CRM Update – Mar 10 : 3:36 pm

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.What’s New This Week?YouTube Channels Get a New Look: There are a few new features for YouTube channels.  The first is a new set of four different Channel templates to choose from.  Plus the Channel Feed has been improved to make it clear what you’ll get if you subscribe.Choose the best layout for your YouTube Channel…

With Telsyte’s recent study predicting that the Australian group buying market will grow by 30 percent this year, both AIMIA and ADMA have jointly released a set of guidelines to help Australian merchants maximize benefits from the group buying experience. The business guide will help Australian merchants understand how to set up deals that will benefit their business.
The guidelines tackle issues such as:

Setting up deals that ensure merchant profitability
Understanding the group buying mechanism
Helping merchants convert deal seekers into repeat customers
Ensuring that they are prepared to meet the increased demand after a group buying offer
Resolving customer complaints
Legal issues related to group buying offers

By setting up guidelines to ensure that merchants too benefit from the group buying deal, the organizations are striving to make sure that a group buying deal is a win-win-win situation…

A recent poll by LivingSocial has shown that people who work in Cleveland OH, take the least amount of vacation days of workers in major cities across the country.
The poll also revealed that Cleveland residents are the lease likely to travel away from the city on vacations or holidays. When Clevelanders DO take a vacation, they rank lowest on the list of “people most likely to leave the country during vacation”.
Do Clevelanders not like adventure? What else does the poll show about the “non-vacationers”?

10 percent get homesick and/or wish they were at home while traveling…

Remember 2009? The time when a million followers was a big deal to have on Twitter? In that year, despite having been around for a bit, Twitter hadn’t managed to get enough users, or, to put it more aptly, ‘followers’.  But all that was set to change, as celebrities were soon going to embrace the social media site. It began with Ashton Kutcher – the early adopted of the celeb pack who took to Twitter with full gusto, and Twitterverse exploded with celeb chatter.  At that time, most people on the site were on it for news or news media, and within a few weeks, Ashton Kutcher challenged and beat CNN with a million followers on Twitter…

Even at SXSW in Austin, Texas, KONY 2012 is the topic of conversation. It was the elephant in the room during a panel on social documentary making and social media. Fortunately, the panelists addressed the elephant — more than once.
KONY 2012 is the massively viral YouTube video, directed and narrated by director Jason Russell who founded Invisible Children, that sheds the spotlight on Joseph Kony, a Ugandan war lord who has been abducting children and turning them into soldiers and sex slaves…