Junior marketing and entrepreneurial management major Travis Kettle finds texting to be distracting, especially when he's studying.

"The constant text messaging is taking your mind off what you're doing," he said.

Yet it's so simple, it's difficult to give up.

"It's kind of a chore nowadays to call people," Kettle said. "Texting lets you send quick, easy statements."

Here are 18 video tutorials that will teach you how to create effective podcasts.

Harvard Business School released the results of one of the first extensive sociological studies of Twitter, the frenetically popular microblogging site. The data was culled from a random sample of the May 2009 activity of 300,000 Twitter users; it was then compared to user patterns on social networks such as Facebook.

"Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter’s purpose," Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, two of the study’s principles, write on the Harvard Business Publishing site. "Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?"

In all my years in the brand business I have yet to run into a company that doesn't have a set of brand guidelines. You know, the carefully crafted criteria for tone and manner, the graphic standards--colors, logo typeface, and the like. Some even include terminology, the voice and verbiage required for use in ad copy, speeches and collateral material. While this is all well and good, it's not nearly good enough at a time when "who" is increasingly trumping "what" as a crucial factor in brand success.

A new survey finds more companies hire staff to just read e-mails to ensure secrets are safe.

Silly time waster? Sure. Powerful business tool? You bet.

You've heard about Twitter--that curious, strangely addictive social-networking technology that facilitates torrents of truncated messages among millions of users. You might even know your hashtags from your re-tweets. But how can you make money with it?

Forbes canvassed scads of businesses and pricey social-networking gurus looking for honest answers. Admittedly, we were skeptical. After all, how much can you accomplish in 140 characters or less?

Turns out there are myriad ways.

Why Should You Care about Facebook?

Facebook has over 200 million active users and that number continues to grow steadily. It is the third most trafficked website in the world (behind Google and Yahoo), and the most trafficked social media site in the world.

Think companies' customers aren't on Facebook? More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college and the fastest growing demographic in those 35 years and older. You will be hard-pressed to find a demographic not yet represented among Facebook's 200 million users.

A lot of people are buzzing about podcasting of late.

In case you've missed this latest tech trend, podcasting is what you get when you combine blogging with Internet radio.

If you were a podcaster, here is what you might do: Using a microphone connected to your computer, you would record your own radio-style program.

E-mail has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

More and more companies find that blogs by their chief executive officers (such as Donata Montanaro, Jr., --photo, left--CEO of TradeKing), can be a powerful marketing and public relations tool. Here's advice on how to do it from some of those CEOs.