contact students through personal pages on Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, but can communicate via pages set up for classroom use, the city’s Education Department said on Tuesday after it released its first list of guidelines governing the use of social media by employees.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to make at least $846 million when the company goes public.

Facebook announced on Thursday that it will sell 337.4 million shares at a price range of $28 to $35 in its initial public offering. According to the company’s filings with the SEC, Zuckerberg will be selling 30.2 million of his own shares.

Forget the screeching emergency tone that interrupts TV and radio shows during severe weather. The Weather Channel wants to build a weather alert system based on social media, and it’s started laying down that framework with a site redesign that launched Wednesday.

The redesign, among other updates, lets users tweet weather warnings or post them to Facebook.

Storify already makes it easy for its users pull tweets, YouTube videos and other social media posts into embeddable timelines. Now it wants to send some of that content back onto social networks.

There are few web services that excite me as much as foursquare does, when it comes to the data that it’s collecting. Based on the venues where I check-in, there is a whole host of other information that could be relevant to me. One service in the UK is taking foursquare’s popularity and alerting its users to crimes that are happening in the areas that they check into often.

A new third-party app called “hopscotch” is specifically for foursquare superusers and brings all of the tools together that you need to update venues on the go.

Social media and technology are mere catalysts in a global revolution that’s altering the very nature of power in our civilization. This movement is mixing the top-down “old power” with a sideways-flowing “new power,” according to the 92Y’s deputy executive director, Henry Timms.

Facebook is using its 901-million-strong following for good, offering organ donors and transplant recipients a way to link up.