Bloomberg.com has a redesigned “breaking news” module, complete with a Tweet button. Now, the second a story breaks, you have the ability to share it with your network.

It’s a given: Social media has changed the way the world gets its news. Chances are, by the time you’ve read a story on a web site or in the paper, the news has been floating around the Twittersphere for several hours.

As a breaking news organization, we understand the power of sharing news as it happens, and are constantly striving to deliver important stories to you faster. That’s why we’re excited to introduce this new feature that will not only help you get a jump on the news, but will put the power to broadcast it in your hands.

If the story in the “breaking news” module is already available online, we will provide you with a link. If it is still being written, you can send your followers to our homepage, which we’ll update with new information as we get it.

Something odd happened today. Just before 2pm, I saw a curious tweet pop up on my dashboard from one of our editors.

Breaking: Washington Post says Rick Santorum will suspend presidential campaign

— Sarah Rabil (@srabil) April 10, 2012

Certain to be the biggest story of the day, I prepared myself to break the news from our branded accounts. However, before retweeting Sarah, I took a second to verify its accuracy. I checked WashingtonPost.com for the story. Nothing. I checked @WashingtonPost on Twitter. Also nothing. I even bounced around on the Bloomberg wire for a bit. Still, to no avail. Of course, that didn’t stop Sarah’s tweet from quickly spreading across the Twittersphere.

To further confuse the issue, Washington Post writer Aaron Blake issued this tweet:

Washington Post is NOT reporting that Santorum is dropping out. We have NOT reported this, despite tweets to the contrary.

— Aaron Blake (@FixAaron) April 10, 2012

Twenty minutes later, after a dozen other publications had reported the news, the Post confirmed that Santorum was, indeed, suspending his campaign. So what happened?

At 1:42 PM a Post story hit the Bloomberg wire (with whom the Post partners with). Bloomberg spokeman Ty Trippet issued this statement amidst the confusion:

To clarify: the Washington Post published the story on their syndication feed at 1:42:59 which was available for our customers to see.

— Ty Trippet (@ttrippet) April 10, 2012

So why did the Post deny breaking a story of such scale? Quite simply, it wasn’t meant to be seen. The story was in fact a draft, embargoed until confirmed. Unfortunately (but fortunately for Bloomberg) the post had been inadvertently send to our feed. A Washington Post spokesperson issued this statement after the events had blown over:

“The draft story was not intended to be published until we confirmed that Santorum was suspending his campaign. The draft was inadvertently sent to Bloomberg, with whom The Post has a partnership, through an automated feed. It was not published on our Web site until the news had been confirmed.”

There you have it. A glimpse of the (slightly terrifying) power of social media. News spreads fast, even when it hasn’t been confirmed. While this case seemed to work itself out, the tone of this post might be entirely different had the report been false. It serves as an excellent reminder to always err on the side of caution when it comes to reporting news on social media. As Bloomberg’s food critic Ryan Sutton so eloquently put it:

Today’s Journalism Lesson: @Twitter’s status as the “new newswire” is dependent on people accessing “real newswires” #santorum

— ryan sutton (@qualityrye) April 10, 2012

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Facebook acquired photo-sharing application Instagram for an astonishing $1 billion dollars in cash and stock this morning. The social Web was abuzz with excitement, but also much confusion. One billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on a company that generates no revenue.

But there’s a lot that Instagram offers Facebook. For starters, Facebook was said to be working on its own photo-sharing app. Instagram offers them an excellent platform with an active user base. Then, there’s the defensive benefits. Google was also said to be interested, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey was an angel investor of the start-up.

But there’s one more advantage that Instagram offers Facebook, that could be far more lucrative than the rest. It’s not so far fetched to think Facebook could serve ads on Instagram at some point. This acquisition just delivered Zuckerberg an extra 30+ million potential ad viewers. That’s not a small figure for a company hoping to trump Google in the $2 billion mobile ad space.

I suppose only time will tell what Facebook’s true intentions are with Instagram (and I’m fairly certain Zuckerberg will take as much time as he needs). But all in all this looks like a very good deal for both sides. Congratulations to Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom.

Last week, Google announced that they would be adding a social-media tracking feature to its Google Analytics product. Now, publishers can identify which social media platforms direct the most traffic back to your website, and see how those visitors behave.

Social Media Examiner did a great write up of all the new features, but here’s the most important stuff.

Identify Traffic Sources

First, you’ll want to identify your top social media traffic sources. To do this, go to the Traffic Sources section and select Sources > All Traffic. Take a look at the list of referrers, and identify the top 2-3 social networks. For most of you, this will likely be Facebook (Facebook.com/referral) and Twitter (t.co/referral).

Create Advanced Segments

Once you have identified your main social media traffic sources, you can analyze visitors from those sites individually, using the Advanced Segments tool.

To do this, click on Advanced Segments from any Google Analytics report and click + New Custom Segment.

This is where it gets a bit tricky. Depending on which social network you’d like to track, you’ll want to include traffic sources to your Advance Segment based on user behavior. For instance, Twitter users often use third-party applications (like Mobile Twitter, Hootsuite, or Tweetdeck) to browse the platform. To get a good measure of your Twitter traffic, those sources should be included in the report using an ‘OR’ statement.

Once you add all your filters, press the Test Segment button to see if everything is set up correctly.

Social Media Traffic

Here are a few of the referring domains that you should remember to include in your Advance Segment filters.

• twitter.com
• t.co
• hootsuite
• tweetdeck
• bit.ly
• facebook.com
• m.facebook.com
• plus.url.google.com
• linkedin
• youtube
• reddit
• digg
• delicious
• stumbleupon
• Tumblr

Twitter will be offer more targeting options for advertisers on mobile, reports TechCrunch. A few week’s ago, CEO Dick Costolo announced that Twitter would be bringing Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts to mobile. At the time, these ‘Promoted Products’ were available only to a small number of users, from the brands they follow.

Today, the company announced a broader roll out of the service, allowing brands to target users (even those who don’t follow the them) by interest, location, and device. Promoted Tweets will appear on a user’s timeline, and also on search. On the timeline, the Promoted Tweet will fall off the page, as new tweets roll in. On search, the tweet will remain at the top of the page until “swiped” off. 

Obviously, improved targeting is good news for advertisers. Twitter has reported high engagement on Web ads, and projects similar engagement on mobile. I, for one, will be putting these targeted mobile ads to the test when my company rolls out a new product for iOS in the coming weeks.

Former Yahoo board member Eric Hippeau took to Twitter this morning to respond to the lawsuit his former company brought against Facebook. 

Pathetic and heartbreaking last stand for Yahoo bit.ly/yirCcj It’s all over. I loved you very much.

— Eric Hippeau (@erichippeau) March 13, 2012

Yahoo claims Facebook infringed on 10 patents which cover tasks that include social networking and messaging. The lawsuit comes as the portal struggles to keep up with Facebook in display-advertising sales.

The company used this same tactic against Google leading up to their IPO, VentureBeat reports, and pocketed a nice helping of the search engine’s pre-IPO shares.

Twitter will be rolling out some minor changes this summer regarding links. Twitter will automatically wrapping all links using an official t.co shorter.

The size of the shortened link ID (what matters to Twitter in regards to character size) will be a predicatble 19 characters, but the link might (and often will) be an slightly longer abbreviated version of the original. The distinction here is that you will be able to see a longer URL description - and effort to prevent link spams and malware - but only 19 characters will be counted against the sender’s total.

Twitter asserted that this would have no effect on third party applications like Bit.ly or Hootsuite, both of which offer full analytics for shortened links.

Twitter has launched a Follow button, allowing websites and publishers to invite users to subscribe to their Twitter feed without ever leaving the page. All it takes is a single click.

Previously a company needed to redirect the follower to the account on Twitter.com, before encouraging them to follow. The result will likely be more “Follow Us” prompts on websites, as publishers no longer need to worry about redirecting audiences off-site.

Expect to see one up on this blog, and on my website, shortly.

As a young professional in the field this is something I’ve thought plenty about. Right now Social Media is hotter than ever, technologically, and of course financially. But have we learned from our mistakes during the dotCOM Bubble? Are we headed down the same path? Check out this Infographic Report from G+:

Read More

We’ve all seen those awful “Roast of…” specials on Comedy Central. Well College Humor decided to take the concept digital with this “Roast of Facebook.” Familiar voices include:  Gilbert Gottfried (as Twitter), Penn Jillette (as Google) and Lisa Lampanelli (FourSquare).