The 45-Day Planning Process That Goes Into Creating A Single Corporate Tweet

by AARON TAUBE

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become increasingly crowded with branded accounts seeking their attention. Every few seconds, your favorite brands are tweeting at you.

But what most people don't know is how much time and effort goes into curating these accounts, writing tweets, and filling your news feed with content people actually want to see. For instance, it can take a team of 13 social media and advertising specialists up to 45 days to plan, create, approve, and publish a corporate social media post.

To learn more about the process, I spent a morning at Huge, a digital design and advertising firm that runs the social media accounts for eight different brands, including TD Ameritrade and Audi. At the agency's New York office, a team of five social media gurus spend their days keeping tabs on conversations across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and whichever social app pops up next.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/huge-social-media-manager-does-all-day-2014-5

Median CEO pay crosses $10 million in 2013

NEW YORK (AP) — They're the $10 million men and women.

Propelled by a soaring stock market, the median pay package for a CEO rose above eight figures for the first time last year. The head of a typical large public company earned a record $10.5 million, an increase of 8.8 percent from $9.6 million in 2012, according to an Associated Press/Equilar pay study.

Last year was the fourth straight that CEO compensation rose following a decline during the Great Recession. The median CEO pay package climbed more than 50 percent over that stretch. A chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker's salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009.

The best paid CEO last year led an oilfield-services company. The highest paid female CEO was Carol Meyrowitz of discount retail giant TJX, owner of TJ Maxx and Marshall's. And the head of Monster Beverage got a monster of a raise.

Over the last several years, companies' boards of directors have tweaked executive compensation to answer critics' calls for CEO pay to be more attuned to performance. They've cut back on stock options and cash bonuses, which were criticized for rewarding executives even when a company did poorly. Boards of directors have placed more emphasis on paying CEOs in stock instead of cash and stock options.

more

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/median-ceo-pay-crosses-10-million-2013

Will The Supreme Court Kill Public-Employee Unions?

Forget Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow union-bashing governors. Forget the partisan Republican attacks on organized labor. The gravest threat today to public-employee unions—which represent cops, firefighters, prison guards, teachers, nurses, and other city and state workers—is a Supreme Court case named Harris v. Quinn, which could be decided as early as this Tuesday. And, strangely enough, it is the court's most sharp-tongued conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, who could ride to organized labor's rescue.

The case pits several of the nation's mightiest labor unions, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), against their longstanding foe, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which helped bring the case. National Right to Work is funded by some of the biggest names in conservative philanthropy: the Bradley family, the Waltons of Walmart, Charles Koch, and DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark-money ATMs. Labor officials see Harris as an effort by the deep-pocketed conservative movement to wipe public-employee unions off the map—and to demolish a major source of funding and support for the Democratic Party. "This is an attempted kill shot aimed at public-sector unions," says Bill Lurye, AFSCME's general counsel.

The origins of Harris date to July 2003, when the Illinois legislature passed a bill recognizing certain home-care providers as "public employees" and designating a Midwest branch of SEIU to exclusively represent those workers. Before that, these workers were deemed independent contractors with no union representation, even though the Illinois government paid them with federal health-care funds. In June 2009, Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, went one step further. By executive order, Quinn declared the state's disability-care providers, another type of home-care worker, eligible for exclusive union representation. (Ultimately, the disability providers voted against unionizing.)

Organized labor hailed these moves. Unions see a huge opportunity in the rapidly growing population of elderly Americans—what SEIU president Mary Kay Henry calls the "silver tsunami." Labor leaders believe that organizing home-care workers across the country could slow the decline in union membership.

more
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/supreme-court-harris-quinn-unions-right-to-work

Calling out the delayers

McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Posted May. 27, 2014 @ 1:40 am

The steady accumulation of recent landmark climate reports is drawing a new form of pushback: not denial, but delay. In a world where denial has no scientific basis, delay provides a fig leaf of legitimacy. But actions speak louder than words and by this metric, delay and denial are indistinguishable.

The latest assessment, the Third National Climate Assessment, raises an obvious question: with so much evidence, why has there been no action? In my home state of Oregon, warming is projected to threaten our iconic forests and the industries they support, and reduce fresh water available for agriculture and industry through declining snow pack. Sea level rise and inundation pose threats to homes and business throughout the Northwest, where ocean acidification (another sad consequence of climate change) is already imperiling our fishing industries. You'd think people would be convinced, but some still find creative ways to rationalize their inertia.

"Delayers" often profess agreement with the scientific consensus and support for climate action, at least in theory. Voices like Bjorn Lomborg, Roger Pielke Jr. and others at the Breakthrough Institute have pioneered this tactic, which establishes credibility and grants entrance into a mainstream media increasingly closed to the denial of basic science. But after token acknowledgement of the problem, a litany of excuses for inaction begins, often on economic grounds. At its heart, the delayer argument is to wait: for better technology, for other countries to act first, for greater scientific certainty or even for other problems to be solved first, like poverty or inequality or growth (as if we can only tackle one problem at a time).

None of the standard delayer excuses hold up against the most current scientific and economic analyses. For example, new evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that addressing climate change is practical and affordable. The report explicitly recognized that effective policies in some countries have already started to decouple economic growth from emissions growth, meaning economic growth need not be compromised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Other countries are already acting. In fact, according to a 2013 World Bank study, about 20 percent of world emissions are already covered by some form of carbon price. Even China has a pilot program underway. Far from acting alone, the United States is actually trailing other developed nations.

more

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/20140527/OPINION/140527638/11606/OPINION

Tuesday Toon Roundup 2- The Rest

UCSB






9/11



Voters



Environment

Tuesday Toon Roundup 1- Repubs

Toon-Sleepwalking in America

Update as needed…

Toon- Sound Good, Boys?

Paralyzed man raided by SWAT, sentenced to 25 years for possessing his own medicine

FLORIDA — A wheelchair-bound man, suffering from paralysis, severe chronic pain, and multiple sclerosis, was raided by masked, gun-wielding agents and ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison for possessing a one-month supply of his own doctor-prescribed painkillers. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws enabled this to happen, and remain a dangerous threat to the freedom of Americans who have never been accused of a violent crime.

The case of Richard Paey dates back to 1985. In that year, Paey, a husband and father, became paralyzed after a severe automobile accident. His condition worsened after a botched surgery.

“I felt like my legs were being dipped into a furnace,” Paey explained to CBS. “They were burning, and I couldn’t move them. It’s an intense pain that, over time, will literally drive you to suicide.”

Mr. Paey knows this because he tried to kill himself twice. “And for me, death would have been a form of relief,” he said. Adding to his misery was a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. His condition made it nearly impossible to do anything except lie in bed, on a steady dose of prescription opiates.

His pharmaceutical regimen included Percocet, Vicodin, and Acetaminophen, and codeine. Because of his agonizing condition, his doses were substantial; Paey would take 2 dozen pills per day. Over time he became tolerant to the drugs, and required larger doses to feel relief. This placed him in a dangerous position of attracting police attention — something doctors were themselves wary of.

“One [doctor] was quite frank and said that I was, in a word, he said, ‘screwed,’” Mr. Paey recalled to CBS. “And I was in that medical nightmare zone where you’ve gone through all the treatments, and nothing works. And what does work, what does help, no one wants to prescribe because it attracts attention, and no one wants that attention.”

more

http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/richard-paey-trial/

Crews search for 3 people in Colorado mudslide

Source: AP/SF Chron

COLLBRAN, Colo. (AP) — Rescue teams resumed the search Monday for three men reported missing after a large mudslide struck in a remote part of western Colorado.

The slide hit Sunday near the town of Collbran, about 40 miles east of Grand Junction and near Grand Mesa, one of the world's largest flat topped mountains. The Mesa County Sheriff's Department estimated it measured 4 miles long, 2 miles wide and as 250 feet deep in many places, but it said no structures or major roads were affected.

Mesa County Sheriff's dispatcher Amanda Orr said three men, all area residents, were unaccounted for. It wasn't known if they were in the area impacted by the massive slide.

"This slide is unbelievably big," said Mesa County Lt. Phil Stratton said.


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/us/article/Crews-search-for-3-people-in-Colorado-mudslide-5504592.php