Uncle of bombings suspects Ruslan Tsarni, speaking this morning to the media.(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The morning shows started our day with the ongoing and continuously changing developments in Watertown, MA and the rest of the Boston area, as the manhunt for the second suspect in the Boston Marathon attacks, now identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, continues. If you’re looking for up-to-the-minute news, The Boston Globe, NBC News, and just about every other news outlet is providing one.

Twitter is also doing its level best to keep up with the news. Just about every trending topic right now is related to this story. But because this is a fluid situation, many are cautioning against taking everything you read as fact. Twitter, which specializes in breaking news, is having an issue keeping up with all of the breaking developments.

“In the past eight hours, Twitter has lit up several times with reports that people are taking as true because they heard them on the scanner. Among them was a report that police had named the two suspects in the Boston bombings and the MIT shootout. But those names were apparently the wrong ones, and two innocent people had their names disseminated widely as terror suspects,” writes Slate in a story titled “Dear Police Scanner, Don’t Believe Everything You Read on Twitter.”  A previous story was titled, “Dear Twitter, Don’t Believe Everything You Hear On A Police Scanner.”

In other words, as Savannah Guthrie is saying repeatedly throughout her coverage this morning, everything is changing, everything is being said “with an asterisk,” and all reports can be amended as the situation unfolds and sorts itself out. The one thing that everyone on Twitter can agree on is the suspects’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, gave one of the most incredible press conferences in the history of media.

Separately but related, overnight another tragic loss of life: A 26-year-old campus patrol officer at MIT, Sean Collier, was shot and killed by one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon attacks. Today, the university has dedicated its website homepage to the fallen officer. A screen grab is below.

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New research from the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that employers are more concerned with a candidate’s ability to think critically and solve problems than with the particular major that the potential hire declared in school.

“Four out of 5 employers said each college graduate should have broad knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences, and 3 out of 4 would recommend a liberal education to their own children,” The Huffington Post reports. It’s worth noting that we couldn’t find a breakdown of the different industries represented by the research participants. For example, if there weren’t a lot of employers in a STEM industry, that could impact the results.

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Recently, while walking to my car for lunch with a group of co-workers, my double life hit me square in the face. As we approached my vehicle there was a small card underneath my windshield wiper, which I recognized from about 10 feet away. I started to speed walk a bit to beat my co-workers to my car and was able to inconspicuously swipe the card from under the wiper and put it in my bag before anyone could see it. Close call!

This card was a flyer advertising an upcoming party with a half-dressed girl on the front. After Reggae Night the night before, I thought I had cleared my car of all high heels, flyers, and other nightlife paraphernalia, but evidently missed this. It would have been an embarrassing moment to try to explain to the Mormon guy in accounting with three kids how that got there.

It’s a fine line to tread to be a person that’s “about that life,” while maintaining a pristine corporate image. Some who work in less stuffy industries like fashion or music may not face this sort of duality. But in the corporate world much of the small talk outside of work revolves around kids and sports, rather than night clubs or other swanky late-night events. Not that I don’t think there are other people in corporate America with an interesting social life. Many just aren’t listening to Juicy J, popping bottles, and wearing a “uniform” of high heels and miniskirts.

Where your corporate life and night life can really come to a head is via social media. Many times on my way out the door to a night club, I like to have my husband snap a pic that I can post to my Instagram account. The pictures of me in “uniform” would raise a few eyebrows and be the talk at the water cooler if any of my coworkers ever laid eyes on them. A male friend of mine, an aspiring hot-shot attorney currently in law school in Chicago, is in a similar situation. After the pictures are posted, he is reprimanded by his wife for jeopardizing his professional career with these online images.

This raises the question: Can you listen to rachet hip hop music and rendezvous at night clubs and still maintain a successful professional life? Or do your fun-filled evenings belong only in your memories and not on your social media accounts?

My answer to this is, as long as you are not a person in the public eye, you can have your cake and eat it too. However, I do believe there must be due care taken when engaging in social media. A study conducted by CareerBuilder last year revealed that over 37 percent of companies are checking prospective employee’s social media accounts before making a final decision and one third of hiring managers admitted that social media trolling led to a candidate not getting the job. So here’s my advice on managing your double life.

Google Yourself

The first step to finding out what employers will see when they do a search is to do the search yourself. Google your name and see what comes up. If there is anything you aren’t proud of in the search results, make the changes you need to clean up your image.

Think Twice Before Posting

If there is something you feel may be detrimental to you keeping or finding a job, just don’t post it at all. Most times this means things like engaging in questionable activity or downing shots in various states of undress should be kept off the Web all together.

Limit Who Can View Your Account

If you insist on putting up your racy pictures, make sure you are aware of all of your privacy options. I suggest making your Facebook account unsearchable through Google, meaning there will be no results on any kind of search. Also, if you are already friends with co-workers, you can limit what they can see on your page. For example, if you don’t want them to have viewing access to your status updates, customize your privacy settings. These types of changes can also be made on your Twitter and Instagram accounts.

At the end of the day, anything you put on the Web can come back to bite you. After you’ve published photos, getting rid of the images can be a challenge since many things can be re-shared or recovered. Furthermore, just because you aren’t in the public eye now, doesn’t mean you won’t be the next Congressman or TV star. You don’t want the photos you posted years ago to prevent you from moving forward in your career.

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The tragic bombings during the Boston Marathon once again proved that, amid all the frivolous uses for social media, it can also be of tremendous service in times of worry and emergency. For most people, on-the-ground social media status updates were where they first learned what was happening.

Almost immediately, the Red Cross and ordinary citizens took to social media to offer help, alert the public about what’s needed, and calm the nerves of worried friends and loved ones. Even the Boston Police Department has used Twitter and other media to seek out tips to get to the bottom of who and what is responsible for this senseless horror. Google immediately set about creating a Person Finder tool to also help in the effort.

Besides meeting these needs, social media acted as an “ombudsman” to use The Washington Post‘s words. Readers jumped in to warn the media, in its race to cover the latest developments, not to jump to conclusions or wildly speculate about what was happening. Scientific American outlines some of the various good uses of social media in this situation.

USA Today has an update on the latest in the investigation of the attack. And NBC News reports that Boston authorities are asking the public for help with their investigation.

“Casting for additional leads, authorities pleaded Tuesday with spectators from the Boston Marathon to send photos and video that may shed light on who set off two shrapnel-studded bombs that killed three people and injured at least 176,” the article says.  One person has been questioned, but this has by no means cracked the case.

All across the Internet, social media, blogs, and traditional media are, of course, bringing the public up-to-the-minute news. Our thoughts are with the people of Boston, all of the victims, and all of the participants.

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For a lot of people social media can make or break someone’s confidence. If no one agrees with your Facebook status, do you feel less witty? If no one retweets that profound quote you just posted, does that mean your taste is off? At the end of the day we all want to be liked and appreciated; but increasingly, I’m finding that people are looking to social media for that validation. I remember having a conversation, years ago, with a group of people when someone said, “Yeah, if people don’t like my Facebook status within 10 minutes, I delete it.” I happen to know that this person was joking; but Humor 101 dictates that jokes, in order to be funny, have to have truth behind them. And since Facebook is slowly becoming less and less popular, the place where I’ve noticed this insecurity resurfacing has been on Instagram. Don’t believe me? Just watch! I have examples.

Source: Fox 2

Now this is how you use social media to protect your kids. According to Fox affiliate station, WJBK,  Antoine Martin, a Detroit father, was checking his 13 year old daughter’s Facebook page when he noticed inappropriate messages from an older man. The suspect, was a 22 year old man who worked at the Southeastern Michigan Boys and Girls Club. Martin’s daughter, Ariel, who frequented this Boys and Girls Club location, met the suspect there.

From there Martin took it upon himself to bring the man to justice. He started chatting with the suspect, pretending to be his daughter. The conversation quickly escalated from the suspect wanting to be a “big brother” figure to a “secret boyfriend” who wanted to have sex with Ariel.

Martin invited the suspect to his home. Once he arrived, he grabbed and handcuffed the suspect where he was able to collect his confession on tape.

MARTIN: “You know how old Ariel is?”

SUSPECT: Yes, I know how old Ariel is.

MARTIN: How old is Ariel?

SUSPECT: She’s 13.

MARTIN: And how old is you?

SUSPECT: I’m 22.

MARTIN: “Tell me why you came here today? Tell the truth.”

SUSPECT: I came here because I thought Ariel wanted to be my girlfriend. So I came here to spend time with her.

MARTIN: And do what?

SUSPECT: And to have sex with her.

SUSPECT: I do not want this to go onto the Boys and Girls Club.  I do not want this to go public, man.  I’m sorry.  I swear to God I’m sorry.”

Martin, who had studied the penal codes dealing with citizen’s arrest,  held the suspect in handcuffs until the police arrived.  This is what he had to say to WJBK when they interviewed him about his arrest. “He’s supposed to be there to help the kids. He said he has a problem.  He had a thirst is what he said, and that he wanted to try to get help and this would be the last time.”

You may be wondering if the father was within his legal rights to pull a Chris Hansen to collect this confession. Legally yes, though there is the issue of entrapment. When his case goes to court, his confession will most likely be challenged. As of now, the suspect is still in police custody. But if Martin can access the correspondence between he and the suspect, that will certainly work in his favor. However this story plays out we have to commend Martin in going 15 extra miles to protect his daughter. We’re all for it.

You can watch the suspect’s confession and Martin relaying the story, with pride, on the next page.

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When you discover someone you know on Facebook, you have a decision to make. To friend them or not. In most cases, unless you already know this person is crazy, you decide to let them in. You look at their profile. They look at yours. Most of the time, this arrangement works out just fine; but other times you realize, all too late that the person you friended or followed is a complete fool. We asked our Facebook followers if they’ve ever had to unfriended someone behind Facebook foolishness. See what they had to say.

Precious: Yes…the younger generation (25 and under) seem to share too much information (pics of private parts, weed, money and opinions) that are so offensive at times that one must block them to prevent further disrespect…I wonder for those whose parents are the “friends” on the various social networks what message it sends when they see this on their children’s pages and fail to say anything…

Domonique: Yup. Mostly my cousins. I always tell them too!

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This week, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first call made from a cell phone. It can be hard to imagine a time when we didn’t all have our phones, computers, music, and more in our pockets at all times. But let’s take a look back at some of the technological innovations we’ve had since 2000.

Source: YouTube

For the past couple of days I’ve been avoiding the almost viral video of a father beating his daughters after he found out that they had recorded themselves twerking and then uploaded the video onto YouTube. If you haven’t seen the video, I’m embedding it below; but beware, it’s graphic and a bit hard to stomach.

Does this remind anyone else of slavery? It’s akin to something we saw in Django Unchained. It’s brutal. The only difference is that this man is related to the girls he’s beating. It’s honestly disgraceful.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t get spankings when I was a child. I’m not anti corporeal punishment. But there is such thing as taking said punishment too far. The girls were screaming and apologizing, pleading for their father to stop as he whipped them, angry overseer style. It’s too much. When I was growing up, my mother was the one who spanked my sister and I. It wasn’t until I got older that they did this because my parents didn’t want to send mixed messages. We tell girls and eventually women that you shouldn’t stay with a man who beats you; but if that man is your father, it’s okay. It’s counter intuitive. Furthermore, if you’ve really done your job as a parent, you shouldn’t still need to beat your children as preteens. There are more effective punishments. Something like your child posting their twerking videos should require a conversation about respectability and standards not a beating. Because when these girls and eventually women are out of your care, what is to keep them from wyling out when you’re not physically there to beat them? (How many girls raised in overly strict homes only to get to college and completely lost their minds?)

And not only was the force of the beating too much, the most disgusting thing about all of this is that it was uploaded on YouTube for the world to see. This father sounds like a hypocrite to me. You punish your children from trying to get a little shine on YouTube and then turn around and upload a video of your own. For what? To embarrass them? To highlight yourself as a concerned father who goes to great lengths for his children? I don’t get it. The advent of social media has shown us that everyone doesn’t know what to do with internet access. Your daughters are still being highlighted in a way that is much more embarrassing than a twerk video would have been. Maybe that was the goal. And if that was the plan, it just might backfire. I’m sure this type of beating violates some type of Child Protective Services law. If his daughters or someone who knows the family decides to report this, this father could be taken away from the daughters for whom he was so “concerned.”

What do you think about this video? Did the father take it too far? Should he have uploaded the video?

Cheryl Contee, a co-founder of Fission Strategy, works with nonprofit organizations and foundations to improve their digital outreach: blogging, tweeting, Facebook, and more. Contee describes the company as “specializing in social media for social good,” and was founded in 2008. She works with organizations like the One Campaign, Define American, Amnesty International, and Zynga.org.

In addition to her work as co-founder of the Jack and Jill Politics blog, she is active in the digital space, on Twitter, and moderated a recent Social Media Week Panel on multicultural mobile consumers.

MadameNoire spoke to Contee about her work with nonprofits, trends in social media, and how the black community is active on social media and mobile devices.

MadameNoire: Why did you decide to start Fission Strategy? Why is it important to get nonprofits to use technology to their full advantage?

Cheryl Contee: I co-founded Fission as a business, as a for-profit, which would keep us focused and structured on innovation, to provide specialized, tailored services for nonprofits and foundations. Nonprofits don’t always have the same budgets, but certainly they have an advantage in this new arena, where individuals are so empowered through social media and can use their voices, use their networks, and use their technological savvy to inspire others around a given cause. They aren’t selling laptops or soap or football tickets, but they are selling ideas and inspiration.

MN: What are some nonprofit organizations that you work with, and what are they doing in social?

CC: Moms Rising is doing an incredible job. They do tweet chats with the White House, and they have an incredible passionate and engaged membership. During the election, we worked with OurTime, which works with young people, and we were able to get voter registration widgets on the Facebook pages of folks like Lady Gaga, Will Smith, Will.i.am, Jess Alba, Eva Longoria, and Trey Songz. We also worked with Tumblr to have the same online voter registration widget. Overall, that ended up driving more than 300,000 registrations, which is the kind of difference-maker that we try to achieve.

MN: I saw you moderated a panel during Social Media Week about multicultural mobile consumers. How do you see the African-American community using mobile more or differently than the general market or other demographics?

CC: Certainly, there are lots of different stats on this, but social media use is really heavy for African Americans. Pew Internet had a study out last year that said that something like 25 percent of online African Americans use Twitter and 10 percent use it every day. That’s a real dominance when you think about the millions [of Twitter users]. And that’s at least twice the rate of whites. A lot of people are using Twitter on their mobile device, either through apps or text messaging.

MN: And is it only about using social media on mobile devices, or are text messaging campaigns and mobile advertising still intriguing for nonprofits and corporations as they try to reach multicultural consumers?

CC: Any technology that is accessible via mobile is something that is important.

When you look at mobile advertising, there are some great numbers that came out Nielsen that show that, when you look at mobile ads, minorities are more likely to see them and click on them and to actually consider those. It’s a really useful way to stretch your ad dollars and make the most of your ad dollars.

[Editor's Note: During the Social Media Week Panel, Monica Bannan, VP of product leadership at Nielsen showed stats about mobile advertising. After seeing a social media ad, 18 percent of African-Americans shared that ad, 29 percent "liked" it, and 18 percent went on to purchase the product. This is compared to 13 percent of whites who shared the ad, 24 percent who liked it, and 12 percent who purchased a product.]

MN: Beyond the mobile trend, what else are you seeing with regards to the black community when it comes to social media, and what technologies are you focusing on for the next year or so?

CC: Certainly, we’re working to understand the power of Tumblr and Instagram, which is more integrated into Facebook, and having the notion of photo filters and hashtags attached to photos. We’re paying attention to that trend and the shift in the market. And again, a lot of these trends and innovations are actually driven by a change in consumer behavior around mobile devices. We are really trying to pay attention to that.

What is key for African Americans going forward is to see themselves not just as powerful consumers—African Americans are more likely than some other groups to own smartphones, to use social media, to use advanced internet—but to see themselves going beyond consumers to become creators. That’s the future of careers, the future of our economy and the future of prosperity for our community. We need to take our demonstrated tech savvy to the next level, launch our own companies, and create products that other people find useful.