Social media is the most rapidly changing aspect of communications to begin with. Throw in an IPO (Facebook) and a major overhaul (LinkedIn) and modifications are barreling ahead so fast, even the techies seem unable to keep up.

"I'm a big believer in social media marketing for my business, so when I started having a lot of problems with LinkedIn, I didn't wait - I sent an email to the Help Center," says Marsha Friedman, CEO of EMSI Public Relations, (www.emsincorporated.com), in Wesley Chapel, Fla.

"Last week, a 'customer experience advocate' finally emailed me back. He wrote, 'I apologize taking so long to get back to you. We are currently experiencing an unusual high volume of requests due to our recent site enhancements.' "

Many of the changes were implemented Oct. 16 and, as EMSI's social media specialist, Jeni Hinojosa, observes, "It's a great overhaul."

But, she adds, "It must not have gotten much of a test run because the site has been very buggy."

Over on Facebook, Friedman says she's noticed advertisements popping up everywhere - even in her news feed.

"Now that the site has gone public, it's trying all sorts of new tricks to make money for shareholders, but it's creating some problems," she says.

One of her employees got this error message while trying to post to her wall: "The server found your request confusing and isn't sure how to proceed."

Hinojosa offered a brief overview of some of the changes and a solution people are turning to - at least in the case of Facebook.

LinkedIn: "One of the new features I like is that you can check for comments and other activity without getting notices sent to your email," Hinojosa says. "Just go to your LinkedIn page and you'll see the notifications at the top, just like on Facebook."

"The bugs I and others have encountered include being unable to check private messages; sporadically unable to get into groups; and being notified that invitations to join others' networks are waiting - but when I look, I don't see any," Hinojosa says. "When we report the problems, the responses we're getting sound like they're working on them but they're overwhelmed.

"Hopefully, they'll get them worked out soon. The good news is, they're aware."

Facebook: "Sadly, I've been down this road before - and it didn't lead to a good place," Hinojosa says. "Remember MySpace?"

Since its initial public offering in May, Facebook has been making a lot of changes designed to add revenue. The newest of these are a $7 fee for "promoted posts" from your personal page and a $5 to $15 fee to promote posts from your fan page. They're not yet available to all 166 million U.S. Facebook users, according to tech bloggers, because it's still experimental.

Now, those with the option will see a "promote" button next to the "like," "comment" and "share" buttons. Click "promote," put the appropriate fee on your charge card, and that post will go to the top of your followers' news feeds a few times in the days ahead. (It will also wear the Scarlet S label of "sponsored post.") The promise is that more of your followers will see it.

"It doesn't make a lot of sense when applied to personal pages," Hinojosa says. "How many people will pay to show off their vacation photos? But people using Facebook as a marketing tool may be motivated to pay for more reach.

"Soon, everyone will be scrolling through a bunch of 'sponsored' posts before they get to the 'free' ones. If you want someone to actually see your post, you'll have to pay."

That's why, she says, people are jumping to ...

Google+: "If Facebook and Twitter had a baby, it would be Google+," Hinojosa says.

This toddler network, which launched in June 2011, combines Facebook's capabilities for sharing news and photos and Twitter's searchability.

"It allows you to designate one or more "circles" for your friends," Hinojosa says. "One co-worker might be 'business' and 'close friends' while another could be just 'business.' So everyone sees what's appropriate for them based on your relationship."

"Like Twitter, Google+ uses hashtags to help sort information and allow people to search for posts on particular topics," she says. "For instance, if you type #cutecats into the search box at the top of your page, you'll see everything with that hashtag - including comments that incorporate the label.

"What makes me happiest is, Google had its IPO way back in 2004," Hinojosa says. "So we shouldn't have to worry about this company suddenly drumming up ways to make us pay for what we previously got for free."

About Marsha Friedman

Marsha Friedman is a 22-year veteran of the public relations industry. She is the CEO of EMSI Public Relations (www.emsincorporated.com), a national firm that provides PR strategy and publicity services to corporations, entertainers, authors and professional firms. Marsha is the author of Celebritize Yourself: The 3-Step Method to Increase Your Visibility and Explode Your Business and she can also be heard weekly on her Blog Talk Radio Show, EMSI's PR Insider every Thursday at 3:00 PM EST.

Publishers, Weakly: What The
Penguin/Random House Merger Really
Means
By: Michael Levin

When I saw the word "synergies" applied to the proposed merger of publishing giants Penguin and Random House, I laughed out loud.  "Synergies" is Wall Street-speak for "Let's merge two failing companies, fire half the employees, run the resulting business more cheaply, suck out all the money we can as quickly as we can, and then leave the wounded, gasping beast that is the resulting company to die a miserable, public death."

Which is exactly why "synergies" best describes the merger of two of the biggest names in the publishing industry, which is wringing its hands over the immediate consequences of this deal, which really represents one more death rattle of the once thriving book publishing trade.

Here's what happens now:  lots of editorial, marketing, and other jobs will vanish.  Agents will have fewer places to sell books.  Fewer books will be published.  Authors will get even less money (if that's even possible, since some publishers are paying zero advances whenever they can get away with it).  And the pontificators will pontificate on what it all means to society (not much, since most of society has already given up on reading books).

Here's what happens next:  the remaining major publishers will find it harder to compete, because the resulting publisher (Penguin House?) will be able to produce books more cheaply.  So they'll fire people, merge, fire more people, and eventually roll over and die.

All because publishers never figured out how to deal with the Internet and how to sell books in a wired world.

All because publishers considered themselves "special" and thought they could get away with selling products they didn't market.

All because publishers are English majors wearing Daddy's work clothes and pretending to be business people, running their businesses on whim and gut feeling instead of figuring out what people want and giving it to them, the way smart businesses work.

I have no pity for the fallen publishers.  In Wall Street terms, there isn't enough lipstick in the world to make these pigs kissable.  They had the responsibility to shape society by providing it with books worth reading, to create a cultural legacy for our generation and generations to come.  And instead, what did they give us?

Ann Coulter, Navy SEALs, and Fifty Shades of Gray.

The publishers will blame everyone in sight for their predicament, but this is a self-inflicted wound; what the Brits would call an "own goal."

You can't run a successful business passively waiting for people (in this case, literary agents) to tell you what you should produce.

You can't run a successful business by throwing 10,000 strands of spaghetti (or 10,000 books a year, in Random House's case) against the wall of public opinion and seeing what sticks.

You can't run a successful business selling information in the form of printed books by putting them on trucks to distant cities, hoping that booksellers (anyone who can fog a mirror, run a cash register and repeat the phrase, "We don't have it but we could order it for you") will actively work to sell your stuff to people.

Bottom line:  you can't run a successful business when you are essentially competing with yourself.  If Barnes & Noble doesn't sell a Simon & Schuster book within three weeks, it sends the book back to Simon & Schuster, at Simon & Schuster's expense, only to have that same space on the shelf filled with...wait for it...a different Simon & Schuster book.

That's not marketing.

That's masochism.

A New York editor who worked at Penguin once told me that his boss called all the employees into a meeting and said, "If there's any merger talk, you'll hear about it from me and not from the New York Times."

A few days later, he was reading The New York Times on the subway on the way to work, and read that Penguin was merging with another publisher.

Here we go again.

If it weren't for Fifty Shades of Gray, Random House (and Barnes & Noble, for that matter) would have been on life support.  There would have been nothing left to merge.

Penguin's owner, Pearson LLC, is the smartest guy in the room, dumping off Penguin's trade publishing on Bertlesmann, a German conglomerate which somehow still thinks it can make money selling books.

And now a few thousand more publishing employees are going to leave the world of books and hit the bricks.

So let the handwringing begin.  The collapse of a once proud industry has taken a giant step forward.  And there ain't no synergies in that.

New York Times best selling author and Shark Tank survivor Michael Levin runs www.BusinessGhost.com, and is a nationally acknowledged thought leader on the future of book publishing.

God Meets Science

In the Presidential Election, the Two Don't Get Along. But Should They?

By: Daniel Friedmann

Do you believe that evolution should be taught in public schools, and that it should be presented as the only explanation for how the species arose?  Based on statements made in the past few years by President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, it appears they both would answer "yes."

However, Romney's fellow Republicans don't all agree. For example, Republican Congressman Paul Broun from Georgia recently announced that evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of hell."

Furthermore, Romney may have recently changed his mind since in the first presidential debate he stated, "We're all children of the same God" -- in stark contradiction to evolutionists' conclusion!

Meanwhile, only 15 percent of the US population believes in naturalistic evolution as the explanation for our origins!

And while the Catholic Church has stopped arguing against scientific findings such as the age of the universe or when life first appeared, it holds that whatever happened was guided in some way by God; in agreement with nearly half of Americans.

For the past couple hundred years, the creation-evolution conflict has been a recurring point of contention in the United States, from the presidential election to what should be taught in schools. American science legend Carl Sagan tried to settle this conflict by calling both camps "non-overlapping magisterial" - in other words, science and religion each preside as the source of wisdom over separate domains.

However, most of us feel that Sagan's explanation is not right. In fact, it turns out that a significant portion of Americans believe science and religion can coexist when it comes to explaining our origins.

The problem between science and religion did not originate over the question of HOW we came to be ? creation vs. evolution ? but over the question of WHEN the Earth came to be.  The creation-evolution conflict was sparked when early geologists began to find evidence that the Earth was older than the Bible seemed to indicate.

Today science tells us that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and the earth 4.5 billion years old; seemingly in contradiction to the biblical creation timeline of six days, less than 6,000 years ago.

A couple years ago I found the blueprint for my house, a piece of rolled up paper with lots of lines that bore little resemblance to my beautiful three-dimensional home. I could not make heads or tails of the blueprint. That is, until I saw the scale: 1 inch equals 8 feet. Now I could compare the blueprint and the house - everything matched, at least as to what it was and how big it was.

Now, the Bible claims to be the blueprint for the universe; but has anyone bothered to look for the scale of this blueprint? I mean, the story is narrated in creation days (analogous to the role of inches on the house blueprint), but what are these creation days in the physical structure, the universe?

It turns out that the Scriptures contain the scale ? it has been found: 1 creation day is 1,000 X 365 X 7,000 or 2.5 billion years. That's right, the scale is really simple, it's been there all along,  and when you apply it to events in Genesis, it converts 19 events to the time we measure in science.

What do we get after converting these events? Agreement within measurement error; very old Scriptures contain the times for key events relating to the development of the universe and the appearance of life on Earth that science has only recently uncovered.

So if both science and the Bible agree on what happened and when it happened, why keep arguing?

Because there is still the HOW it happened. But having found agreement on the "when" and the "what," sheds new light on the issue. It is time to check out the scale, reread the biblical blueprint and stop the 200-year-old argument in politics, education....

Daniel Friedmann is the author of The Genesis One Code, and CEO of an aerospace company. He has a master's in engineering physics and 30 years' experience in the space industry, and has published more than 20 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He is also a long-time student of cosmology and religion.

Special Ed Students, Diversity & the Benefits of Inclusion
Friendship, Learning are a Two-Way Street, Says Doctor

For orthopedic surgeon Sean Adelman - a father of three, including Dev, a high-school age daughter with Down syndrome - life lessons are not the exclusive province of the young.

"As a dad, I have often been reminded of the poet William Wordsworth and his line, 'The child is father of the man,' " says Adelman, author of Sam's Top Secret Journal (www.raiseexpectations.com), the first in a the first in a Nancy Drew-style children's book series featuring a protagonist with Down syndrome.

"I think most parents have this experience that, while it's our job to teach our children how to grow up and function in a society, we are constantly learning ourselves. They force us to rethink the basics as we help mold them into mature human beings."

Of course, much of a child's development is out of the hands of parents, he says. School and other social functions provide many first worldly experiences that are so important to developing students. And that makes diversity so important.

Various studies have shown that not only do those with learning challenges benefit from "inclusive education" - a movement that integrates special-ed students with non-special-ed students - but also the rest of the student body.

Adelman explores how inclusion benefits the entire student body:

• Empathic development: To a significant extent, society is a social contract among citizens. That means, at the very least, good behavior is required of individuals. At best, however, citizens recognize that we are social creatures who need each other, and the best way to a better society is to have empathy for our fellow human beings. During the 1990s, inclusion of special-ed students jumped from 48 percent to 70 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Despite concerns at the time about teachers' ability to attend to the needs of all their students in such classes, a Zigmond and Baker study showed teachers did not lose their effectiveness. The famous study also showed that the students treated each other better in general. Children learn that everyone needs help from time to time, and it's as gratifying to provide it as to receive it.

• Diversity and the real world: Children who attend inclusive schools, where all children are mainstreamed, are better able to navigate the complexities of our diverse adult society. Students with and without special needs benefit from exposure to classmates who face different life circumstances. Studies from the National Center for Special Education Research, among others from throughout the world, support claims of mutual benefit from special-ed and non-special-ed students with integration. For a well-rounded character and personality, young people need to be exposed to the many faces of humanity in terms of race, economic background and those with special needs. In addition to this personal edification, a professional career demands social grace and comfort in a diverse work environment.

• The meaning of friendship: Children need to develop social skills and to know how to create and sustain meaningful friendships for a healthy adult life. We may lose wealth, youth, health, and spouses. Friends, however, are often the most reliable emotional resource in life. Friends must learn to accept one another's limitations and flaws, and to complement one another's weaknesses by contributing their strengths. Friends also quickly learn that superficial differences are far less important than shared values, trust and humor.

About Sean Adelman

Sean Adelman is a practicing orthopedic surgeon and advocate for exceptional kids in Seattle. He and his wife, Susan, have three children. Adelman wrote the "Sam's Top Secret Journal" series to show the similarities the protagonist shares with other children, and to explore how differently-abled individuals benefit society.