Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish-born linguist who invented Esperanto – an “artificial” language created from basic linguistic elements of several languages. Zamenhof intended Esperanto to serve as an international common language that would play the role of a neutral communication tool among people of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and as such, promote understanding and world peace.

Social media is no longer exactly the wild frontier it was back in 2006, when Twitter was hatched. Although more innovative uses and Web applications for such sites as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube emerge on a regular basis, it has since become obvious that some approaches don’t work for companies that use social media for branding. Among them is the biggest, which has reached mythic proportion:

“Kids know all about this stuff, so I’ll let our (choose one: a. interns; b. any 20-something employee; c. closest 20-something relative) handle it.”

We’ve all experienced encounters with socially inept people. They’re the ones who interrupt conversations to blather on about a totally different subject (usually themselves), demand all the attention in the room, are oblivious to social cues others send, and generally miss the point or purpose of what’s going on in their environment.

That’s why it’s important to keep in mind that the operative word in “social media” is “social.” And why – if your business or organization is using social media as a means of positioning and branding itself – you need to practice good social skills, just as if you were engaging in face-to-face interactions.

There’s no question that economic realities are affecting every aspect of life – including our business relationships. The pressure is on to optimize every asset and trim every expendable expense, which presents some game-changing strategies between clients and vendors. All bets are off for the foreseeable future, necessitating new ways of doing business with each other. But the good news is that it will ultimately be to everyone’s benefit.

A federal judge denied AT&T's request for a temporary restraining order to force Verizon to yank its "There's a map for that" commercials showing AT&T's lesser 3G coverage. Verizon has been seriously dissing AT&T in the aggressive ad campaign, which poses possible repercussions for the iPhone, which has AT&T as its exclusive carrier. And make no mistake; the campaign is a great big flaming arrow that’s really targeting Apple.