Ricki Lake’s Social Network, Microsoft’s Open Secret, Top Tech Jobs

The Content Strategist picks the day’s most relevant and interesting stories about the world of content from around the web. Here’s what you should be reading today, in case you missed it:

Ricki Lake’s New Social Network

The Ricki Lake Show is coming back and bringing with it an entirely new social strategy.

Unlike other show that use social to interact with fans, NewsCorp is looking to control the social side of the experience, and in turn, give fans a deeper dive into the show and NewsCorp greater access to revenue.

This means building an entirely new platform, Adage.com reports.

Microsoft’s New Business Plan Is No Secret

ZDnet’s Ed Bott loves reading public corporations’ 10-Ks. Lucky for us, he’s a very close reader, closer, in fact, than many of his peers, and he’s made some pretty eye-opening predictions.

“They missed the much bigger story: Microsoft is reimagining its entire business model, and they’ve laid out the details for anyone to inspect,” he writes.

Top Tech Job Trends of 2012

Forbes.com has a breakdown of the most popular job posting keywords via Indeed.com.

“The results may surprise you. From a relative volume point of view, jQuery (an Open Source JavaScript Library) is the clear winner with a growth of more than 800,000%,” Reuven Cohen said.

Yahoo’s Second-Screen App, Now with Memes

The new version of the IntoNow app offers a Shazam-like feature, chat capabilities, and screen grabbing from live TV. The app is really ingenious, but takes a little of the creativity out of making a meme.

“The app listens to a show’s audio, just like the song-identifier app Shazam. It then uses the audio from the show to determine what you’re watching. Once this happens, the CapIt tool presents a stream of still images from the live broadcast or show,” Wired.com reports.

“After choosing an screencap, you can add captions to the top and bottom of the image (think LOLcats), and then share your new meme candidate on Twitter and Facebook at will.”

Frito-Lay Using Facebook to Pick a New Chip

The New York Times reports that Twitter chatter and Facebook apps are just a few ways companies are conducting market research online. Social media sites are the new focus groups.

Companies offer prizes to customers in order to find out exactly what flavors, colors, or movies users are interested in, and change products accordingly.

“Once the company sees what is popular and where, it can tailor its products to specific areas of the country,” according to the Times.

Little Caesars Flips the Script

While, “each slice of marketing cleverly contributes to the integrated pie,” Adweek.com questions whether Little Caesar’s “Do Not Call Campaign” is a little bit of a letdown?

It warns that possibly “this kind of chain-reaction creative is adored by ad types but largely ignored by the pizza-scarfing public.”

Newsletter Images Getting Lost in the Sauce

Many users turn off images in emails. So, how do you get them to engage with your visuals?

Mashable.com offers some guidelines to guarantee eyes on your images.