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This week’s featured young sports business professional is Jessica Lichtenberg from Shade Global Inc.

Today’s guest blog comes from Ben Goss, an associate professor in the entertainment management program in the College of Business Administration at Missouri State University. A full description of Goss can be found at the bottom of the blog.

The 2009 Princeton Sports Symposium is being held today in Princeton, NJ. Some of the brightest minds from the sports industry will be on hand to discuss current events in sports business.

A message from the Founder:

Happy Thanksgiving from the team at The Sports Business Exchange! We’re thankful for a lot of things, but mostly we’re thankful for everyone who has helped The Sports Business Exchange get off the ground this year. We couldn’t have done it without you. We are also thankful for our readers. We know there’s a place for TSBX in the sports industry but without the support of our readers none of this would be possible.

Byran Elliott, Chairman of So Cal Action Sports Network, credits much of his success in life to his wife and four children. In Bryan’s case, his four children are his skateboard, surfboard, snowboard and his BMX bike. Bryan’s wife has our deepest sympathy as we can only image the trauma of four very difficult deliveries. If you haven’t heard about the SoCal Action Sports Network, it’s a story worth learning. From what started as a small group of 11 people on Linkedin, the group has exploded to 3,000+ members in a short few months. Members represent key brands and influencers leveraging the $150 billion dollar youth market and include familiar brand names such as Burton, Fuel TV, Hurley, Oakley, and Quiksilver to name a few.

Please join us in welcoming the newest members to WOMMA:
100 Monkeys
Spring Creek Group
Unilever
Yovia
Vanksen

John Bell, Managing Director, 360° Digital Influence and WOMMA Board President, was recently interviewed by David Wright on ABC’s Nightline, weighing in on the Domino’s Pizza incident.

According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, there are too many Indians and not enough Chiefs in the world of Web 2.0 marketing today. "There is a lot of advice about how brands should be interacting online," he said in a keynote presentation at Ad:Tech San Francisco this past week. "But, unless your brand is information dense, this highly interactive marketing is both expensive and useless. Wales, who led the user generated content movement three years before the term Web 2.0 was coined, today told a standing room only audience that people fail to get their corporations off the ground because they don't focus on community. And in a recession, your community could be your saving grace.

Last fall when Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace and WOMMA member company, met Laura Fitton (Twitter name @pistachio) at a conference, she heard that she was the Queen of Twitter. So Diane asked the question, "Do you really have time to get online and find out which of your friends is in the bathroom?" Convinced that Laura was the real deal, Diane invited her to Communispace to present to her staff about the Twitter phenomenon. Six months on Diane has found Twitter to be more valuable and more fun than just about any of her other social media adventures.

College students who have defriended Facebook after news broke of a link between the social-network site and lower grades can rest easy. The grade numbers arise from a study that is preliminary -- so much so that it cries out for further study even more than many other pilot experiments. These latest headlines originated with a survey last year of 219 Ohio State University undergraduates and graduate students. The study triggered frightening headlines such as, "Study finds Facebook goofing hurts grades," "Study says Facebook can impact studies" and "Research finds the website is damaging students' academic performance."

What’s your Twitter strategy? What’s going to be the next Facebook? How do you make inroads on the latest mega-platform before anyone else? For some brands, social media marketing has become a tools and technology chasing exercise. Once the mainstream media latch onto a platform, companies feel that if they’re not instantly on-board with a host of apps, add-ons and highly visible branded activity, the fragile facade that they’re run by a switched-on bunch of kool kids will evaporate like spring mist in the sun.

keithrrhodes: I loved the Range Rover Sport Supercharged! Can't wait for the 2010 models to come out :)

How does that tweet sound to you? Positive, no? But, does it sound overly subjective, perhaps even the result of a paid tweet? It just might be.

"As MarketingVox recaps, the focus was on a special hashtag setup for the campaign - #LRNY – that was included both in marketing collateral and in pay-per-tweet ads purchased through ad network Twittad. The result – as far as searching for the hashtag go – appears to be fairly good."

That being said, it's impossible to prevent negative tweets, and in fact...

cara19: Think LandRover would appreciate me using their new hashtab every time I complain about them? #LRNY

In 2006 Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on microfinance and socially responsible investing (SRI). Kiva.org is a social web tool which is "all about community, and the community is all about fighting poverty. By allowing loans as small as $25 to those in the developing world, Kiva has become a huge force in moving money around the globe."

In this interview with itbusiness.ca, Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley discusses how social media tools can be used "to make a real difference," and how the blogosphere generated Kiva's buzz early on.

Google announced this morning that Google profiles will begin being included on search results pages, "where applicable."

Guess what: Google does have a social network. Considering that Google has the most widely used brand on the web, and considering that it is the most widely used search engine, it certainly seems that Google is readying itself to jump full force into the social networking world. With its strength from other sectors of the online world, it has a good foothold to begin with.

Guess what else: you may already be on Google's social network. Conduct a Google search of the word "me," and see what happens.

We all like to think we're savvy, but numbers speak for themselves. Heck, Conficker has infected something like 94 percent of the planet by now. And, when crooks start using url shortener favorites like Ow.ly and TinyURL, it's easy to see why even the most savvy of us can fall victim to phishers.

Luckily, a new "Firefox addon called LongURL can quickly reveal the real URL and foil the scam" of a message "that reads 'Don't Click! www.tinyurl.com/XXXXXXXX.' "

The tool will display the full url in a tiny pop-up window when hovering your mouse over a url shortened by TinyURL or Ow.ly, which should help prevent tired eyes and fingers from accidentally clicking through to a dangerous url.

Warning! This is no joke. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. now has almost as many paid bloggers as lawyers. Once a haven for techies, there are now blogs for everything from celebrity gossip to political commentary to the most mundane personal minutiae. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters. By 2012, more than 145 million people—or 67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once per month.