I always thought Cardinals were the original “Angry Birds!”

Here is what I am reading today:

“The purpose of social media is to discover and share content you wouldn’t find through normal means. That’s its greatest strength, but the problem is harnessing this power for your own brand. Not everyone has access to a team or budget that the large brands have, but with a little bit of creativity and forward thinking, you can carve out a following and get people talking about your page. Here are some straightforward tips to help you get started…..”

“…Dove has come up with a smart way of promoting its colourful range of shower gels with this Vine offering. The product looks attractive and the clip has a humorous twist, plus they made a bit of a deal out it being their first Vine post, so people were more likely to give it a watch….”

“To completely understand how a living organism works one would have to take it apart, the great physicist Niels Bohr once observed — but then the organism would certainly be dead1. In general, systems of high complexity, including living things but ranging from the Internet to social networks, are often impossible to track in all their details.

But what if you didn’t have to? Network-theory researchers now have come up with some clever mathematics that reveals complex systems by tracking a selected few of their components.

Say, for example, that you wanted to find a biological marker that identifies people with a certain disease. You can track down all the genes that are expressed differently in people with the disease and assemble a network that shows their interactions, but how do you then pick out those that are specific to the illness?”

“More friends, more fans, more brands, more stories.

More people are using social media than ever before – and for longer, on an increasingly diverse array of devices. As a result, newsfeeds are cluttered, and fans are more distracted and discerning.

In order to succeed, brands will increasingly turn to real-time creative, analytics and paid media to ensure that high-performing content reaches as many people as possible, at the moment they are most interested, to spark conversations and deepen customer relationships. As media converges, brands will invest in ways to complement original, visual content with fan-sourced creative.

Promoting high-performing content that aligns with new “real content” search drivers will become essential. Brands will host epic social events to excite the base and invest in tools that help them target and engage one-on-one more efficiently. And brands will have a little fun in the process, remembering that brandplay can go a long way to telling their story.

There are 10 social media essentials that can help guide brands to achieve success in 2013. We explore these essentials and case studies of brands in action…..”

“Canadian tennis player Rebecca Marino’s revelations that she’s been bullied via social media has shone a light about how professional athletes react to what’s said about them on Twitter and Facebook.

Marino said Wednesday she felt overwhelmed at times by barbs directed at her following a loss.

“The hurtful ones kind of stick with you a little bit more,” Marino told reporters Wednesday during a conference call. “I was getting some messages saying I should go die, that I should go burn in hell, that I’m a dumb-ass, that I’m an idiot, that I lost them money.”