Most people do not know that more than 700,000 children are reported missing each year in the US alone (US Dept. of Justice Statistics). While the majority are located quickly, there are still thousands that remain missing for longer periods of time. Families are broken and devastated as they anxiously wait for news. Sometimes they know where the children, as happens many times in domestic custody disputes. Sadly, however in most cases, there is no word, just emptiness.

 The only real way to help with this problem is awareness. Placing pictures of the missing children in prominent places has shown considerable success. Child Watch of North America is one of the world’s foremost authorities on recovering missing children. They have helped to recover nearly 200 children in recent years. By working with various sponsors and increasing community awareness they have made a real impact on this terrible problem. The sponsors also seem to benefit as well by being associated with such a good cause. In fact the organization has research to show that the advertisers get better results here than in other traditional media, such as radio and newspapers. This is refreshing, as it is always nice to see everyone benefit from such a socially redeeming cause.

 Child Watch has recently teamed up with Childrens Digital Network to provide awareness using the latest technology. The network is deployed primarily in gas station convenience stores across the US with missing children on the screen 100% of the time. The network is sponsored by national, regional and local advertiser-sponsors. While the network is new, with more than half the screens in place less than 6 months, children featured on the network have already been recovered.

 Currently the network has more than 7 million viewers in 9 states. To purchase this kind of coverage on comparable national TV would cost in excess of $30 million per year. The organization has a goal of placing more than 2000 screens in 25 states by the end of 2010. This kind of awareness will not only make a huge dent in the problem it will serve as a considerable deterrent to that contemplating child abduction.

 More information can be found at the organizations website www.childrensdigital.com . This is a huge problem and it is great to see ingenuity being applied to tackle it.

Unemployment Rate Falls to 10%? Bureau of Labor Statistics & News Media Publish Fraudulent Data

Internet users have become fast content creators over the few years with almost all of them jumping from one social media platform to the other during a single login session and thereby contributing to diversified content on the internet. Various social media platforms such as micro-blogging websites, social book marking sites, social networking sites, blogs, etc. are widely used by an average internet user. All of this has provided a perfect opportunity for website owners to showcase/advertise their website faster and to a select target audience through these commonly used social media platforms. This large-scale use of Social Media platforms such as the much popular facebook, twitter, digg, plurk, orkut, blogger, stumbleupon, etc for website promotion has created a great market for social media optimization companies.

On the one hand the social media optimization companies have benefited largely because of the increase in the number of social media optimization requests that they have been getting lately. On the other hand it has been a win-win situation both ways as even the companies engaging the services of these social media optimization companies have resulted in higher footfalls to their website and subsequent increase in net profits.

To choose from the vast ocean of Social Media Optimization companies or consultants it is very important not to compromise on Quality for just a few bucks. Evaluate the promises made by the social media optimization company that you are about to engage with their proven track record and cross-check references. Understand what all strategies would be adopted by the social media optimization company, whose services you are about to hire and see if they are really in sync with your business requirements.

It is a given that with the widespread popularity of internet and the many companies successfully adopting the Social Media Optimization strategies would push the present and future entrepreneurs and organizations to seriously consider engaging the services of a professional Social Media Optimization company.

Seth Godin on social networking.