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Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Timeline Extends the Life of Facebook Posts
posted by Michael Garrity @ 9:45 PM
Monday, May 21, 2012
Facebook’s Timeline
update has been available for brands long enough now that we’re finally able to
gain some useful data about the effect they have on marketing efforts, and the
initial information seems pretty positive.
Most notably is a recent report from social media analytics firm Sotrender, which says that Facebook posts now live longer on Timeline that that did before the format change. Before, half of the comments made on a brand’s Facebook post were made within the first hour of it being put up, but since the Timeline switch, that average has increased to 2.5 hours.
Unfortunately, the study was fairly limited. The London-based company only looked at 130 U.K.-based brands and about 5,000 Facebook posts, giving them a usable but ultimately limited sample.
Still, this is the first such study since the big move to Timeline, and it does present some very interesting information that could interest companies on the social network.
For instance, the report shows a 13-percent increase in the average number of users that interact with a post. Plus, about 80 percent of comments are now made within 8.5 hours of a posting, a two-hour extension over the previous average.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Timeline hasn’t contributed to a significant hike in a brand’s overall number of fans, nor did it improve the average number of “likes,” posts and comments per user or cross-page engagement.
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Three New Additions to the Adobe Marketing Suite
posted by Michael Garrity @ 3:00 PM
Sunday, May 20, 2012
At this week's Adobe Digital
Marketing Summit in London, hot on the heels of the release of Creative Suite 6 and the
Creative Cloud, the software company announced three new products.
Each release is aimed at helping marketers “Build compelling personalized experiences that address complex digital marketing problems,” says Kevin Cochrane, Adobe's vice president of enterprise marketing.
Content management on the Web is fundamentally changing and it was with that in mind, Cochrane explained, that Adobe crafted a set of new products to help digital marketers focus on creating not only compelling content but also compelling user experiences. He identified three primary issues that digital marketers face in the current environment.
The first is, obviously, driving revenue growth, especially with consumers who seem to become increasingly indifferent toward online advertising. On today’s Web, users are interested in targeted, personalized experiences, or they’re not interested at all.
The second consideration Adobe made was with regards to marketing budgets, specifically ensuring that every dollar spent on a digital marketing campaign is spent wisely. Thus, Adobe's solution is designed to help marketers optimize their spending by measuring and analyzing the impact of their efforts to determine the most efficient places in which they spend.
Finally, Adobe wanted to find ways to monetize a marketer’s audience by making each user they reach a valuable asset in driving conversions.
The resulting products were Adobe CQ 5.5 Social Communities, CQ eCommerce and CQ Cloud Manager.
Cloud Manager
A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) app for
businesses to quickly launch marketing initiatives in the cloud, providing
access to an integrated set of Web Experience Management (WEM) services for the
creation, management, measurement and optimization of user-personalized
experiences on websites, mobile devices and social media.
After starting a marketing campaign, Cloud Manager lets users remotely control a complete digital marketing solution from the cloud, leverage capabilities available through a rich partner ecosystem and monitor Adobe CQ and cloud infrastructure using real-time metering capabilities, among other handy features.
E-Commerce
An integrated solution that also leverages Adobe’s WEM platform. eCommerce manages and
optimizes the buying process for websites, mobile devices and social media by delivering a branded, personalized experience
incorporating the hybris multichannel commerce software.
Extending the reach of personalized digital marketing campaigns across these channels allows marketers to present a targeted experience to consumers from the point-of-engagement to the point-of-sale, regardless of the device they’re using. In addition, e-commerce sites and apps can be delivered on-premises or from the cloud, and using eCommerce in tandem with Cloud Manager lets marketers speed the creation of branded, personalized e-commerce sites that continuously scale to meet demands across all channels.
Social
Communities
Marketers can better leverage social engagement across
owned digital properties to build loyalty and drive conversions. Information
from leading social networks (gathered, again, over multiple channels) helps
organizations make a social connection with users by allowing them to log into
their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and then use their profile information to
personalize the consumer’s experience.
This product can also be used with other sources, like a CRM or website profile, to create a more comprehensive view of each unique customer.
Plus, new social plugins make it possible for customers to share content with their friends, making every new customer a potential brand advocate, and immediately increasing each consumer’s value. Using this solution with eCommerce lets businesses embed social elements into the product selection and purchasing processes of their owned properties.
This new suite of digital marketing products has been built to appeal to each unique consumer’s interests from the beginning, and then maintain that personalized experience throughout the purchasing process to increase the chances of conversion, maximize the value of the money spent and, with any luck, create a lifelong customer and brand advocate.
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Everybody and their ousted Brazilian co-founders are talking about the Facebook IPO today. So, when the editors at Website Magazine held a closed-door brainstorming session about the day’s content, we were unanimously in favor of one thing and one thing only: Anything but Facebook.
Then, in accordance with the house rules, we did the exact opposite of what had just been agreed upon. Instead, we pored through close to 100 pages of search results on WebsiteMagazine.com, totaling nearly 1,000 posts related to the world’s largest (and richest) social network. We selected 15 of our favorites, keeping in mind that it is our duty to inform our readers more than it is to entertain you.
Hopefully, the results are a fan-friendly combination of both information and entertainment:
10 Facebook Optimization Tips for Merchants
It’s been a little more than a year since Facebook first introduced the now ubiquitous Like button, and a significant update three months ago has given users the ability to add comments and increased the button’s visibility for the benefit of merchants, marketers and brands. Read more …
500 Million Ways to Make Money from Facebook
With Facebook recently exceeding half a billion users, businesses of all types are realizing they have a big opportunity to monetize their efforts on the world’s largest social network. Read more …
Be Like Mark: Facebook IPO Takeaways
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, Facebook announced its epic $100 billion IPO this week. Read more …
Master List of Facebook Commerce Platforms
Utilizing Facebook’s massive audience to help grow an e-commerce business through social networking takes little more than common sense and hard work. However, to take full advantage of the world’s largest social network as an actual selling platform requires a little more know-how than elbow grease. Read more …
Facebook is the New Google
Much of the discussion throughout the Web industry this week has revolved around Thursday’s announcement of Google Instant, the revolutionary new feature that has many business owners wondering about the future of search engine marketing in particular and Internet advertising as a whole. Read more …
Best of 2011 - Facebook Brand Pages
As 2011 fades away, it is time to reflect on some of the year’s biggest trends, one being social media. Although it was the birth year of Google+, Facebook still remains the king of social networks and social media marketing. Read more …
Facebook Timeline for Performance Marketing
A major announcement today from Facebook is going to have significant impact on how marketers utilize the Web's largest social network. Read more …
5 Reasons the New-Look Facebook Could Sink Twitter
Facebook is launching a new look, and the main focus is on real-time feeds and status updates on every user’s home page – including businesses. Sound familiar? It should, because that’s been the very model of success for Twitter. Read more …
Facebook Fails with Social Shopping
Facebook is missing the mark on social shopping, perhaps the biggest money-making venture in the social era of the Web. Read more …
Could Facebook be the Daily Deal Killer?
The Web’s largest social network is taking a jab at the Daily Deals industry with its newest launch of Facebook Offers, which is a tool for engaging with and driving new customers to businesses. Read more …
Long Live the Facebook Post
According to Facebook exposure ranking tool EdgeRank Checker, the life of a Facebook post begins when it is posted live on the social network, and it ends when the growth in engagement is less than 10 percent between hourly snapshots. Read more …
Social Media Tips from the Republican Party
There is finally something that the Democrats and Republicans can agree on – social media is an essential marketing strategy. Read more …
Claiming Your Facebook Place
Facebook has become an important channel for marketers – on the Web and off. The social media destination’s relatively new Facebook Places offering provides businesses an additional opportunity to track the people who visit their stores, offices or venues. Read more …
Granny Gets a Facebook Page
Social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, but older users have been adopting networking tools particularly fast. New research released today by Pew Internet indicates that social networking use among Internet users age 50 and older nearly doubled in the past year – from 22 percent in April 2009 to 42 percent in May 2010. Read more ...
Facebook Posting Strategies
When is the best day to post on Facebook? How about the best time of day? Social media management company Vitrue released a report that reveals some interesting Facebook publishing strategies and practices based on data evaluated from the fans managed through the company’s SRM platform. Read more …
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Pinterest Brand Intelligence with Curalate
posted by Peter A. Prestipino @ 9:20 AM
Thursday, May 17, 2012
The marketing mania of Pinterest has waned a bit the past several weeks, but that’s hasn’t stopped consumers from visiting the site (see Compete.com chart below) or brands seeking ways to participate on the social pinboard site.
But if we’ve learned anything from social media – in whatever form it comes (visual or otherwise) – it is that you can’t effectively manage participation if you can’t measure it (and you sure as heck can’t monetize it either).
Enter Curalate, a newly launched service that enables brands to discover, track, and yes, even measure the sharing that is occurring on visual platforms like Pinterest. Curalate aims to reveal a brand's true Pinterest presence by understanding the activities coming from a brand website as well as from their Pinterest page. The platform, which offers a free trial, goes quite a bit deeper, however – something that its 150+ brands starting with the service at launch were likely drawn towards. Curalate also offers a way to consolidate the conversations that are occurring on Pinterest, helping brands engage with their brand-endorsing pinners more effectively.
"Before brands put serious money towards a new social network, they need to be able to measure and monitor their brand engagement," said Apu Gupta, Curalate's CEO and co-founder. "Today's launch, and the 150+ brands and agencies we've signed up, show just how important it is for brands to make sense of and benefit from today's socially curated sites."
As you can see in the chart from Compete.com below, Pinterest keeps growing. Will it continue? And will platforms such as Curalate increase participation from brands?
"The emergence -- and popularity -- of sites such as Pinterest, Instagram, Fancy and Wanelo show us the power and universal appeal of communicating through images, not just text," said Patrick Chung, partner at NEA – who just led a $750,000 financing round for Curalate (along with First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures. "These sites give brands the ability to identify and understand the products people care about right now so that brands can dynamically adapt their e-commerce strategies to target the products that are top of the mind -- for each individual mind."
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It just got easier
to communicate with users on the Tumblr microblogging platform, thanks to a new integration with Chatwing.
Tumblr's recent surge in popularity is often referenced in conjunction with its supposed limitations, namely that it appeals to a younger audience and that only its visual content is likely to go viral. The latter assumption leads many marketers to believe that the site is lacking when compared to other social networks such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter in terms of fan engagement.
While that may not necessarily be true, it has caused some established brands to hesitate before migrating to Tumblr. But the new Chatwing partnership will introduce a website chat widget to Tumblr that adds an element of communication that never existed before.
Chatwing has been integrated with Facebook for some time now, and has greatly improved the communication experience for many global companies. Now Tumblr users will also be able to add the chat box to their blogs and quickly share and receive information from their followers to expand their social horizons.
The latest version of the Chatwing tool is available to Tumblr users, including a filter for “indecent” words and a greater selection of emoticons and avatar displays.
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If you are frequently responding to customer support issues via Facebook and Twitter, the updated Zoho Support app may just be exactly what you need to make the process less time-consuming and more effective.
Online app provider Zoho’s updated customer support app now integrates with both Facebook and Twitter. The new integrations enable businesses to quickly and easily monitor, route and respond to support requests on both social networks.
Users that leverage these new features will be able to provide their customers with unified Facebook and Twitter support from one central location, capture social interactions such as tickets, obtain notifications when an increasing number of tweets contain specified escalation keywords, as well as automatically direct specific keywords to specific support agents or teams.
Social media is a powerful tool that can affect a company’s reputation if not closely monitored. By becoming proactive and emphasizing strong customer support via these channels, brands have the opportunity to build their customer bases as well as loyalty among their current customers.
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Many digital media professionals, myself included, expect that Pinterest's days as the darling of the social media world are numbered.
The popular pinboard, however, remains appealing to merchants as it has been shown time and again to drive website traffic, and in some cases even conversions.
Website Magazine has seen an influx of tools and resources designed for merchants to optimize use and improve understanding since the rise of Pinterest began. The latest comes from PinnableBusiness.com, which just announced the release of PinAlerts, a free Web service that tracks pins being added to Pinterest from any website or blog.
Users of the service are notified by email about the pin along with a description of it when new items are posted. Users can also control the frequency of those emails, choosing alerts in real time, or opting for daily or weekly aggregate reports.
Here's a screenshot of what the email reports look like.
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Facebook Metrics: Reach, Engaged Users, Talking About This
posted by Peter A. Prestipino @ 1:30 PM
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
The investing world is certainly going gaga over Facebook's upcoming IPO, but the community of social media professionals continue to scratch their collective heads about the meaning of the available metrics within brand pages that is being reported by the social network.
Based on my conversations with those both successful and struggling with their social media participation and optimization, much of the troubles stem from a simple lack of understanding. There's a lot of "overlap" in the reports, which I believe is certainly one reason this data doesn't generate more attention and exploration.
Let's look at these metrics in more detail and consider how you, as a social media maven, can use the information to your benefit.
Reach: The number of people that have seen your post. The Reach metric is segmented into three seperate channels - organic, paid and viral.
Organic reach is the number of people that have seen your post in their news feed, within the ticker, or on your page. Keep in mind that metrics reported under organic reach can include people that have never liked your page.
Paid reach is the reach associated with sponsored stories or Page Post Ads. It is reported as the number of unique people that saw an ad or story that pointed to your page.
Viral reach is where things get tricky. Viral reach is the number of people that have seen your post because one of their friends interacted with it, either liking, commenting, sharing, answering a question or responding to an event. Viral reach also has to do quite a bit with the Talking About This (TAT) metric discussed below.
Engaged Users: The number of people who have clicked within your post/update.
The Engaged Users metric is reported in three forms: link clicks (clicks on links within your post/update), stories generated (a story is created when someone likes, comments, shares, answers a question or responds to an event), and other clicks, which are clicks on names, timestamp or the number of likes (the "other clicks" metrics is a good indicator of attention).
Talking About This: The number of people that have created a "story" from your page post. The TAT metric reports the number of likes, comments and shares in aggregate.
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Social login platform Janrain has released some interesting information which analyzes social login and social sharing preferences for online users from the over 365,000 sites using its Engage platform.
As you might expect, Facebook is the most popular option, coming in with a majority of usage at 45 percent - but don't count out Google, Yahoo! and Twitter. The Janrain research indicates that Facebook's share of social logins has increased considerably over the past two years at the expense of Google (and by the looks of it Yahoo!) but as Google+ continues to scale up, that trend seems to be reversing slightly (see graph).
JanRain also analyzed four industry verticals (media, entertainment/gaming, retail, and music) and found similar "arcs" but there are some consistencies across all verticals.
The e-commerce/retail vertical in particular is quite interesting. While Facebook's dominance has declined moderated from 49 percent to 42 percent during the past two quarters, there appears to be a uptick in the most recent quarter. Google seemed to peak in the fourth quarter (coninciding perhaps with the release of Google+) but is has since fallen off. Yahoo fared best in the e-commerce vertical but its slide since 2010 is quite apparent.
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Online video is hot. Social media has mostly taken over the world. So, why haven't these two highly popular advertising avenues been married yet? (My guess is fear of commitment.)
Slowly, but surely, it's starting to happen. Recently, video advertising solution provider Innovid announced major enhancements to inRoll Studio that will allow users to to create interactive video ads that offer social media and microsite functionality. These ad units will be able to quickly launch on all sites and devices almost effortlessly.
The inRoll platform allows advertisers to add interactive elements to pre-roll video ads to improve interactivity (obviously), increase awareness, foster brand engagement and introduce better tracking and targeting capabilities into the videos. This new update will help make inRoll enhancements more social, which is never a bad thing on today's Web.
Innovid is even helping to tailor specific features to some of the Web's most popular social networks to help customers get the most out of their ads. For instance, they can include actions to drive users to their Facebook profile pages by encouraging them to "like" the pages with interactive elements over the pre-roll.
Other social network-specific options include the ability to display real-time Twitter feeds over their pre-roll, let users tweet and retweet the content from the pre-roll, add streaming YouTube videos, include "like," "subscribe" and "share" functionalities for YouTube and leverage a variety of other social media channels (Digg, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest) with a "Share This" feature to let users share marketer information.
According to an Innovid press release, advertisers using inRoll Studio are seeing an average 500 percent CTR increase over their banner ads.
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The good news for
Facebook is that it officially surpassed the 900 million-user
mark earlier this year. The "bad" news is that the social network is growing slower than in years
past.
While it’s hard to undermine just how monumental a figure 900 million users really is, it’s also important to know that rapid growth has heretofore been Facebook’s primary means of generating revenue. And while it only took the site about five months to go from 800 million to 900 million worldwide users, it took just three months to expand from 700 million to 800 million.
Facebook is still the top dog in terms of social networking and, really, a lot of other things on the Internet.
Each of the 901 million Facebook users is worth $1.21 for the company, which shows a 6-percent increase from this time last year. Moreover, 532 million of them are considered “daily active users,” which is up from just 372 million a year ago.
Plus, the site is still valued at more than $100 billion, and Q1 revenue was up from this time last year, although it did see a slight net income decrease due to additional operating costs.
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HootSuite App Directory Adds MailChimp and More
posted by AllisonH @ 12:00 PM
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The ever-growing HootSuite App Directory has just gotten a little bigger.
The social media management platform just added new partner integrations from MailChimp, Chime.in, Identi.ca, Vision Critical Surveys and RSS Reader into their App Directory. These new apps are immediately available to all HootSuite users.
Check out more information about the newest apps below:
MailChimp – This app enables HootSuite users to send email newsletters, manage subscriber lists, track campaign performance, view and search for recent email campaigns and share campaigns to social networks.
Chime.in – This app from social interest network Chime.in, allows users to schedule and send chimes, leave and view comments, preview photos and videos.
Identi.ca – HootSuite users can use this app to post status updates, monitor timelines and messages, track replies and view conversations.
Vision Critical Surveys – This app enables users to design and share surveys with social networks and monitor results in real-time.
RSS Reader – Users can utilize this app for a quick and easy way to view RSS feeds in the HootSuite dashboard, as well as share stories and articles from feeds to social networks.
“Businesses today are social, says HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes. "Success depends on connecting with customers instantly across multiple social media channels and networks. The growth of our App Directory gives clients an impressive arsenal of tools to do this, all in a single place. Our goal, as we close in on six million users by end of year, is to continue aggressively integrating leading apps, turning our dashboard into the mother of all SaaS resources for the social business.”
This new set of apps joins the current group within the HootSuite App Directory, which includes applications from Digg, TrendSpottr, InboxQ, Constant Contact, Get Satisfaction, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr and Orkut.
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The best strategy for creating engaging marketing posts on Facebook is _____ .
A new study from social media analytics provider Simply Measured reveals that fill-in-the-blank posts on Facebook receive more comments than any others.
According to Simply Measured, JetBlue incorporated fill-in-the-blank posts into its Facebook content strategy approximately every seven to ten days over the past six weeks and discovered 182 percent more comments than other types of statuses, such as posts that contain links or multimedia.
However, the study also shows that statuses containing links were better performers for driving likes and shares.
It is important to note that although the fill-in-the-blank method was an obvious success for JetBlue, it doesn’t mean that companies should start sending out a ton of posts that contain blanks. Social media managers should remember that variety is the spice of marketing life, so therefore it is important not to overuse any particular strategy.
Brands should experiment with different content strategies, compare and analyze the success of the types of posts that are being sent out, and remember that everything is good in moderation.
Otherwise, you may just be shooting blanks.
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Grammatical Gaffes on the Web are the Worstest
posted by Michael Garrity @ 1:00 PM
Friday, April 20, 2012
They’re maybe one or
too things wrong with this sentence your reading, or may be even five – quite possibly more.
Grammatical gaffes can have a devastating effect on Web workers. Content has long been the King of the Internet, but that has never been so true as it is today. Website visitors ultimately make their decisions based on the quality and relevance of the content they consume, so grammatical errors have a profoundly negative effect on overall user experience – and thus, on conversion rates.
Users are not the only ones put off by careless grammatical errors. Search engines do not look kindly on poorly written and/or edited content. The most severe situations will usually involve error-ridden page titles or headlines, which can actually prevent the offending Web page from appearing in search results on Google, Bing and other engines.
So, let's say that you are neither a Pulitzer Prize-winning author nor a university English professor; how do you know what pitfalls lurk in the shadows? Here are a few common mistakes that all Web workers can and should avoid:
Correct
Usage of Homonyms
Homonyms are words that are
pronounced the same but differ in meaning and also frequently in spelling. Some
classic examples of these include the following:
- Their (to show possession), They’re (a contraction of "they" and "are") and There (which refers to a place or acts as a pronoun)
- Your (to show possession) and You’re (a contraction of "you" and "are")
- Other common misuses of homonyms can include "affect/effect" and "then/than"
These mistakes are easy to make and can be hard to catch, but the negative "effects" they have on big brands and small businesses can be significant.
Hyphens and Apostrophes
Making sure that you use
punctuation properly can make a big difference in terms of your SEO success. But these things are often determined by preferences in style rather than universal grammatical rules.
The common Web terms "Email/e-mail", "Ecommerce/e-commerce", "eBooks/Ebooks", etc., pose challenges for online content providers, and stylistic standards can change overnight. The best advice when it comes to specific Web-related jargon is to remain consistent; if not throughout your entire site, certainly throughout a given article or post – anything less will be seen as unprofessional by the eagle-eyed members of your audience.
Apostrophes are also often overlooked but vitally important elements to creating great Web content. The most typical infractions occur in the different case uses of the words "its" (possessive) and "it's" (it + is), and in the different versions of commonly used acronyms such as "CEO's" (possessive) and CEOs (plural).
Dangling Modifiers and
Subject/Verb Agreement
Dangling modifiers take place when a sentence is structured
in such a way that a modifying word or adjectival clause is associated with a word
or phrase that is not the one it is
supposed to be modifying.
Example: The robber ran from the policeman, still holding the money in his hands.
Subject/verb agreement simply means that the main verb, or action, in a sentence must “agree” in number with the subject, or main noun. In other words, a plural subject (cats) requires a plural verb (ran), while a singular subject (umbrella) requires a singular verb (opens).
Both of these errors can make it hard for readers to decipher the intended meaning of a sentence, thus obscuring your brand’s message.
This Goes Without Saying
You may not have a crack editorial staff at your disposal, but most website owners and content producers do have access to simple spellcheck programs that can save them a lot of headaches and maybe even some business. Avoid using them at your own peril.
Final Word
Did you see what we did here? We purposely planted dozens of grammatical errors in this very post to see who amongst you is really paying attention. Let's have it in the comments section, and we'll be happy to provide a critique.
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The social Web, it turns out, is full of Moms I’d Like to Friend.
A new study from performance marketing provider Performics reveals that mothers are more versatile, present and engaged users of social networking sites than other women. In fact, moms are 61 percent more likely to own a smartphone, 16 percent more likely to visit Facebook daily, 46 percent more likely to visit Google+ daily and 75 percent more likely to trust information that they receive from companies on social networking sites compared to women that are not mothers.
“Moms continue to take advantage of the little spare time they have by utilizing all the tools at their disposal. This includes their mobile devices and social networks,” says Daina Middleton, Global CEO of Performics. “Increasingly, as a segment of the social networking population, moms perception is their voice can be leveraged to influence, participate with, and promote brands.”
The study also shows that moms are not only more likely to trust brands on social sites, but also look to interaction with brands on social sites as a primary point of contact. This statistic is significant because mother bloggers, which is a sub category of moms, control more than two trillion dollars worth or purchasing power, according to the study.
Not convinced yet that your brand should be targeting Moms online? Well, another intriguing piece of data from the study reveals that they are also 45 percent more likely to make a purchase as a result of a social network recommendation, and are more likely to become brand ambassadors, or mombassadors, for their favorite brands via social media.
In fact, moms are 34 percent more likely to recommend a company or brand via social media, 48 percent more likely to discuss a brand on a social site after seeing the brand’s ad somewhere, 24 percent more likely to talk about brands that they follow on Facebook, 23 percent more likely to link to a brand, 53 percent more likely to post brand ads, and 50 percent more likely to post interesting or relevant content about a brand.
“Brands have an opportunity to motivate moms to participate through their social media properties,” says Middleton. “In this age of participation, moms expect a constructive, two-way relationship. To stay current, build loyalty and, in many cases, drive sales, brands must provide that meaningful connection with their customers.”
So don’t be shy. Show moms some social love because it could help your brand out in the long run.
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Companies around the
globe are throwing their marketing weight behind social media, but how do they
know it’s really worth the effort?
One of the biggest issues for many brands today is trying to find a way to tie their sales data to their social media programs to justify the time and resources spent on running a social media campaign. Essentially, they’re trying to ensure that social media marketing offers a worthwhile return on investment (ROI).
Good news for some, as Social Media Link (the company responsible for the Smiley360.com social influencer platform) is partnering with Web-based retail promotion company Incentive Targeting. The deal will help Social Media Link integrate sales data research and analytics into its brand advocacy programs.
This pairing will be able to help brands uncover the exact dollar impact of its influencers who test and review their products, and those who are influenced by reading said reviews. They can do this because they will be given access to anonymous retail sales insights from participating retailers (those involved in the Incentive Targeting national retail network).
Ultimately, the goal here is to use this information to drive in-store actions and purchases.
The partnership will utilize Social Media Link’s Single-Click Sharing Technology tools, used by Smiley360.com consumers to publish product recommendations to their social networks. Incentive Targeting will be able to track brand and category usage before, during and after a Smiley360 influencer program by anonymously linking the social behavior of its users and their followers to in-store purchase data.
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Analyze Tumblr’s 50 Million New Posts Per Day
posted by Peter A. Prestipino @ 3:00 AM
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Social data provider Gnip has announced a partnership with Tumblr where they will have full access to the publishing platform's firehose - the full feed of Tumblr's 50 million new posts each day - and making the information available for business analysis.
Tumblr, which is growing rapidly and a company that I believe is the next major acquisition target (we're looking at you Facebook now that Twitter snapped up Posterous), currently receives over 15 billion monthly pageviews - that's a lot of data. Couple that with other data that reveals that Tumblr is only second to Facebook is social engagement and we start to see the value in this partnership.
"Our goal is to be the single source of record for all public conversations online," said Chris Moody, President and COO of Gnip. "As one of the most vibrant online communities in the world, there's an enormous amount of public conversation taking place on Tumblr. We're thrilled to be able to make this available for the first time."
Tumblr join several other noteworthy Web and technology companies including Twitter, WordPress, Disqus, IntenseDebate, StockTwits and Newsgator in partnering with Gnip to make their public data available for analysis.
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Back in August, Pinterest rolled out YouTube support to allow users to pin and share videos from the site on the pinboard-based social network. Still, despite that addition, the focus of Pinterest (and reason for its growth) has remained pretty consistently rooted in photos.
However, as the site continues to grow in popularity, the company probably realized that it will have to broaden its horizons to hold the interest of new and old users, alike. Thus, Pinterest announced integration with Vimeo, which, like its YouTube deal, will allow users to pin Vimeo videos on the site.
Some are speculating that this move is just what Pinterest needs to expand its content reach, since Vimeo’s fanbase tends to be more art and design focused than YouTube’s things-on-cats loving crowd. This means these younger, hipper users may be more interested in sharing viral content on the site, so this new deal could help spur video usage on the social network. Or that's the theory, at least.
If nothing else, it’s clear that Pinterest is interested in evolving beyond its current format.
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Facebook IPO filing reportedly due ‘as early as next week’
posted by Technology @ 2:47 PM
Friday, January 27, 2012
Facebook's initial public offering has been anticipated for months and is speculated to be worth as much as $100 billion whenever it arrives.
And right about now, that's the biggest question for the world's largest social network — when will the IPO filing arrive?
According to a Friday report from the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, Facebook could file for its IPO "as early as next week."
When next week? The Journal says "Facebook could file papers for the IPO as early as this coming Wednesday, but that timing is still being discussed, said a person familiar with the matter."
Facebook, for its part, hasn't said when its inevitable IPO will arrive, but the rumor mill is in high gear.
On Wendesday, multiple reports said that the Menlo Park, Calif., company had temporarily suspended trading of company shares on private markets so it could tally up just how many shareholders it has — a move sometimes made ahead of an IPO.
The IPO is expected to be the largest of the year and possibly the decade and, as noted by the Times' Jessica Guynn and Walter Hamilton, it could turn as many as 1,000 Facebook employees into millionaires. Facebook has more than 800 million users worldwide and it's expected to also reach 1 billion users soon as well.
Wall Street clicks 'like' on Facebook IPO
Facebook reportedly suspends share trading ahead of IPO
Facebook IPO: Could Facebook be worth more than $100 billion?
– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Photo: Facebook's thumbs-up "Like" icon is displayed on a sign at the company's new campus in Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook hopes to accommodate over 6,000 employees on the new campus, which is spread out over a million square feet of office space. Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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#TwitterBlackout: Tweeters protest nation-specific blocks [Updated]
posted by Technology @ 12:51 PM
Friday, January 27, 2012
Twitter faced a growing backlash on Friday, less than a day after it announced that it can now block specific tweets from being published in specific countries that legally require such censorship.
On Friday, a day after the country-specific plan was announced, #TwitterBlackout and #TwitterCensored were trending topics on the hugely popular social network.
In the case of #TwitterBlackout, thousands of users from around the world threatened to boycott using the service on Jan. 28, with the hactivist group Anonymous among those calling on tweeters to skip the site for a day. The group Reporters Without Borders issued a letter on its website to Twitter's executive chairman, Jack Dorsey, asking him to "reverse a policy that violates freedom of expression."
The trending topic #TwitterCensorship was filled mostly with tweets from users complaining that Twitter shouldn't be censoring any of its users. Fear over increased censorship also was widely expressed, as was some frustration as some believe Twitter's new policy may result in less censorship, not more.
In the past, Twitter only withdrew a user's tweet globally — meaning the entire world wouldn't be able to see a tweet if the site censored it. But now, the San Francisco company has built a tool that allows them to censor tweets just in the country that calls for the censorship, but others outside of that nation will be able to view the message share on the service.
Twitter said Thursday in a blog post that it doesn't want to censor anyone's tweets but legally has to do so in certain cases, such as France's and Germany's ban on "pro-Nazi content."
The company also said it has teamed with the free-speech and online-rights website ChillingEffects.org — an online partnership between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics — to document who is asking for a tweet to be censored and why. Such notices will be published at chillingeffects.org/twitter.
Jillian C. York, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's director of international freedom of expression, argued in a blog post defending the company that the move doesn't "represent a sea change in Twitter's policies."
"It's been difficult to comment on the move given the extreme reaction by Twitter's own community," York said. "Lots of 'I told you so' from the conspiracy theorists who think that this is because of Saudi Prince Alwaleed's stake in the company, compounded by the #occupy crowd continuing to claim their hashtag was censored in Twitter's trending topics made me want to avoid the subject entirely."
But, of course, York doesn't avoid the subject.
"Let's be clear: This is censorship," she said. "There's no way around that. But alas, Twitter is not above the law. Just about every company hosting user-generated content has, at one point or another, gotten an order or government request to take down content. Google lays out its orders in its Transparency Report. Other companies are less forthright. In any case, Twitter has two options in the event of a request: Fail to comply, and risk being blocked by the government in question, or comply (read: censor). And if they have 'boots on the ground', so to speak, in the country in question? No choice."
Nonetheless, York said she understands why people are angry.
"Twitter has previously taken down content — for DMCA requests, at least — and will no doubt continue to face requests in the future," she said, referencing Twitter blocking tweets in the past to follow DMCA copyright laws. "I believe that the company is doing its best in a tough situation…and I'll be the first to raise hell if they screw up."
[Updated 3:03 p.m.: Twitter updated it's blog post on the censorship changes in response to the user backlash seen over the last day.
The company said that it believes "new, more granular approach to withheld content is a good thing for freedom of expression, transparency, accountability -- and for our users. Besides allowing us to keep Tweets available in more places, it also allows users to see whether we are living up to our freedom of expression ideal."
Twitter also answered threee questions it says it has been asked since Thursday. The questions and answers from Twitter:
Q: Do you filter out certain Tweets before they appear on Twitter?
A: No. Our users now send a billion Tweets every four days -- filtering is neither desirable nor realistic. With this new feature, we are going to be reactive only: that is, we will withhold specific content only when required to do so in response to what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request.As we do today, we will evaluate each request before taking any action. Any content we do withhold in response to such a request is clearly identified to users in that country as being withheld. And we are now able to make that content available to users in the rest of the world.
Q: What will people see if content is withheld?
A: If people are located in a country where a Tweet or account has been withheld and they try to view it, they will see a alert box that says "Tweet withheld" or "@Username withheld" in place of the affected Tweet or account.Q: Why did you take this approach, and why now?
A: There's no magic to the timing of this feature. We've been working to reduce the scope of withholding, while increasing transparency, for a while. We have users all over the world and wanted to find a way to deal with requests in the least restrictive way.]
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Twitter can now censor tweets nationally, rather than globally
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Images: Screen shots of Twitter users complaining about Twitter's new nation-specific censorship policy. Credit: Twitter
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Twitter can now censor tweets nationally, rather than globally
posted by Technology @ 6:07 PM
Thursday, January 26, 2012
The San Francisco-based company said Thursday that it will now be able to censor tweets in specific countries that ask it to do so for legal reasons, rather than having to block tweets globally as before.
"As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," the company said in a blog post. "Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content."
Up until this point, Twitter was only able to censor tweets worldwide, which means nobody would get to see a blocked tweet, the company said.
"Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world," Twitter said. "We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why."
When a tweet is blocked in a country, a message will appear stating that the tweet has been withheld in that nation alongside a link that explains the reason as to why the tweet was blocked.
"We haven't yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld," Twitter said. "As part of that transparency, we've expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter."
Twitter says in its help center that the ability to block a tweet in a specific nation will allow it to "respect our user's expression, while also taking into consideration applicable local laws."
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Images: Screen shots of what blocked content will look like. Credit: Twitter
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Google+ now open to teens, with a few security tweaks too
posted by Technology @ 2:52 PM
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Google+ opened up to teenagers on Thursday, a move that Google no doubt hopes will help it challenge Facebook as the social network of choice.
"Teens and young adults are the most active Internet users on the planet," said Bradley Horowitz, Google's vice president of products, in a post on his Google+ page. "And surprise, surprise: they're also human beings who enjoy spending time with friends and family. Put these two things together and it's clear that teens will increasingly connect online."
While minors will now be able to use Google+, the experience on the social network won't be exactly the same for them as the 18-and-older crowd. Google has made a few privacy and security changes with teens in mind that Horowitz said will make Google+ a more ideal network to use for sharing and connecting with friends than other services.
"Unfortunately, online sharing is still second-rate for this age group," he said of teenagers. "In life, for instance, teens can share the right things with just the right people (like classmates, parents or close ties). Over time, the nuance and richness of selective sharing even promotes authenticity and accountability. Sadly, today's most popular online tools are rigid and brittle by comparison, so teens end up over-sharing with all of their so-called "friends.' "
The ability to share on Google+ to specific "circles" of friends is a start Horowitz said, but the social network is also giving users "control over who can contact them online. By default, only those in teens' circles can say hello, and blocking someone is always just a click or two away."
Google+'s Hangout video chats will also be tweaked for teens. "If a stranger outside a teen's circles joins the hangout, we temporarily remove the young adult, and give them a chance to rejoin," he said.
Previously, Google+ was only open to users who were 18 years old and up. Now, Horowitz said, anyone who is old enough for a Google account of any sort is old enough for Google+. And in all but Spain (14), South Korea (14) and the Netherlands (16), that age is 13.
Facebook, which boasts more than 800 million users, is open to anyone 13 and older. Google+ has about 90 million users, the tech giant said earlier this month.
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Image: An example of the prompt a teenage Google+ user under age 18 will receive whenever someone they don't have included in a contact "circle" on the social network joins in on a Hangout video chat session. Credit: Google
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Is Facebook ‘Subscribe’ for real? Booming new traffic explained
posted by Technology @ 2:20 PM
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
As their Facebook "subscriber" lists have spiraled upward — into the thousands and tens of thousands in recent weeks — many journalists have looked on in awe and wonder.
Executives at the social media behemoth say the "Subscribe" function, introduced in September, has instantly become a hugely popular feature. It allows the public to follow journalists, artists and political figures without taking the more personal, and potentially intrusive, step of "friending."
The manager of the Journalist Program for Facebook said in a posting Wednesday that subscriptions have jumped more than threefold since November for a sample of 25 journalists around the country. Vadim Lavrusik, the program manager, suggested that the exponential growth — CNN weather reporter Bonnie Schneider somewhat suddenly has 72,000 subscribers — is a reflection of the "organic discovery mechanisms" built into the social network.
Journalists have alternately expressed happiness (any audience expansion is a good thing) and skepticism over what's behind the booming Facebook Subscribe numbers.
Linda Thomas, a morning news anchor in Seattle, put out a series of Facebook messages trying to determine why her following on the site had suddenly leaped to nearly 5,000. Media analyst Jim Romenesko responded: “Subscriber (and LIKE) spam is a huge problem for Facebook. I have 14,000+ Facebook subscribers and guess that not even 25% of them know my work and have any interest in it.”
When I asked Romenesko why he was skeptical that new subscribers were real, he said it was partly the fact the newcomers to his Facebook page seemed to have no connectedness to his other friends and subscribers. Many came with oddball names, like the one that appeared to be a takeoff on "Adolph Hitler."
Romenesko conceded that some of the subscribers might be real people, genuinely interested in his news feed, which focuses on the media industry in the U.S. But he added: "I suspect the vast majority are simply spammers."
USA Today's Gregory Korte said he was initially "mystified" by his booming following on Facebook subscribe, which now numbers more than 21,000. "I mean, I'm not kidding myself," emailed Korte, who covers Congress, "I'm not a celebrity journalist, even among the C-SPAN set." But he figured the fact he ended up on a Facebook list of journalists to subscribe to might have goosed his traffic.
I've watched my own Facebook subscriptions jump to more than 17,000 — almost all of them signing on in the last six weeks. That made me a little giddy at my wondrous, ahem, allure. But I also couldn't help wondering (with apologies to Woody Allen) why so many would want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.
I emailed several of my new subscribers — including Zarrouk in Morocco and Giovanni in Naples — but got no response. Finally, I heard back from one, Chris in Montreal. He told me he had found me through Facebook's recommendation on his Subscribe page.
Chris figured I popped up because he had subscribed to other writers in the media and tech fields. The 33-year-old fine arts student credited Facebook's algorithms with helping him compile a news feed that is "synchronous and relevant.”
Facebook's Lavrusik said the function can be a boon to journalists, and said they should not be skeptical at the far-flung provenance of their subscribers. In the report he posted Wednesday, Lavrusik pointed to updates NBC's Ann Curry posted on a recent trip to Iraq. (Nearly 2,300 people "liked" her update describing her late-night arrival in Baghdad.) A New York Times reporter has regularly posted videos of protests in Moscow.
"You can distribute your content but also contact sources using that profile," Lavrusik said. "So it opens the door to really use it not just for distribution but to improve the journalism process."
Now USA Today's Korte is trying to get the most out of his new audience, figuring out when and how to query them for stories he is working on. Having been schooled in competitive newspaper towns, Korte said he sometimes tends to be cautious, lest competitors see what he is working on.
But he also doubted competitors would spend much time burrowing into his Facebook feed and so is "trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and practice what I preach about 'open source' journalism."
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– James Rainey
Photo: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The social media site introduced the "Subscribe" button to allow users to follow journalists, artists and others whom they had not "friended." Credit: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
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Facebook reportedly suspends share trading ahead of IPO
posted by Technology @ 2:09 PM
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Facebook Inc. has reportedly frozen the trading of its shares on secondary markets through Friday, a move that might be made in preparation for the company's expected initial public offering.
Buy and sell orders can be made, but the world's largest social network won't approve or reject any transaction Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, according to a reports from both Bloomberg News and the New York Times, which each cited unnamed sources.
Officials at Facebook were unavailable for comment on the reports Wednesday, but for months speculation has been rampant over just when the Palo Alto company would sell stock on public markets for the first time.
As we've reported before, Facebook's IPO, whenever it comes, could be as worth as much as $10 billion, which would place the social networking giant's market value at more than $100 billion.
The move to temporarily suspend trading might be taking place so Facebook can get a count on just how many shareholders it has among employees, investors and traders who picked up company stock on private secondary markets. Or the freeze may be attributable to Facebook preparing a pre-IPO prospectus of its financial information, Bloomberg said, noting that companies don't want secondary-market investors trading stock with the prospectus out before going public.
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Photo: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows off the Timeline view at the company's F8 developer conference in September in San Francisco. Credit: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
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Facebook’s Timeline will become mandatory soon
posted by Technology @ 4:47 PM
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Love it or hate it, Facebook's Timeline will be mandatory on your profile soon.
The social network said in a blog post Tuesday that it would roll out the feature — currently available on an opt-in basis — to all users "over the next few weeks."
You'll have seven days to preview your Timeline before it goes live, which "gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else sees it," the company said. When it's your turn to get Timeline, you'll see an announcement at the top of your home page.
Introduced late last year, Timeline has been touted by Facebook as an "entirely new kind of profile" that is more visual and comprehensive.
"Timeline gives you an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect your most important moments," the company said in a December blog post. "It also lets you share new experiences, like the music you listen to or the miles you run."
Among the most noticeable differences: Past activity is easily accessible via an archive panel on the right side of your screen, and in addition to your smaller profile photo you can choose another image that will be prominently featured across the top of your page.
So far, reviews for Timeline have been mixed, with critics saying they didn't like having all their previous activity dredged back up (you can remove it) or the scattered layout.
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– Andrea Chang
Image: Facebook's Timeline. Credit: Facebook
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Google plans to merge more user data across its products
posted by Technology @ 3:05 PM
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Google is alerting hundreds of millions of users of its products that it's changing the way it treats users' data, combining even more information it knows about them from all of its products, from Gmail to YouTube.
The Internet search giant is putting a notice on its home page and sending emails to users starting Tuesday. Google says the changes will give users a better, more consistent experience on Google products and will help advertisers better reach users who are interested in their products and services.
The changes to Google's privacy policy and terms of service take effect March 1. They remove legal hurdles Google had faced in combining information from certain properties such as YouTube or search history.
Google said the new privacy policy responds to demands from regulators around the globe that users have a simpler, more concise way to understand what Google does with their information. Right now users have to navigate a complex web of privacy policies and terms of service for different Google products.
Google says it's been combining information it gleans about users logged into Google for years to tailor search results and ads to their interests. Now it will be able to do that even more broadly. For example, if you search for skateboard tricks on Google and then hop over to YouTube, the video sharing site will recommend offerings from skateboard pro Tony Hawk.
Google says users can still control their information through the privacy dashboard and the Ads Preferences Manager.
Google says it's helping users. But it’s also clearly helping itself, said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com.
"This may cause more critics to complain that there is no escaping the clutches of Google," Sullivan said.
And it could throw more fuel on the already heated controversy over Google's recently launched Google Search plus Your World feature which combined information from Google+ into search results.
Under the leadership of Chief Executive Larry Page, Google has moved more aggressively to use its position as the dominant Internet company to promote its Google+ social network.
It's looking to slow the momentum of Facebook and to use personal data from Google+ and other Google products to improve search, maps and ads.
It’s a battle of the Web superpowers. Facebook, which is on the verge of an initial public offering that could raise $10 billion and value the Menlo Park, Calif., company at $100 billion, aims to own everyone’s online identity and already has a rich hoard of information about its users and deep insights into their connections and interests.
To counter Facebook's growing influence, Google is pouring massive resources into reengineering its approach to the Web and make it more social.
Like other major Internet players, it’s walking a fine line between respecting the privacy of users and mining as much information about them as possible.
Google has stumbled when it comes to privacy. Last year it reached a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that subjects the company to 20 years of privacy audits. It also has drawn heavy regulatory scrutiny in Europe.
Google recently launched a privacy campaign to educate consumers about how it uses their information and how to protect themselves on the Web.
Privacy advocate Ryan Calo, who was given a sneak peek at Google's new privacy policy, says it's unlikely users will read it. Privacy policies are required by law, but few people pay attention to them, even when they are like Google's latest one: short, concise and written in plain English, he said.
"Sounds like Google's overall practices won't be that different; it's more that Google is owning up to how it thinks and what it does," said Calo, who’s with Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society, which gets some funding from Google.
But he’s less sure if Google isn’t risking turning off some users with what he calls the "creepiness" factor.
For example, Google says someday it may be able to alert you based on your location, your calendar and local traffic conditions when you are going to be late for a meeting. According to Google: "Google users still have to do too much heavy lifting, and we want to do a better job of helping them."
Do users want Google to do that? It depends, Calo said.
"It's different if I am going to a business meeting or to a strip club,” he said.
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: A sign for Google is displayed behind the Google android robot, at the National Retail Federation, in New York on Jan. 17, 2012. Credit: Mark Lennihan/AP Photo
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Tweets deny that Anonymous will try to hack into Facebook
posted by Technology @ 2:45 PM
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Anonymous has lobbed many online attacks against high-profile websites, but so far the hacktivist group has never hacked into the world's largest social network, Facebook.
And, if you believe most Anonymous connected Twitter accounts, that won't be changing anytime soon — despite ongoing rumors and a YouTube video stating an Anonymous-backed Facebook strike is planned for Saturday.
The question of whether Anonymous will attack Facebook got started with that YouTube video, published Monday. The video, which can be seen above, states that the group is targeting the social network as a part of an online war in reaction to two controversial online anti-piracy bills known as SOPA and PIPA that were abandoned by several Washington politicians last week.
"Hello. People of the world. We are Anonymous," a computer generated voice-over says in the video. "The time has come. An online war has begun between Anonymous, the people, and the government of the United States. While SOPA and PIPA may be postponed from Congress, this does not guarantee that our internet rights will be upheld."
Later, the video states that "while it is true that Facebook has at least 60,000 servers, it is still possible to bring it down. Anonymous needs the help of the people, the people who want to take a stand against the government. The people who want to make a difference. This is what we must do."
On Monday, just a few hours after the video was published on YouTube, the @AnonOps Twitter account — which many believe to be an authentic Anonymous account — said there were no plans to hit Facebook.
"Again we must say that we will not attack #Facebook! Again the mass media lie," one tweet said.
Another tweet repeated the denial of the YouTube video, stating "AGAIN: 'Anonymous Threatens Facebook Shutdown Jan' IS A FAKE. RT PLEASE."
But while the attack may not be a legitimate Anonymous operation, and while it may never even take place, the group's lack of hacks against Facebook isn't for a lack of threats.
Rogue members of the collective, which has no publicly clear leadership structure, and possibly even impostors have threatened attacks against Facebook multiple times in the past. Notably, one such threat last August planned for Guy Fawkes Day on Nov. 5 never panned out.
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Image: A screenshot of a tweet from the @AnonOps account that denies the hacker group Anonymous will attack Facebook. Credit: Twitter
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SoundCloud hits 10 million users, launches Story Wheel web app
posted by Technology @ 9:46 PM
Monday, January 23, 2012
SoundCloud announced Monday that it has reached a milestone: more than 10 million users and 5 million downloads of the SoundCloud mobile app.
But what's probably more interesting to SoundCloud users is a new Instagram-compatible Web app called Story Wheel that the Berlin company launched Monday.
"It's a really big thing for us to have the community get to that point," Alex Ljung, SoundCloud's co-founder and chief executive, said in an interview. "It's just been a great last year for us. Everything has sort of ramped up faster and faster and recently we're signing up about a million users a month."
The audio-hosting and -streaming service, which we've said aspires to be the YouTube of audio, has grown largely by word of mouth, Ljung said.
"The SoundCloud community is really pushing it forward," he said. "We see now super clearly that sound is mobile with the number of sign-ups and usage growth on the mobile app side. We've also seen over the last year just how wide sound can be beyond music."
One example of that diversity is that there are more than 3.3 million tags that SoundCloud users identify their recordings with, Ljung said.
Another example of SoundCloud's "sound is more than music" ethos is the Story Wheel app, which is essentially an online version of a slide show with a projector sound effects, to re-create the feeling of sharing photos the old-school way with friends and family.
The app enables users to import in photos from the popular iPhone photo-sharing app Instagram and add recorded narration — hosted by SoundCloud — to go with the pictures.
On Monday, Ljung and SoundCloud co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Eric Wahlforss posted a Story Wheel of their own that offered up a bit of company history: Their first SoundCloud "office" was a Berlin coffee shop.
The app started last November in Boston as a project at Music Hack Day, which SoundCloud helps organize, then continued in the company's Berlin and San Francisco offices. The inspiration for Story Wheel came when SoundCloud engineers found themselves telling each other the stories behind the photos they posted to Instagram.
"We chose Instagram is because it's the service we use the most for our own photos," Ljung said. "We built Story Wheel because it's something we wanted to see and we thought it was something our users would like to see and use too. And we built the whole thing on the same API that we offer to our developers, who have made more than 10,000 apps on our platform."
About a year ago SoundCloud had about 2 million users, Ljung said, adding that he thinks third-party developers and the popularity of the company's mobile apps deserve as much credit for the growth to 10 million users as the word of mouth spread by users.
So where does SoundCloud go from here? Ljung said the 80-employee company is focused on continuing its growth and creating more things like Story Wheel that show users what they can do with the audio files they record and share on SoundCloud's website.
Aiding that effort is a recent round of venture funding and the addition of Mary Meeker, a renowned tech analyst and partner at the investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to SoundCloud's board as an observer.
Ljung, however, wasn't too interested in talking about Meeker or just how much money SoundCloud has raised.
"I think for us it's not such a big deal," he said. "It's just kind of like a background thing that helps the company grow. It's great to have good partners and have great apps built on our platform. But for us, the 10-million-user figure is really more interesting. Everything we do, we think about how it will affect our users because without the users, none of the other stuff is there."
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Image: A screen shot of SoundCloud's Story Wheel Web app. Credit: SoundCloud
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‘Don’t Be Evil’ tool alters new Google search results
posted by Technology @ 4:44 PM
Monday, January 23, 2012
When Google changed the rankings of its search results this month, items from its Google+ social network — such as photos, videos, comments and links — got a boost at the expense of other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter wasn't happy about the changes, which Google called Search Plus Your World, and made its dissatisfaction known. Privacy groups called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the changes.
But merely complaining about the new search results wasn't enough for a few engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. On Monday, the backlash against Search Plus Your World hit another level with the release of their Don't Be Evil bookmarklet, available on the new website Focus on the User.
The bookmarklet, which is a browser plug-in of code that alters Google search results to make them more like they were before Search Plus Your World, was built over the weekend by a small team that included Facebook's director of product, Blake Ross, and Facebook software engineers Tom Occhino and Marshall Roch.
The bookmarklet's Don't Be Evil name is a nod to Google's company mantra.
A statement posted on Focus on the User says:
When you search for "cooking" today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense," reads a statement on Focus on the User. "But rather than linking to Jamie's Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago. Is Google's relevance algorithm simply misguided?
No. If you search Google for Jamie Oliver directly, his Twitter profile is the first social result that appears. His abandoned Google+ profile doesn't even appear on the first page of results. When Google's engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right.
So that's what our "bookmarklet" does. It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+.
Google officials were unavailable for comment on the bookmarklet Monday afternoon.
Facebook's Ross, who is also one of the three co-founders of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser and was spreading the word about the bookmarklet on his Twitter and Facebook accounts, has had a run-in with Google+ before: In August, Ross' Google+ profile page was temporarily suspended. Google never commented on why that happened, but Ross has said it was because Google didn't think the page really belonged to him.
Along with the launch of the bookmarklet and the Focus on the User site, a video (which can be seen below) explaining how the bookmarklet works, narrated by Ross, was posted to YouTube.
The bookmarklet isn't an official product of Facebook, Twitter or Myspace, but nobody seems to be shying away from the connection to those companies.
Where will this beef go from here? That's up to the involved engineers and anyone else around the Web who wants to dig in and write some code.
"This proof of concept was built by some engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, in consultation with several other social networking companies," Focus on the User says. "We are open-sourcing the code so that anyone may use it or make it even better."
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Image: A screen shot of FocusOnTheUser.org.
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President Obama to answer questions in Google+ Hangout on Jan. 30
posted by Technology @ 11:17 AM
Monday, January 23, 2012
President Obama is back on social media like it's 2008 — when the Technology blog described him as "the first social media president."
The president has a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Google+ — both for his reelection bid and for official White House communications. You can even download a ringtone for your smartphone of Obama singing Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" from a recent New York campaign fundraiser.
Next up is the first Presidential Google+ Hangout.
Obama will take part in a hangout video chat with up to nine other Google+ users on Jan. 30.
The hangout will cap a week of White House officials' fielding questions across Facebook, Twitter and Google+ about the president's annual State of the Union speech, to be delivered Tuesday.
And while the focus of the conversation is likely to be on the State of the Union, anyone can submit a question on just about any topic to Obama this week on Google+ and YouTube, the White House and YouTube said in separate blog posts.
YouTube posted even published a video promoting the event Monday showing scenes of tea party, Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring protests, coverage of the death of Osama Bin Laden and the end of the Iraq War, as well as a brief voiceover from a gay Air Force lieutenant.
"If you could hang out with President Obama, what would you ask him? Would your question be about jobs or unemployment? The threat of nuclear weapons? Immigration reform? Whatever your question is, submit it on YouTube for the opportunity to ask the president directly in a special interview over a Google+ Hangout from the White House," YouTube said.
Of course, Obama won't answer all the questions submitted through the White House YouTube channel, but he will answer "several of the most popular questions" the White House said, and a small number of those who submit questions will be invited to join the president in the video chat.
RELATED:
Obama 2012 campaign heads to Tumblr
White House joins Google+ ahead of State of the Union speech
Obama 2012 campaign joins Instagram on eve of Iowa caucuses
– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Image: Screen shot of the White House on Google+. Credit: Google
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White House joins Google+ ahead of State of the Union speech
posted by Technology @ 5:34 PM
Sunday, January 22, 2012
The White House is now on Google+ and no, it's not technically a move to help President Obama get reelected — there is a separate Obama 2012 page for that.
So why is the Obama administration now on Google's social network? The State of the Union speech on Tuesday is at least one reason to join Google+.
The annual speech will be broadcast across major TV networks and an enhanced version will be streamed online to the White House's mobile apps and at whitehouse.gov/sotu, with "charts, stats and data that helped inform President Obama's policy decisions as he delivers his speech to the nation," the White House said.
After the speech, which starts at 6 p.m. Pacific time, White House officials will field questions throughout the week regarding the speech, the president's policies, and the direction in which the country and economy is headed. Those questions will be taken from Twitter, Facebook and (as of this week) Google+.
Down the road, the White House may use Google+ Hangouts, the social network's group video-chatting feature, to reach constituents.
"The President and First Lady often call the White House 'The People’s House.' Well, this is another way we're opening our doors (virtually) to citizens around the country," said Kori Schulman, the deputy director of outreach at the White House Office of Digital Strategy, in a blog post. "On our Google+ page, we'll host regular 'White House Hangouts' with administration officials on a range of issues and topics.
"Some Google+ users will be invited to join the Hangout with the White House and have a conversation with policy experts. But the best part is that even if you're not 'in' the Hangout, you can watch the whole thing live on WhiteHouse.gov, on our Google+ page or on the White House YouTube channel."
The White House currently has no Google+ Hangouts planned.
Although the White House's Google+ page isn't an official campaign tool, there is no doubt that the Obama administration and his reelection campaign staff are looking to use every tool possible to reach voters this year.
After all, the president's use of social media in his winning of the 2008 election is often cited as one of the reasons he was able to build up support among voters. The Technology blog even described Obama as "the first social media president."
One other reason the White House might want to be on Google+ — Republican rivals looking to knock Obama out of office are there too.
RELATED:
President Obama's 2012 campaign joins Google+
Facebook to launch its own political action committee
Obama 2012 campaign joins Instagram on eve of Iowa caucuses
– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Image: A screen shot of the White House page on Google+. Credit: Google
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How Your Business Can Get an A+ on Google+
posted by Michael Garrity @ 2:30 PM
Friday, January 20, 2012
Google's social network hasn’t provided Facebook with the competition that
many thought it would when Google+ was first announced, but its importance as a social media
avenue towards Web success cannot be denied. Fortunately, some best practices have begun to emerge in recent months.
Below are some of the strategies that may give your Web enterprise an advantage over the competition when utilizing Google+, which should be a priority for any online company that is not yet doing so.
Circles
Perhaps the biggest difference between Google+ and competing social networks is the Circles feature, and the most successful brands have been
able to optimize the management of their Circles. The purpose of Circles is to organize contacts
into helpful groups based on different characteristics, and by segmenting a company's contacts into Circles, that business is able to manage who sees what messages. This provides one way to establish trust and loyalty with
users, and you will most likely find
them more involved with your content and engaging with your company's G+ page more often as a result.
Segmentation can be
done by location, interest, relation to your business or any number of other criteria. The important thing is to make sure that you manage your circles in such a way
that content will be relevant to one or more
of these groups.
Connections
Social media is an important part of every business' Web presence in 2012, but the ultimate goal is to get users back onto your company's website. This is especially important if you’re
connecting with users on Google+ because the site doesn’t yet allow
vanity URLs, making certain sites difficult to find through this channel if
the user is not yet familiar with a company.
Google+ does provide a simple set of codes and
buttons so that users can link to your site through G+, and you can easily access this
information by going to the “Get Started” option beneath your company's name and/or avatar on
the Google+ home page.
Links
One underrated feature of Google+ is the
ability to add links to your “About” page and that they are highly customizable. Business owners can add links by clicking the “Edit Profile” option and going to the "About" tab.
When
you add a link to the “Recommended Links” option, you will be able to also include a title that tells the user
where they will be directed. You can use this space to send users to your other
social media profiles, your primary website or other relevant sites that they
may find useful, and you can tag these links however you’d like.
Scrapbooks
The only design elements that companies control over their
brand pages on Google+ are profile pictures and the five Scrapbook Photos at the top of the page. This allows brands to express their creativity, share a little about the company and, most importantly, build an online identity.
Some good examples of companies that take full advantage of
this feature are Starbucks, BMW, Pepsi and Google’s own Android.
Engagement
The
most important thing a business can do with any social media campaign is to provide
meaningful information to users by inviting interaction. This means posting engaging content
that will both interest and inform users while creating a sense of trust and familiarity
with the brand or company. Website owners should also be interacting with users and
responding to their comments, good and bad.
Another way to invite engagement is by establishing a voice as an expert in a particular industry. Share your own content and other valuable information via links, photos and videos on Google+. With Circles, website owners can create a “Suggested”
group of important people and companies around their industries to share with
users. Whether these methods garner attention from colleagues or customers, they will likely provide business owners with insightful feedback and
information.
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Bloggers in China sound off on SOPA blackout
posted by Technology @ 2:44 AM
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Watching from China, where Web censorship is practically a national hallmark, some can't help but smirk and crack jokes about the controversy raging over Internet freedom in the U.S.
"Now the U.S. government is copying us and starting to build their own firewall," wrote one micro-blogger, relating China's chief censorship tool to the U.S. plan to block sites that trade in pirated material.
The Relevant Organs, an anonymous Twitter account (presumably) pretending to be the voice of the Chinese communist leadership, quipped: "Don't understand the hoopla over Wikipedia blackout in the U.S. today. We blacked it out here years ago. Where are OUR hugs?"
PHOTO: Sites gone dark to protest anti-piracy bills
Humor aside, the brouhaha has generated some strong opinions in the country that Google fled, not the least because opponents of the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills are conjuring Chinese Web censorship to promote their case.
The consensus here, however, appears to be this: Americans should try a minute in our shoes before invoking online Armageddon.
If anything, Chinese bloggers say, the debate underscores how privileged U.S. Web users and Internet companies are, even in times of duress.
"Only an American company could protest the way Wikipedia or Google has to the government," said Zhao Jing, a closely followed blogger in Beijing who uses the pen name Michael Anti. "A Chinese company would never get away with that."
Indeed, China's Internet sector has no choice but to submit to government pressure -– be it by censoring its own users or implementing whatever happens to be the state initiative of the moment (the latest may require the real-ID registration of 250 million micro-blog accounts despite threats to privacy and the cost burden on Web firms).
Another distinction Chinese activists note is that the proposed legislation in Washington is being debated openly in public and ultimately has to adhere to U.S. law. Chinese censorship, on the other hand, operates in an opaque space where no one really knows what's banned, what isn't and who is calling the shots.
"It's hard for people in the U.S. to understand Internet censorship in China," said Wen Yunchao, a prominent blogger and outspoken government critic who left mainland China recently for Hong Kong. "In China, all the government decisions are done in a dark box. No one knows what's going on. There's never any legal reason cited. If these laws are passed in the U.S., every step of the way it will be more transparent. People can challenge it. There's no comparison when it comes to censorship in China and in the U.S."
Still, Wen supports U.S. activists challenging the bills, saying it's a slippery slope to lesser Web access. He said China's so-called Great Firewall, which blocks access to many foreign sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, was first billed as a strategy to stop piracy and pornography.
"Now it's being abused and extended to thousands of websites," he said.
Ironically, China's 513 million Web users have relatively free access when it comes to the very sites targeted by the proposed Protect Intellectual Property Act and Stop Online Piracy Act. Those include BitTorrent sites such as Extratorrent and sellers of counterfeit goods such as Taobao.
"The Chinese Great Firewall is not targeting pirated material," said Beijing-based Jason Ng, another popular blogger who has 29,000 Twitter followers. "Look at the Chinese Internet space and it's all about pirated movies, TV and porn. Everyone just wants to enjoy and be entertained. If the government cut all that off, they'd have a serious problem on their hands."
RELATED:
Number of Web users in China hits 513 million
SOPA blackout: How many have joined the fight?
Google says 4.5 million people signed anti-SOPA petition today
– David Pierson
twitter.com/dhpierson
Photo: A Google search page awaits input from a user at an Internet cafe in Beijing. Credit: Alexander F. Yuan / Associated Press
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Managing Multiple Brands in Social Media
posted by Peter A. Prestipino @ 9:30 AM
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Those responsible for managing multiple brands on the social Web understand how cumbersome the process can be – log in, log out, and repeat.
While there are a handful of tools/platforms on the market with such a capability designed for the enterprise-level user, we at Website Magazine are always on the lookout for a better way. One such vendor that caught our attention today is social media management and analytics vendor Statf.ly, which just announced the addition of such a multi-profile management feature.
The multi-profile dashboards are appropriate for those managing multiple brands, namely agencies and those companies (or perhaps even individuals) promoting multiple profiles. The platform enables brand managers to monitor keywords and conversations on Twitter/Facebook, perform live searches on those social networks, and measure the results of interactions. The service now also offers unlimited report generation (with data point annotation) and social data storage for up to one year.
“We added quick-switch multi-profile management and unlimited analytics reporting to Statf.ly Pro to meet the growing demands of time-strapped agencies and brand managers overseeing content distribution and communications for multiple social client profiles,” says Statf.ly CEO, Bryan Crick. “Statf.ly will continue to grow its suite of management and analytics features with a usability-first philosophy that is both economical and efficient.”
The statf.ly platform looks pretty sparse on the whole (see a statf.ly campaign dashboard below). There are far more robust solutions on the market but perhaps its worthy of a closer look if you are managing multiple social profiles.
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Foursquare wants its users to explore.
The location-based company launched an “explore” feature for smartphones last March, and the feature has now migrated to desktops, which allows users to discover new places based on other users’ recommendations and check-ins.
The Explore option can be thought of as Foursquare’s first go-round at social search.
“Most real-world searches are one-size fits all. You search for pizza, and it gives you the same list of pizza places, whether you like deep dish or thin crust, whether you want a slice or a sit-down meal, or whether your friends would love it or hate it,” says the company’s blog. “But not with Foursquare Explore, because you and your friends’ check-ins (along with the 1,500,000,000 more from the foursquare community) help us personalize our recommendations for you. Every time you check in, we get better at finding places you’ll like.”
This social search option is personalized and specific. For example, if someone types in “thin crust” they won’t just get results for pizza places, but instead specific results will appear for restaurants with thin crust pizza. Additionally, users can type in adjectives such as "fun" or "romantic", to find spots to their liking. Users can also specify certain options when typing in a keyword, which filters places that the user hasn’t been to, has been to, their friends have been to, or places that have Foursquare specials.
The service is powered by 1,500,000,000 check-ins, tens of millions of Tips and over a half million lists. The service should prove to be especially useful to local businesses, since all of the searches are tailored to local results – unless specified for a different city.
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Privacy watchdog urges investigation of Google search feature
posted by Technology @ 8:01 PM
Thursday, January 12, 2012
An influential Washington privacy group is urging government regulators to probe a new search feature from Google, saying it invades the privacy of users and shuts out competitors.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday over the new feature called Search plus Your World. The feature started getting attention this week as it rolled out to users who began to see personal photos and updates from the Google+ social network show up in their search results.
Twitter, a competitor to Google+, complained that its content was being pushed down in search rankings.
EPIC’s executive director, Marc Rotenberg, says Google is using its dominance in Internet search to promote its own products at the expense of its rivals. He also said the new feature violates the privacy settlement that Google reached last year with the FTC over its defunct social network Buzz.
"We believe this is something that the FTC needs to look at," Rotenberg told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for the FTC declined to comment.
Google says it’s trying to make its search engine more useful by highlighting personal information from its social network. Google rolled out Google+ six months ago as Facebook and Twitter increased in popularity.
"For years we’ve been working on social search features to help you find the most relevant information from your social connections no matter what site it's on," a Google spokesman said. "Search plus Your World doesn't change who has access to content, it simply helps people rediscover information they already have access to. We've taken special care with our new features to provide robust security protections, transparency and control for our users."
The new feature mostly affects the up to 1 in 4 people who are logged in to Google or Google+ while searching the Web. Those users now have the option of seeing search results that are customized to their interests and connections. If they search for a vacation spot such as Mexico or Hawaii, they may see photos from previous trips or posts from friends.
Google has been working a long time to create a search engine that delivers results tailored to its users. It's also trying to catch up to social networking giant Facebook, which, with more than 800 million users, knows its users far better than Google does.
Google was already facing broad scrutiny of its search and advertising businesses in Washington and Brussels. Critics allege that Google exploits its dominant position in search to promote its own services.
The Federal Trade Commission, attorneys general in six states and the European Commission are looking into complaints. Google handles about two-thirds of Web searches in the U.S. and more than 80% in much of Europe.
Google also faces rising scrutiny on privacy matters. In April, it agreed to submit to 20 years of privacy audits as part of the privacy settlement with the FTC.
In an interview this week, Google Fellow Amit Singhal said Google has taken significant steps to make its new feature private and secure. He also said Google was open to including information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
"However," he said, "it has to be done in a way that the user experience doesn't deteriorate over time and that users are in control over what they see from whom and not some third party."
But Google is facing uncomfortable questions about whether it's looking out for its users or itself, said Danny Sullivan, editor of the website Search Engine Land, who has been tracking Google since the 1990s.
Facebook, which generated billions of dollars in revenue last year and is weeks away from filing plans for a $100-billion initial public offering, poses the biggest threat to Google's online advertising business.
Facebook formed an alliance with Microsoft's Bing, a rival to Google, which has been showing information mined from Facebook in its search engine’s results since May.
Facebook declined to comment.
Washington antitrust lawyer David Balto said Google has little to worry about because EPIC does not have a case.
"You would need a super-powered microscope to be able to find any significant competition or privacy concerns from Google's conduct," Balto said.
Users are split on whether they want their search engine to deliver results customized to them.
Dave Mora, 31, an analyst for a Los Angeles entertainment company, said he now gets more relevant search results and consequently is using more Google services.
"Your experience is even that much richer," he said. "How many times have you asked a friend that knows about computers a tech question, you car enthusiasts friend a car question, or even that doctor friend a medical question? It is the same idea, just presented differently.”
But Melissa Cleaver, a 35-year-old blogger from Houston, said that she would turn off the feature and that she's getting increasingly wary of how powerful Google has become on the Web.
"It just seems to me that Google is pulling out all the stops to force you to use Google+," said Cleaver, who has 40% of her investment portfolio in Google stock. "I don't think Facebook or Twitter have anything to worry about. Just another reason that Mark Zuckerberg can sleep soundly tonight."
RELATED:
Google likely to face FTC complaint over 'Search Plus Your World'
New Google feature adds a personal touch to search results
Twitter blasts prominence of Google+ content in search results
– Jessica Guynn
Photo: Google office in Brussels. Credit: Virginia Mayo / Associated Press
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Pinterest for Businesses – Beginner’s Guide to Next Big Social Thing
posted by Helga Weber @ 12:46 AM
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Interest in Pinterest
Pinterest is a well-turned combination of “pin” and “interest” meaning web service that allows to post, manage and share inspiring pics and videos online. Pinterest has quickly started enjoying great popularity, involving more than 1 million users in summer and exceeding 4 million members to date. Of course we all as web professionals not only care about how to find new awesome stuff there, but also how to show our own awesome products or services to new audiences on Pinterest. That’s what we’ll try to figure out today.
But first let’s dig into how this whole thing works. Here’s how. You find interesting stuff, place it to the pages and topic boards and share them with other site users. It’s much like other social networks, still hiding a few nuances which make it quite a powerful marketing tool on the net. Most “pinned” content are photography and digital design but there’s also an option to share video content. The pics themselves are not the main focus of interest – the point is the ability to arrange links to various exterior pages and connect with people sharing your interests and hobbies. You may also follow the updates of other users boards if their taste is authoritative for you. Now here is where you should be careful – officially Pinterest is not for business needs, it’s for personal use only. But that doesn’t necessarily means that you can’t use it for your business, it just means you have to be more careful than you would be on Facebook or Twitter for example.
Back to your new Pinterest account. The initial and only inconvenience is that you can’t access Pinterest immediately, but need to get an invitation first. You can request an invite on the site itself and wait for an invitation request coming in a week or so to your email. Another way is getting an invite from other active pinners you are familiar with.
Quick Pinterest Usage Guide
No matter whether it’s a business or a personality that you want to create the Pinterest account for, you still want to create an account for a person. Reveal your personality by filling out the biography field right under the profile pic. This shows you are active and lures more interested pinners. Creating topical boards for images is as easy as putting two and two together. Place your so-called “pins” on your edited boards and enjoy sharing! The “Pin It” Button is represented by an ordinary extension of your browser with a drag-and-drop function. You can pin everything you like, seek or trade: cute pets and astonishing landscapes, luxury autos and accessories, home decor and clothing, tutorials and video lessons. You may even allow other pinners to publish your content on their own boards. You may find the boards devoted to separate rooms with decor ideas for each one, photos of pets of their owners or plants they grow. Cooks make another active category of Pinterest fans – they keep and share their recipes online. But the major audience is represented by artists in search of inspiration and fresh ideas.
You can follow the updates of other Pinterest users and re-pin their posts. If you can’t help searching for other crazy pinners, use the «Everything” menu, and choose Boards by category. What else can be done with a pin? It can be commented, liked or re-pinned onto your personal board. Besides, pins can be tweeted and shared on Facebook. Being an open network like Twitter it allows to follow nutty boards and pinners without any special permission.
You may check the most discussed and popular images by clicking the “Popular” button in the menu. You are to include @mention into the pic description for sharing material with another user, and pinner will receive a message about having been referred. Due to the “pin-it” option in the bookmarklet you don’t have to be logged in and stay on page to pin something.
Use the “Videos” button on top in case you need to pin and share some video material. The range of videos on Pinterest is impressive: starting from video tutorials, lessons and presentations and ending with movie trailers.
Pinning Marketing Tips
This service is geared at specific groups of products and services like fashion, decor, model business, photography, architecture, interior design, landscape design, website design etc. The content posted for these areas is leading. And surely, the pin should be awesome. A stunning pic will win much attention and get thousands of pins. So our the major suggestion for businesses starting their Pinterest activity is to post images related to the product or service they deliver (not the images of products themselves, this would look too obtrusive). For example, AMD (the micro chips manufacturer) maintains boards featuring the life of techie people and gadgets – that’s pretty much related to the product they sell, so the proper audience will hang around these boards for sure.
Need a special gift? Enter the Gifts section and look for the priced items. The process is quick and easy: click on the pin and go to the store where you may buy it. Gift pins are even sorted by price which makes the section even more convenient. When you like something, you just pin it to your board and get a convenient wish-list contenting your desire of ownership. If you represent the store, encourage other pinners to move to the next step and actually buy your products. Pins take you back to the original web page, which eases the process of marketing and website promotion.
Just like in other social networks you can easily add descriptions and tags to the images. This makes them easier to be found by other users. The marketing essence of the whole “pin factory” is the external links you place for the pics you pin. What’s so important for businesses and websites promotion: when you pin graphics from a website directly and click on this pic on Pinterest board, you’ll find out that it is still linked to the original page. These links work the same way even if images have been re-pinned.
As for the potential customers, the service is more geared at female rather than the male part of Internet audience. The majority of pins represent home decor, fashion, make-up, vintage, crafting, clothing and kitchen ideas and so on. This makes it similar to various creative Tumblogs aimed at inspiring readers. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you fail in reaching interested men there. Generally, it depends upon the business itself – photography, household, architecture, design and art, sportswear, fishing, football and other areas lure both men and women.
Pinterest better suits for small companies promotion. But cramming your boards with your own goods is a bad strategy. You should act as an individual with his/her own taste, contributing helpful and exciting stuff to win trust and friendly feelings of your potential followers. One way is offering imagery that is inspiring for other pinners and still reveal your brand/business. The other way is getting more followers, socialize, link and connect to users with the similar tastes or preferences. Self-promotion shouldn’t be so evident – use creative thinking and interact! The major aspect of your marketing work in Pinterest is getting more clicks from the back links associated with every pinned image or video. This helps to boost your SEO and brand awareness in general.
You may even hire a special pinner to promote your goods through Pinterest boards, representing your brand face, thoughts, style and other business peculiarities. You may not refer to the brand in the image name, but remember to include the links to your original website. We’d like to warn you to be careful while commenting, since all comments are public and you just can’t hide them.
Group pinning is one more useful option you may enjoy on Pinterest. It may enhance promotion of your brand, its special offers and deals, if you pin it all to any topic-related community fan board. If the pin is something you’d like to purchase, you may include the price into its description.
Following the updates and boards of your target audience on Pinterest will help you track trends of current interest and predict your customers desires. Offer the goods they visualize and make their dreams come true!
P.S. Check the video revealing how Pinterest Will Compete with Top 10 Social Networks
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You can find an app store on just about any platform now-a-days, and LinkedIn is no exception.
LinkedIn Applications are designed to enrich a user’s profile, but for those of you that haven’t rummaged through the networking site’s apps, here are a few that have caught our attention:
Show off your blog content! This app syncs WordPress blog posts with LinkedIn profiles. Additionally, blog posts can be filtered with a LinkedIn tag, in order to make sure content is relevant to the LinkedIn’s professional community.
Share presentations and documents within the LinkedIn network. This app allows users to upload content such as portfolios, resumes, conference talks, PDFs, marketing and sales presentations. The app supports many different formats and allows YouTube videos and audio to be embedded into presentations. It is available and can sync with both LinkedIn and Facebook social networks.
This is a great app for resume building. It allows users to showcase creative work by uploading their portfolio to the Behance Network, which is a free online platform for creative professionals. Then, users can create an unlimited number of multimedia projects and select which ones are displayed on their profile.
The Google Presentation app allows users to showcase presentations directly on LinkedIn profiles. Users can either upload a Powerpoint file or use Google’s free online application to create a presentation. The app presents a great avenue for visually displaying professional accomplishments.
Find out what your peers have been reading. This app allows LinkedIn users to share their favorite books with each other. Once the app is installed, users can add books that they are currently reading, planning to read and have already read.
Huddle Worspaces enables different workspaces to be created for different groups of connections. By separating connections, LinkedIn users can choose to share specific content with specific people. This app is great for teams that are working together to exchange documents and ideas.
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By now, most business owners realize the important role that social media plays within their business plan. But new research suggests that business owners should enable social to play an even bigger role, by becoming the login option for customers on a website.
Ninety percent of consumers will leave a website if they forget their user name and password according to Janrain’s Social Identity study, which was conducted by Blue Research. Additionally, 86 percent of people are bothered by the need to create new accounts when registering on a website, with 54 percent deciding to either leave the site or not return.
The problem with the traditional registration process is that it requires visitors to create new usernames and passwords, and consumers are getting frustrated with remembering many different identities.
The study reveals that 77 percent of respondents claim social login is a good solution that should be offered. Furthermore, social login can help a business through word of mouth marketing. Other findings reveal that 78 percent of social login fans have posted a message to their social networks about a product or service that they liked and thought others should know about or purchase, and 83 percent of consumers say that they are influenced to consider buying new products or services based on positive comments or messages from people in their social network.
“The findings of the survey show that social login continues to dramatically increase in favor among consumers as they realize the benefits of using an existing identity in order to bypass the traditional online registration process,” says Paul Abel, Ph.D., Managing Partner, Blue Research. ”Failing to offer social login is a missed opportunity for businesses to improve ROI of online properties, as fans of the service are more likely to register on the site, influence their friends through social networks and more likely to return to a site that offers them a personalized experience.”
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Twitter blasts prominence of Google+ content in search results
posted by Technology @ 4:09 PM
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Twitter came out swinging after Google said Tuesday it would display content from Google+ more prominently in search results than content from rival social networks.
"As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results," Twitter spokesman Matt Graves said in a statement. "We're concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users."
Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray, who used to work at Google, on — where else? — Twitter called the launch of the new search feature a "bad day for the Internet." He commented that search was "being warped."
Google responded on Google+: "We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer, and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions."
Google's new feature enables users to search for "personal results" that include posts, comments and photos from Google+ and photos from Picasa. But it will not promote results from rivals Facebook or Twitter.
Facebook declined to comment.
Google, which handles about two out of three Web searches in the U.S., is already under antitrust scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission. And lawmakers have questioned whether Google uses its dominant position in search to promote its own services at the expense of competitors and consumers.
Google and Twitter have history. Twitter gets traffic from Google, and Google used to pay Twitter for access to its "firehose" of tweets. It no longer does (although Microsoft's Bing still does). Google can still show tweets in search results because most of the 250 million of them a day are public.
Google has also tangled with Facebook, which does not let Google crawl its site. Facebook poses the biggest threat to Google in the battle for eyeballs and ad dollars. It's on the verge of a $100-billion initial public offering more highly anticipated than any tech offering since Google in 2004.
John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, took to Twitter to express his dismay.
“We are becoming helpless collateral casualties in the war between Google and Facebook,” Barlow wrote.
RELATED:
Heads are turning to Internet's golden child
Google making another attempt at social networking
Google gets personal, searches your world, not just the Web
– Jessica Guynn
Image: Screenshot of Google's new personalized search results. Credit: Google
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Social Media Workflows Come to Sendible
posted by Peter A. Prestipino @ 2:00 PM
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Social media dashboard Sendible, one of Website Magazine’s Top 50 software solutions and a platform used by companies the likes of BBC and Zynga, has announced new features which aim to facilitate collaboration between clients and team members before content is published to blogs and social media sites.
The new features include an ability to assign specific tasks to team members, approve or reject content before it gets published, as well as create and manage content approval workflows. Perhaps Sendible’s most popular feature however is its social media monitoring tools which allow users to track what is being said on social networks, analyze sentiment and respond. Users can now prioritize and assign mentions to specific team members, ensuring that the best person responds to the item.
Sendible has traditionally focused on the SMB market (plans start at $9.99/mo), but the new features position the social media management tool very well to attract more corporate customers – those with larger team and more complex workflows. Sendible also offers a white label version for agencies interesting in offering a social media management tool to clients using their own branding.
Below is a screenshot of dashboard showing how team members are assigned social media mentions.
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What is the most popular content category on the Web? Social networking of course.
Social networking sites now reach 82 percent of the world’s online population, which represents 1.2 billion users according to a recent study from ComScore.
In fact, social networking accounted for 19 percent of all time spent online in October – which is almost 1 out of every 5 minutes. This is a steady incline from 2007, when social networking only accounted for 6 percent of time spent online.
The most popular social site, Facebook, now reaches more than half of the world's population, and accounts for about 3 in every 4 minutes spent on social networking sites and 1 in every 7 minutes spent online around the world.
However microblogging has also gained momentum in the social space. Twitter grew 59 percent over the past year, and now reaches 1 in 10 Internet users across the world. But other microblogging services are also gaining traction, such as Tumblr and Sina Weibo. Sina Weibo is the leading Chinese microblogging site, and is ranked as the tenth social network globally, while Tumblr ranks twelfth globally and has recently seen a growth rate of 172 percent.
So aside from being everyone’s favorite past time, what is driving the popularity of social media? The answer could be mobile devices, which allow users to update statuses on the go, check-in with location-based services, redeem coupons or deals and more. According to the ComScore report, 32 percent of the total U.S. mobile population reported accessing social networking sites on their phone in the month of October, while 24 percent of the mobile population from the five leading European markets also claimed to have engaged with a social network via their mobile devices.
And although people use social networking for many different reasons, it continues to be an affordable and effective marketing avenue for businesses, especially since it reaches such a large audience.
A noteworthy statistic from the study reveals that social networking leads all content categories in the number of display ads delivered. In October, 28 percent of U.S. display ad impressions came from social media, and 5 percent of all ad impressions viewed in the U.S were socially enabled. Facebook is currently the largest publisher of U.S. display ad impressions, delivering 28 percent of display ad impressions in the third quarter of 2011 – which is more than the other four major portals combined.
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SoundCloud reportedly raises $50 million and adds board member
posted by Technology @ 7:56 PM
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
As we've reported, SoundCloud is a company that wants to become the YouTube of audio, and on Tuesday it announced two moves that may help make that happen.
First off, SoundCloud has closed a major funding round. How much? The Berlin company, with an office in San Francisco, isn't saying, but TechCrunch Europe has reported that it may be as much as $50 million.
The new funding round, led by the investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with GGV Capital also contributing, will go toward allowing the site to "expand more rapidly," SoundCloud said in a statement. In June, SoundCloud said that it had more than 5 million users.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is well-known in the tech industry for investing in Google, Amazon, Zynga and other high-profile companies.
Secondly, Mary Meeker, a renowned tech analyst and partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is joining SoundCloud's board of directors.
Meeker also sits on the board at mobile payment startup Square and is "actively involved" in the firm's investments in Groupon, Legalzoom, Waze, 360buy.com, Spotify, Jawbone, One King's Lane and Trendyol, SoundCloud said.
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Image: A screen shot of Nathan Olivarez-Giles' SoundCloud page. Credit: SoundCloud
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Status update: Facebook breaking up a third of UK marriages
posted by Technology @ 12:21 PM
Friday, December 30, 2011
This post has been corrected. See note below for details.
So much for marital bliss. In Great Britain it's all about the Facebook dis.
Apparently, there's no such thing as a no-fault divorce across the pond. Facebook is taking the blame for breaking up a third of marriages in which "unreasonable behavior" was a factor.
The popular social networking site is getting an unfriendly rap because it's a major way that spouses uncover incriminating messages and photos.
According to Divorce-Online, a third of 5,000 petitions in the past year mentioned Facebook. More than 30 million people in the UK — about half the population — log into Facebook each month.
"People contact ex-partners and the messages start as innocent, but lead to trouble," divorce lawyer Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, told the Daily Mail. "If someone wants to have an affair or flirt with the opposite sex then it's the easiest place to do it."
The law firm said it has noted a 50% jump in the number of petitions that cite Facebook over the last two years.
Facebook is also becoming less and less social as warring exes use it as a "War of the Roses" battleground to air their differences from picking up the kids to paying child support. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner would be proud.
This is not a big surprise in the United States where Facebook is the new "lipstick on the collar" and infidelity uncovered in the form of "Facebook bombs" has been known to torpedo relationships. One dating coach speculates that Facebook is "the source of all future infidelity." There is even a website dedicated to "Facebook cheating."
[For the record, 4:30 p.m., Dec. 30, 2011: An earlier version of this post said that Facebook was a factor in one-third of U.K. divorces; it should have said that Facebook was cited in one-third of U.K. divorces in which "unreasonable behavior" was a factor.]
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images
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Google, Facebook, YouTube are most visited websites in 2011
posted by Technology @ 8:00 PM
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Google, Facebook and YouTube racked up the most unique visitors among U.S. websites in 2011, according to new data from the research group Nielsen.
Not necessarily the most surprising news is it? What may be a bit more interesting is that, despite its rapid growth, Google+ was on average visited by fewer users than Myspace this year, according to Nielsen. Google+ was released in beta in July and opened to the public in September.
The Nielsen data also doesn't cover the entire year, only January to October.
According to Nielsen, the top 10 U.S. social networks and blogs, by page views, in 2011 were:
1. Facebook — 137.6 million average page views per month
2. Blogger — 45.5 million average page views per month
3. Twitter.com — 23.6 million average page views per month
4. WordPress.com — 20.4 million average page views per month
5. Myspace.com — 17.9 million average page views per month
6. LinkedIn — 17 million average page views per month
7. Tumblr — 10.9 million average page views per month
8. Google+ — 8.2 million average page views per month
9. Yahoo! Pulse — 8 million average page views per month
10. Six Apart/TypePad — 7 million average page views per month
Nielsen also reported that the 10 most visited overall U.S. Web brands in 2011 were:
1. Google — 153.4 million average page views per month
2. Facebook — 137.6 million average page views per month
3. Yahoo! — 130.1 million average page views per month
4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing – 115.9 million average page views per month
5. YouTube — 106.7 million average page views per month
6. Microsoft — 83.8 million average page views per month
7. AOL Media Network — 74.6 million average page views per month
8. Wikipedia — 62 million average page views per month
9. Apple — 61.6 million average page views per month
10. Ask Search Network — 60.5 million average page views per month
And finally, the top 10 U.S. Web brands for video, according to Nielsen's data:
1. YouTube — 111.1 million average page views per month
2. Vevo — 34.6 million average page views per month
3. Facebook — 29.8 million average page views per month
4. Yahoo! — 25.3 million average page views per month
5. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing — 16.6 million average page views per month
6. AOL Media Network — 13.3 million average page views per month
7. Hulu — 13.1 million average page views per month
8. The CollegeHumor Network — 12.5 million average page views per month
9. CNN Digital Network — 8.3 million average page views per month
10. Netflix — 7.4 million average page views per month
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Image: A screen shot of plus.google.com. Credit: Google
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Report: Investment banks compete for lead role in Facebook IPO
posted by Technology @ 4:44 PM
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Top Wall Street investment banks are competing to be the lead bankers for Facebook's blockbuster initial public offering, which could come in early 2012.
That's according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, which also says that the Menlo Park, Calif., company held a new round of meetings with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley after Thanksgiving.
The paper reported last week that Facebook would take the stock public in the second quarter of 2012. The IPO could peg the worth of Facebook at $100 billion or more and could generate as much as $10 billion. That would give bankers a 2.2% cut, or as much as $220 million. But Facebook may negotiate lower fees.
Goldman Sachs mishandled a private placement deal earlier this year and had to limit the offering to investors outside of the U.S. Morgan Stanley recently was the lead banker in the Zynga IPO, but its shares have mostly traded below the offering price.
Representatives for Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Facebook declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal. "As is our typical practice, we just don't get into speculation about an IPO," a Facebook spokesman told me.
The Facebook IPO is widely anticipated. Facebook board member Peter Thiel said last year that Facebook would consider going public in 2012.
"It's a consumer-facing company, which makes it very interesting to people. People can relate to it," Thiel told the Los Angeles Times in an interview last year. "It's somewhat of a unique thing. There is a lot of intensity surrounding it."
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at an event in November 2010 in San Francisco. Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
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MySpace’s Tom Anderson weighs in on censored pics on Google+
posted by Technology @ 3:36 PM
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Call it the tempest in Google+.
Former TechCrunch writer and current blogger/venture capitalist MG Siegler stirred things up this week by complaining that Google's politically correct overlords had censored his profile picture because in it — not sure how to put this delicately — he was giving the world the finger.
SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan explained Google's rationale (in a post on Google+): "Why's Google care so much if +MG Siegler wants a middle finger in his Google+ profile picture? Because in turn, that has him giving the finger in Google's search results. And that mess is kind of Google's own doing on how it has linked author pictures so much to Google+ profiles."
Now in a blast from the past, Tom Anderson has taken to Google+ to pounce on the debate. As the co-founder of Myspace, the guy who was everyone's automatic friend on the service, he has a lot to say including this: MySpace became a "cesspool" because people put up all kinds of potentially offensive content.
"All Google+ has done here is execute on its stated plan: removing offensive photos. This is Facebook’s plan, Twitter's plan and Myspace's before it. When you’re processing hundreds of thousands of photos a day (and in Facebook’s case, millions a day), it’s not easy to spot such material (even with algorithms). It’s not that Google+ has decided to do things differently, it’s just that they’re ahead of the game and doing things better," Anderson wrote.
Further, Anderson says users of Google+ (and presumably Google) "don't need to see you flipping us off, nor do we need to see you naked, or displaying something else generally considered offensive. When a social network lets that stuff slide, it turns into a cesspool that no one wants to visit … sorta like Myspace was."
In a Twitter post, Siegler responds: "As much as I enjoy #fingergate I do have this other job I'm attempting to do…"
The real beneficiary may be Google+ itself which, if you believe predictions from the armchair statisticians out there, is starting to get some real traction.
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: Surfboards decorate the main lobby at one of Google's offices in Santa Monica in 2007. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times
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Google+ may reach 400 million users by end of 2012
posted by Technology @ 8:55 PM
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
It's a guessing game but only Google has the real answers: How many users does its Google+ social networking service have? And how actively are they using it?
The Internet search giant is adding 625,000 new users a day to the service and will finish 2012 with 400 million, said Paul B. Allen, founder of Ancestry.com.
Allen, who calls himself Google+'s unofficial statistician, has been estimating the number of users on the service that seeks to challenge Facebook, which has more than 800 million and is preparing for an initial public offering next year that could raise as much as $100 billion. Google, which is stepping up its game in the social arena with Larry Page at the helm, said in October that it had 40 million users.
"It may be the holidays, the TV commercials, the Android 4 sign-ups, celebrity and brand appeal, or positive word of mouth, or a combination of all these factors, but there is no question that the number of new users signing up for Google+ each day has accelerated markedly in the past several weeks," wrote Allen, founder and CEO of FamilyLink.com, a company he helped start in 2006 with other Ancestry.com alumni.
But Allen is not measuring active users, which is what Facebook measures. He's just measuring total users. The real question, as TechCrunch's Eric Eldon points out, is how many people are hanging out on Google+ after creating accounts.
Last week, ComScore reported that Google+ had grown to 67 million monthly unique visitors in November, up 2 million from October. But that's measuring visitors.
Still, the two analyses do suggest that Google+ is growing.
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: Google CEO Larry Page. Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
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Mark Zuckerberg vacations in Facebook-blocked Vietnam
posted by Technology @ 11:10 AM
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
For the holidays, Mark Zuckerberg went where Facebook is not allowed to go: Vietnam.
The Facebook founder vacationed in the communist state, arriving sometime around Dec. 22. Zuckerberg sightings almost immediately began to ricochet around the Web.
VnExpress reported that Zuckerberg was granted a two-week tourist visa to Vietnam on Dec. 16.
He and girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, visited the "Hanoi Hilton" prison in Hanoi on Thursday, according to local news websites.
The Dan Tri website quoted Tran Ngoc Bich, a tour guide at the prison, reporting that Zuckerberg and Chan joined a group of about 10 tourists who were "also very excited at seeing this talented young man."
A report on the VnExpress news website claimed Zuckerberg visited a shop that sells mobile phones on Thursday afternoon, but that his bodyguards would not let fans take photos with him.
The happy couple spent Christmas Eve in Ha Long Bay, local official Trinh Dang Thanh told Associated Press. And Christmas Day they spent at an ecolodge in the northern mountain town of Sapa.
Zuckerberg rode a water buffalo there, reported Le Phuc Thien, deputy manager at Topas Ecolodge. Presumably the buffalo had a gentler fate than the bison who had the misfortune of encountering Zuckerberg.
Vietnam blocks access to Facebook and other websites. But young people in Vietnam bypass censors to use the service.
Facebook does have a representative in Vietnam who told one news outlet that he had not been informed about Zuckerberg's visit.
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University on Nov. 7. Credit: Brian Snyder / Reuters
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It is always important to reflect on the past and take note of successes in order to avoid failure in the future.
As 2011 fades away, it is time to reflect on some of the year's biggest trends, one being social media. Although it was the birth year of Google+, Facebook still remains the king of social networks and social media marketing.
So, with the days of 2011 coming to a close, let’s take a look at some of the best Facebook brand pages of the past year:
With more than 48.2 million fans, this page is one of the most liked brand pages on Facebook. The brand page features top videos in various genres, but the point of difference is a feature that allows fans to search for videos without leaving Facebook. How can you not "like" it – it is a social network inside of another social network!
As one of the most successful brands in the world, it is no surprise that Coca-Cola is successful on Facebook, too – with more than 36.4 million likes. The landing page of this brand is something to take note of. It makes it very easy for fans to access Coca-Cola content, including links to its Twitter, YouTube and Flickr pages, as well as links to fan highlights. Moreover, fans can even make a donatation to save the polar bears through a link on the landing page, which has already racked up more than $92,000 in donations.
As if you needed a reason to “like” Oreos, the brand’s Facebook page gives you one. The page has more than 23.6 million fans and includes many interactive aspects, such as the "Birthday of the Day" feature, Oreo commercials, recipes, coupons and even “Say it with Oreo,” which allows fans to post Oreo pictures and messages on their friends' walls. These fun and interactive apps are a great way to entice new fans and customers.
There is no doubt that this brand page wins the most colorful design award, but with a slogan like “taste the rainbow”, how couldn’t the Skittles Facebook brand page feature an eye-catching splash of hues? Skittles has more than 19.6 million likes on Facebook, and features pictures, advertisements, videos and witty posts. By not saturating a fan's newsfeed with promotions, brands can keep social media social, and are likely to have engaged consumers that more frequently comment and like posts.
Best Buy currently has more than 5.5 million fans on Facebook. The brand’s page includes polls, sales, pictures, and apps such as the holiday fun app, a gaming app and an interactive deal app. By providing a deal section on a Facebook brand page, consumers have no need to search for deals anywhere else.
And don't forget – Website Magazine
If you aren’t already one of our more than 40,000 fans on Facebook, now is the time to hit the like button. Our Facebook page features all of our top stories, promotions, contests and more. And if you already like us on Facebook, why not follow us on Twitter too?
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Five ways to get started with your new Android phone
posted by Technology @ 11:33 AM
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Did you unwrap your gifts this Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus to find that you're the proud new owner of an Android? If so, welcome to the world of Google-powered smartphones.
Millions of others around the globe own phones running Google's Android operating system, across dozens of devices with varying screen sizes and specs. These phones might be from one of more than a dozen hardware makers, running on just about every wireless network out there.
Given the variation, Android can be a bit fragmented, but no matter what your Android looks like, here are a few basics that can help you get started if you're new to smartphone ownership.
1. Set up your Google Account: To use an Android phone you'll need to have a Google Account, which means you'll have to set up a Gmail.com email address if you don't already have one. Your Google Account is, of course, the login identity that follows you as you use all things Google — Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Blogger and anything else Google produces. This can add some convenience to your life by automatically syncing your contacts and calendars across your computer and your smartphone if you make use of Google's services for keeping track of all that information.
2. Get yourself some apps: The major differentiator between smartphones and other cellphones, aside from the ability to send and receive email, is the mobile app. Android phones have the second largest app store, behind only Apple's App Store for its iPhone/iPod/iPad lineup. Unlike Apple's i-devices, Android users have the option of getting their apps from Google or from third parties. The top two places to find apps currently are Google's official Android Market and the Amazon Appstore for Android. Both stores offer a wide selection of apps and games that have been tested and vetted before being sold, to help prevent apps filled with viruses and other malware from making it out to Android users. Amazon also allows you to test many apps, which can be helpful before downloading. Some basic apps we really like for Android: Pulse is a great news reading app if you like to read news from multiple websites and Cut the Rope is a fun game that can be a bit tougher than Angry Birds but is just as fun.
3. Social networking: Android phones are among the best choices for staying on top of your social networks. The official Twitter app is thoughtfully designed and can help you keep up with the fast-paced social network. Path is a social network that is by default private and designed for easily sharing what's going on in your life with close friends, but you can also share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare from Path as well. And, of course, there is Google+. The Google+ Android app isn't the greatest social networking experience in mobile apps, and falls far below Twitter, Path and Facebook in terms of looks and usability, but if you were lucky enough to receive the Galaxy Nexus smartphone this holiday, which runs Ice Cream Sandwich (the latest version of Android) this might not be as big of a problem. In Ice Cream Sandwich, Google has baked-on Google+, allowing for automatic photo sharing and the ability to even read emails in your Gmail inbox by circles of friends on the network.
4. Check out Google Music: For many, the smartphone is also a portable music player, and if you're not already a big iTunes or Amazon customer for music, Google's own Google Music is worth a serious look. Google Music on a PC isn't as easy to use as iTunes, but it does allow you to sync your purchases and music library to the cloud for streaming or easy downloads on the go. Also, Google so far has done a great job on pricing, with hundreds of songs as low as 49 cents and albums as low as $4.99.
5. Talk to friends: As suggested by my colleague Deborah Netburn in her "Five Ways to Get Started With Your New iPad" post, talking to others who own and use Android on a daily basis is a good call. This shouldn't be too tough considering that Android is the most widely used mobile operating system worldwide.
Do you have any other suggestions for new Android owners? Feel free to sound off in the comments.
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Photo: The Motorola Droid Bionic from Verizon Wireless, left, and the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch from Sprint. Credit: Armand Emamdjomeh/Los Angeles Times
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Britney Spears first person with 1 million Google+ followers
posted by Technology @ 12:57 PM
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Click me baby one more time.
Britney Spears is the first person to get more than 1 million followers on Google+. As of this writing, she had 1.08 million according to Social Statistics. Google's founder, Larry Page, is the second most popular person on Google+ with 926,161 followers. Snoop Dogg comes in third with 930,292 followers.
Spears, who turned 30 this month, has a pretty robust social media presence — she is the fifth-most followed person on Twitter with 11.9 million following her tweets, and 15.7 million fans "like" her Facebook page.
But that doesn't put her anywhere close to the top of Facebook's most popular list. Currently, Eminem is the most "liked" person there with 38.7 million likes.
So why is Spears the queen of Google+?
Well, if you go to BritneySpears.com you'll find a giant Google+ icon on the bottom right, that takes up nearly one-sixth of the page. By comparison, there appears to be no Google+ icon anywhere on Rihanna's website Rihanna.com.
If you want it, you've got to work for it people!
Wondering what the most successful Google+ user in the world is sharing? Here's a taste:
"OMG. Last night Jason surprised me with the one gift I've been waiting for. Can't wait to show you! SO SO SO excited!!!! Xxo"
And:
"Still glowing! About to jump on a plane to Planet Hollywood in Vegas. Throwing a Bday Party for Jason at Chateau Night Club. So fun. Xxoo"
That last post got 500 comments on Google+. The star (or her team) posted the same thing on Facebook, where more than 1,300 people commented on it.
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– Deborah Netburn
Image: A screen grab of BritneySpears.com which shows how the site prominently features Google+.
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Facebook to boost privacy protections in Europe, Irish agency says
posted by Technology @ 11:54 AM
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Facebook will improve privacy protections in Europe over the next six months after an investigation into its practices there, the Irish data protection agency said Wednesday.
The agency conducted a three-month audit of Facebook’s compliance with European Union and Irish data protection requirements.
Facebook, the Menlo Park, Calif., company that has its European headquarters in Dublin, has agreed to give users more information on how Facebook and third-party apps handle their information, minimize how much data is collected on users when they are not logged in to Facebook and warn European users that Facebook uses facial recognition software that suggests people to tag in photos.
The Dublin headquarters has responsibility for handling hundreds of millions of users outside the U.S. and Canada.
“This was a challenging engagement both for my Office and for Facebook Ireland,” Irish Data Protection Commissioner Gary David said in a statement. “Arising from the audit, FB-I [Facebook Ireland] has agreed to a wide range of ‘best practice’ improvements to be implemented over the next six months.”
There will be another formal review in July.
The agency received 22 complaints from a privacy group, Europe V Facebook, and additional complaints from the Norwegian Data Protection Agency. Facebook said it was pleased that the report underscored a number of Facebook’s “strengths or best practices” in the security of user data and using personal information to target ads.
“The people who use Facebook take privacy and data protection seriously and so do we,” Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of public policy for Europe, said in a blog post.
Last month, Facebook agreed to settle privacy complaints raised by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The proposed 20-year agreement would require Facebook to get permission from users before sharing information they thought would remain private. The company also agreed to 20 years of privacy audits.
Facebook has run into trouble with its facial recognition software that suggests people for users to tag in their photos. A German data protection agency said it may fine Facebook over the feature and Norway’s privacy watchdog is investigating.
Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site, is planning a $100-billion initial public offering sometime next year.
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images
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Final Brand Page Changes for Google+ in 2011
posted by Michael Garrity @ 2:15 PM
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Google+ wants to know who the 50 most important people in your company are; or, at least, the 50 most important people related to social media.
As a present to its users, both brands and regular Joes, Google+ pulled out a few last updates for 2011 in preparation for what should be a pretty successful 2012 for the social network. Arguably the two biggest changes to the product are those that will affect businesses and users: stream noise controls and clearer notifications.
Let's be honest, the Google+ homepage can get really cluttered. Luckily, more observant members of the Plus team noticed this and resolved to do something about it; the result is a stream noise control feature that allows users to determine which of their circles they're most interested in, giving them more control over what is seen in their streams (and how much of it). Circles now come equipped with sliders (think volume control sliders) that let a user determine the amount of material that each circle includes in the general stream.
Also, they company has added sneak previews to the new "Google bar" that sits atop Google-related pages. Now, when users click on their glowing red notification indicator, they'll be able to see what's happening on the social network and determine how interested they are in the material without having to leave the page and go to the content. This notification tab has been upgraded with some other "meaningful improvements," such as letting users see +1s and shares to posts received since they last time they were on.
For brands, Google+ Pages are getting some pretty notable enhancements, as well. Brands can now let more of their employees socialize; before, just one user was given access to a brand page, which can be a big hindrance to some businesses, especially larger, enterprise-level companies. The latest update allows up to 50 moderaters for each Google+ Page.
In addition, notifications are changed so that all of a brand's administrators are aware of activity taking place on the page, including a new metric displayed on the page that tells both administrators and visitors that shows how many people have engaged with the it through +1s or by encircling it.
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Marketing agency Mr Youth recently conducted a fairly comprehensive study about the role social media played in holiday gift purchasing decisions this year, and what they found wasn't all merry.
For the three weeks leading up to and including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Mr Youth gathered data on social media interactions to see how they affected holiday purchasing decisions. On the upside, they concluded that about 65 percent of user recommendations made or received on social networking sites led to a purchase, and these recommendations were twice as likely to lead to gift purchses. However, it seems that many brands are apparently just not responding to consumers on these same social media sites; only 55 percent of brands regularly respond to users on Facebook, meaning nearly half of all consumer comments are ignored.
The numbers are a little better on Twitter (this study was obviously conducted before it rolled out brand pages), where brands respond about 61 percent of the time, largely because it allows for both private DMs and @ replies. Also, Facebook has recently been toying around with the idea of introducing private messages for pages to help alleviate this problem, but it still speaks to some potentially damaging missed opportunities by these supposedly social-savvy companies.
Perhaps that explains why the study also found that just 36 percent of social media users find brands with a social presence more trustworthy than brands who aren't on social networks. And online trust seems to be important, as 52 percent of users would be willing to pay more for brands they trust, while just 29 percent of people who aren't on social media will pay more for a brand they trust.
If that's not enough, 80 percent of users who got a response from a brand on a social networking site would go on to make a purchase based on the interaction. This speaks volumes about the crucial role that social media plays into today's marketing environment, as consumers are ever-increasingly expecting brands to interact with them on a wholly personal level, and the responses they get could be the deciding factor for turning a potential customer into a real live paying customer.
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Social Sharing in 2011 via AddThis
posted by Peter A. Prestipino @ 5:30 PM
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Who is the winner of the social sharing wars? Well, Facebook of course. That's what indicated in data released today by ClearSpring Technologies, makers of the popular AddThis sharing platform.
AddThis is really the perfect platform to help understand social sharing trends. The tool is currently used on 11 million domains and see 1.2 billion uniques a month. So who are the top sharing services?
Facebook makes up 52.1 percent of sharing on the Web, followed by Twitter at 13.5 percent. Both Twitter and Tumblr are growing however with 576 percent and nearly 1300 percent growth for the two social sites respectively.
Some other highlights from the study:
- Stumbleupon creates a "viral lift" of 320 percent
- Google +1 grew 373 percent by has platuead
- Sharing on Digg and MySpace declined by 47 percent and 56 percent respectively
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Social media commerce continues to grow, and many ecommerce companies are slowly starting to focus more of their efforts on moving into the market. Whether or not this is the future of online shopping is yet to be seen, but many online properties certainly seem to think that it might.
The latest convert is the online coupon site RetailMeNot, which recently launched its “Today’s Top Deals” Facebook application “to help consumers shop smart and save money during the 2011 holiday shopping season.” The app includes coupons, promotional codes and special deals from some of the company’s merchants, allowing customers to save an average of almost $20 on products and services. Some of the more notable merchants with “Today’s Top Deals” listings are Overstock.com, The Gap, Cooking.com, Dell and PetCo.
“Social media continues to play a more heightened role in how we communicate to consumers. The ‘Today’s Top Deals’ app will help us get the best deals to our fans on Facebook,” says RetailMeNot’s Senior Vice President, Jag Bath.
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New Tools Available in HootSuite App Directory
posted by AllisonH @ 12:45 PM
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
The HootSuite App Directory, which went live in November, has launched application support for three new networks – Constant Contact, Summify and Formulists.
Let’s take a look at the features of these new apps:
Constant Contact – Enables HootSuite users to view results of recent email campaigns, and share campaigns across social networks, which extends the reach of a business’s online marketing initiatives. Users of this app can view the number of emails sent, opens, clicks and bounces, as well as view who opened and clicked on links, and which links were clicked on.
Summify – Users can control the large amount of news on social networks, as well as filter important updates into personalized digest summaries within HootSuite’s user-created streams. Additional features include the ability to view details of new items within summaries, such as who shared items, and the actual message that was shared.
Formulists – Formulists users can manage Twitter lists more easily and view dynamic, personalized list streams within the HootSuite dashboard. This app allows users to analyze lists and streams with a variety of features, as well as view and engage top fans, followers and unfollowers.
This new lineup adds to HootSuite’s App Directory, which already includes apps for YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and Get Satisfaction. The new tools are immediately available to the more than 2.7 million HootSuite users throughout the world, including Basic, Pro and Enterprise users. These tools will enable social media managers to publish content and target more audiences across a larger number of social networks
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Facebook debuts Subscribe button for websites
posted by Technology @ 2:57 PM
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Facebook has launched a Subscribe button for websites, making it possible for users to subscribe to updates from their favorite journalists and other public figures without leaving their sites.
The company said the plug-in — which is already live on sites including All Things D, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post — would give publishers and other developers another way to gain subscribers, connect with readers and drive traffic to their Facebook profiles.
In a Facebook blog post Thursday, the company said once a user clicks a Subscribe button, the public posts of the person they have subscribed to will begin appearing in the user's News Feed.
"The subscribe action is also shared — allowing others to subscribe directly via the News Feed stories, and further increasing viral distribution," the post said.
Facebook first launched a Subscribe button in September for people who wanted to share their public updates with more than just friends.
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Image: Screen shot of the All Things Digital blog, with Subscribe buttons below the names of its journalists. Credit: Facebook
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Edmodo, Facebook for classrooms, lands $15 million, top advisors
posted by Technology @ 5:31 AM
Thursday, December 8, 2011
A Silicon Valley education start-up is getting a big vote of confidence from two venture capitalists who have veritable PhDs in social networking.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Matt Cohler, an early employee at Facebook, are joining the board of Edmodo. Their respective venture capital firms, Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital, are leading a new $15-million funding round.
"Edmodo has emerged as the engine in the classroom for content sharing, collaboration and assignments," said Cohler, a general partner with Benchmark Capital. "Edmodo works and students get that, teachers get that."
And that has helped the Facebook-like service catch on in the classroom. More than 5 million teachers and students in 60,000 schools around the globe use Edmodo. The site's usership has doubled in the last three months.
Hoffman, a managing partner with Greylock, said Edmodo is emerging as a key network. Just as Facebook is the social graph and LinkedIn the professional graph, he said, "Edmodo is the educational graph."
Even as technologies in Silicon Valley have radically transformed our lives and industries, they've been slower to make a major dent in the 21st century classroom. Surveys show that most students still use technology more outside the classroom than in it. And while 73% of teachers say digital content is essential, only 11% of districts are using it, according to a survey of IT professionals.
In their last meeting before he died, Steve Jobs spoke with Bill Gates about the future of digital technology in the classroom given how little headway it had made. They agreed that "computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools — far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law," according to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.
Rob Hutter, chairman of Edmodo and a managing partner with Learn Capital, contends that 2011 marks the tipping point with high-speed Internet in 95% of schools and the proliferation of mobile devices, which are more affordable and have longer battery life and the ability to create feature-rich, sophisticated educational initiatives in the cloud.
Edmodo is the brainchild of Nic Borg and Jeff O'Hara, IT professionals from a Chicago-area school district who wanted to bring the connected way people live their lives into the classroom. Most school districts block social networks, but Borg and O'Hara banked on the idea that a safe, secure social network that allowed teachers to network with one another and with students could fly.
How it works: K-12 teachers sign up for free, then add their students to create classroom communities that work on every type of personal computer and mobile device, Hutter said. Teachers can then send messages about assignments, post materials such as photos and videos related to the assignments, conduct quizzes and discuss topics covered in class. Teachers can also share educational content and best practices with each other. Edmodo has even offered interactive lessons on polar bears.
"This is going to be a really big, important network," Cohler said. "The more people join, the better the service gets for everybody."
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Images: Student profile on Edmodo (top), teacher profile (bottom). Credit: Edmodo
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Facebook fixes security glitch after leak of Mark Zuckerberg photos
posted by Technology @ 1:58 PM
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Facebook says it has fixed a security glitch after founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's private photographs were published online.
The incident stemmed from a Nov. 27 post on the Bodybuilding.com Web forum. An anonymous tipster spelled out step-by-step instructions to access photos uploaded by Facebook users, even if the photos were marked as private. Among the photos hackers published: Zuckerberg preparing food and handing out candy on Halloween.
Facebook says the security glitch "was live for a limited period of time." It did not say how many of the site's more than 800 million users were affected. "The precise number of people impacted is unknown at the moment but we continue to investigate," a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.
Facebook blamed the problem on a recent "code push" in which it revised some of its software.
"Not all content was accessible, rather a small number of one's photos. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed," a company spokesman said in an email.
The privacy breach struck at Facebook's Achille's heel. Last week Facebook agreed to settle federal government charges that it exposed too much user information without consent.
Security and privacy concerns have not dampened enthusiasm for Facebook, which has soared in popularity. It's preparing for an initial public offering next year that could peg the company's worth at $100 billion.
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo credit: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images
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Theaters set aside tweet seats for Twitter users
posted by Technology @ 8:15 AM
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Perhaps the most unexpected thing about "tweet seats" is that they exist. Perhaps the second-most-unexpected thing about them is that they appear to be a growing trend.
A tweet seat is a seat in a theater that has been approved by the theater for use by someone who would like to tweet a performance. Whip out your cellphone and start tweeting at a rock show and nobody will notice — the rest of audience is probably shooting cellphone pictures anyway. But try that at the opera and you'll be glared at, unless you are in a tweet seat.
Tweet seats first started surfacing at the end of the '00s. In 2009, the Lyric Opera in Kansas reserved 100 tweet seats for its final performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's "HMS Pinafore." In those seats (and only those seats) audience members could use their phones to look at tweeted content sent by the theater's artistic director about the production, the scenery and whatever was happening on stage. Audience members were also encouraged to tweet questions in real time.
According to a recent article about tweet seats in USA Today, twitter-friendly seats have since been adopted by others, including the Carolina Ballet in Raleigh, N.C., the Dayton Opera in Dayton, Ohio, and the historical Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn.
And soon tweet seats may be coming to Broadway. Jennifer Tepper, the director of promotions for "Godspell" on Broadway, told USA Today that the production definitely intends to use them.
"While we haven't done tweet seats, they are certainly in our plan for the future at 'Godspell,'" she said.
If you find the idea of tweet seats hard to swallow, don't despair. The next time you go to the symphony, the orchestra will almost certainly not be accompanied by your neighbor desperately tapping at her phone.
Tweet seats are generally reserved on one side of an auditorium to keep the cellphone glare from interfering with non-tweeting audience members' enjoyment of a performance. At the Dayton Opera, tweet seats are only available on certain nights of a show's run.
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– Deborah Netburn
Image: Empty seats at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. But are they tweet seats? Credit: Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times
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Facebook picks up team behind location-sharing service Gowalla
posted by Technology @ 12:14 PM
Monday, December 5, 2011
The team behind Gowalla is going to Facebook.
That's the upshot of a blog post from one of the company's founders, Josh Williams.
Like the more-popular Foursquare, Gowalla is a mobile application that lets people share where they are and what they are doing with friends by "checking in."
Facebook confirmed that it's hiring Gowalla co-founders Williams and Scott Raymond, along with "several other members" of the Gowalla team. They'll move to Facebook in January, joining its engineering and design teams. Facebook did not identify which product or products the Gowalla group would work on.
The move gives Facebook an injection of top engineers as it competes for talent with other tech giants such as Google and Apple and startups such as Square. Facebook said last week it was opening an engineering office in New York to attract engineers. And Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook plans to hire thousands of employees in the next year.
Williams said the talks with Facebook began after the F8 conference in September. For those keeping track, that was one year after Foursquare decided not to sell out to Facebook, opting instead to stay independent — and pursue a truckload of cash from venture capitalists.
A CNN report Friday prompted a weekend of fevered speculation over whether Facebook was buying Gowalla.
But in moving to Palo Alto from Austin, Texas, the Gowalla team won't be packing up the Gowalla service or its technology. Instead, the service will be wound down early next year, Williams said in his post.
"We're sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time," a Facebook spokesman said in an e-mailed statement.
Gowalla was one of the pioneers in the location-based sharing space. Both Gowalla and Foursquare launched in the same week of 2009. Kara Swisher dubbed the company "Not Foursquare." As she rightly points out, the company had changed tactics several times and was for sale for some time.
Clearly it's not the way Williams and his team had hoped things would turn out. But working for Facebook, which is on the verge of a $100-billion initial public offering, is surely a nice consolation prize.
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: Mark Zuckerberg at a product unveiling at Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters in August 2010. Credit: Robert Galbraith / Reuters
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At this point, even the most inexperienced Web marketer is aware of the vital role that social media plays in promoting a brand on the Internet. Of course, almost everyone has a presence on at least one of the major social destinations, mainly Facebook and Twitter, but what many people seem to overlook are the seemingly endless amounts of smaller, alternative social networks at their disposal.
In addition to the "Big 5" social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Tumblr), there are a wide variety of different places that users can go to be social on the 'Net. Some of these sites are aimed at specific lifestyle markets, some provide specialized services like user reviews or checking in, and some are simply older or smaller takes on the social network platform that we all know and love.
There are obviously many ways for marketers to approach social media. It would certainly behoove everyone to make their presence felt on Facebook and Twitter, because the number of users and levels of engagment on those two sites are so astronomically high compared to their competitors, but beyond that, the sky is really the limit for companies trying to optimized their Web profiles.
This issue becomes more difficult to address when you consider the very broad defintion of "social media." For some, social networks are only those like Facebook or Myspace that are built around the idea of users having their own unique profiles, which are the focus of the site. Others define social much more loosely, referencing any site that gives users a chance to share and interact with content. Because of this, the opportunities for social media marketing are, in a way, limitless.
Local businesses probably want to seek out services like Yelp or Foursquare, which give users a chance to write reviews or check in to local shops, respectively. Companies that operate in more niche markets by offering products or services most useful to a specific group can seek out social networks that serve the interests of these unique customers. Other businesses have the opportunity to market themselves in unique ways, such as in pictures or video, by jumping on board with specialized social networks that focus on these types of content. Here's a list of some of the best social media sites on the Web today that covers all of these areas and more.
"The Big 5"
Athletes
As someone who runs (or, in my case, has befriended runners) will tell you, it is a very social activity. This website takes the communal nature of the sport to the next level, by allowing runners to share their experiences with like-minded athletes around the world.
Education
The first is a great site geared mostly towards college and high school students to work together and seek help in their schoolwork without having to plagiarize or turn to the unreliable Wikipedia for answers. The second provides a network for teachers to share and get ideas.
Music Lovers
To many users, the Web and music go hand-in-hand. One of the most popular uses of the Internet for many people is to listen to, share and discuss music with others, making it a natural move to create social networks based around the idea of, surprise, listening to, sharing and discussing music with others.
Finance
Everyone's always seeking financial advice and/or business information, so why not turn to the Web?
Pet Lovers
People love pets, and for those people who really love their pets, these sites offer a place to turn to get advice and share stories about their favorite four-legged creatures.
Gamers
The classic stereotype of "gamers" is that they're all very anti-social, but with the advent of online gaming over the last decade, it has become one of the more social hobbies in which one can particpate. These sites allow users to connect with other gamers while sharing their individual accomplishments online.
Food and Cooking
Yum! This is the digital-age equivalent to your grandma sharing recipe cards with her friends.
Artists
This popular art-hosting site has become a haven for those wanting to share their original content with the world.
Travel
Social networks based around travel allow users to seek out information about potential destinations based on actual user feedback, which provides practical information for trip planning.
Avid Readers
Another group that isn't usually seen as the particularly social, readers now have a variety of places to visit online to share with like-minded individuals about what they're reading and what they've read, as well as get recommendations for new books.
Film Buffs
Like music fans and readers, those among us obsessed with movies also love to talk about them and share ideas and recommendations, and this site allows users to do just that.
And more!
There are plenty of other great social destinations that offer a variety of options and services for users, as well as great opportunities for marketers to spread their message on the Web.
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Google+ offers free voice calls to U.S. and Canada from Hangouts
posted by Technology @ 12:23 PM
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Google+ is offering free voice calls to the U.S. and Canada from Hangouts.
Google staffer Jarkko Oikarinen made the announcement, from where else, Google+.
That means anyone can join a Google+ video chat even if they are not online. Just call them and they can join the Hangout session.
The new feature is available inside Hangouts with extras (plus.google.com/hangouts/extras). To add someone by phone: click invite at the top of the hangouts with extras window. Then click the phone tab on the left of the window and punch in the number. Click call now.
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– Jessica Guynn
Photo: New calling feature in Google Hangouts Credit: Google
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Social network offers ‘smart journal’ users a revamped Path
posted by Technology @ 9:39 PM
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
In an unforgettable scene from AMC's "Mad Men," Don Draper pitches Kodak executives on an advertising campaign for their new slide projector.
They want to focus on the technology. He's loaded the carousel with family pictures and the emotional pull of memory.
"This device isn't a spaceship," he tells the suits. "It's a time machine."
And that's exactly what the founders of Path are trying to build: a smartphone app that is more powerful than memory alone, that becomes a digital vehicle for recording memories so users can roll back through time and return to places that in Draper's words, "we ache to know again."
Dave Morin and Dustin Mierau have distilled that idea into a new version of the Path app for iPhone and Android. They call it a "smart journal" for the smartphone. Think of it as a modern take on the moleskin diary that travelers used to carry in their pockets to jot down notes about the places they had been and the people they met.
Morin and Mierau say they took their cue from their some 1 million users who have turned Path into a handy way to document their lives — screenshots of songs playing on their iPods, notes to friends or themselves, photos from weddings and road trips — and share pivotal moments with a tight-knit circle of friends and relatives.
"People have this deep desire to remember things, to remember their lives. It's a source of real happiness for people," Morin said. "It's the participation of your friends and family in the story that's exciting."
Path is looking to cement its bond with users by rolling out an updated version of the app. The app has been redesigned to be easier on the eyes and make stuff easier to share.
Users can also now share and check in on other networks such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. And a new feature called Automatic does exactly what the name suggests: it automatically notes changes to your daily routine, such as traveling to a new city, and updates your social circle, essentially becoming a journal that writes itself. (You can turn it off if that's not your thing).
Still, Path has yet to live up to its promise as a new kind of social network.
People often say that they want privacy as they gripe about Facebook pushing them to share more information with more people. But is that what people really want?
So far, Path has yet to catch on in a big way. It's early going but Path is still an ant in a land of social media giants. Facebook is the world's largest social networking site with more than 800 million users and an initial public offering coming soon despite concerns over privacy. And Google's new social network, Google+, has already attracted millions (in part by using its mighty presence on the Web and in part by giving users a new way to segment friends in "circles").
So Path is casting a wider net. At the time it launched a year ago, Path let users designate only 50 friends. Path has now upped that limit to 150 friends, but even then lets people accumulate more friends if they want.
Path pitches itself as a social network that is more exclusive and private than Facebook, an antidote to an era of online openness in which people routinely broadcast the details of their lives to friends and strangers alike.
Morin, a former executive at Facebook and Apple, is betting that people crave more intimate interaction with a much smaller circle.
Path users post snippets and snapshots that over time create a "path." That means your friends and family can see your life through your eyes. The concept got early traction with high-profile investors. Path even turned down a $100-million buyout offer from Google.
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– Jessica Guynn
Images: Screenshots of Path include U2's "Beautiful Day" being posted by a user, and friends and family commenting and sharing emotions on a user's post. Credit: Path
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Facebook settles privacy complaint with Federal Trade Commission
posted by Technology @ 11:12 AM
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Facebook has settled charges with the Federal Trade Commission that it deceived users by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private and then repeatedly making it public, according to the agency.
The settlement of an eight-count complaint requires Facebook to warn users about privacy changes and to get their permission before sharing their information more broadly, according to the FTC. Facebook has agreed to 20 years of privacy audits, it said.
"Facebook is obligated to keep the promises about privacy that it makes to its hundreds of millions of users," Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC, said in a written statement. "Facebook's innovation does not have to come at the expense of consumer privacy. The FTC action will ensure it will not."
In a blog post, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook is committed to giving its users "complete control" over what they share and with whom.
"I also understand that many people are just naturally skeptical of what it means for hundreds of millions of people to share so much personal information online, especially using any one service. Even if our record on privacy were perfect, I think many people would still rightfully question how their information was protected. It's important for people to think about this, and not one day goes by when I don't think about what it means for us to be the stewards of this community and their trust," he wrote. "I'm committed to making Facebook the leader in transparency and control around privacy."
Facebook also has created two new positions to make sure it takes privacy seriously, Zuckerberg said.
Erin Egan, a former partner with Covington & Burling, will become chief privacy officer for policy. Michael Richter, Facebook’s chief privacy counsel, will take on a new role as chief privacy officer for products.
Privacy watchdog Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said the settlement shows that Facebook "has long misled users and the public."
But another frequent critic, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), applauded the settlement.
"The settlement's privacy protections will benefit Facebook users and should serve as a new, higher standard for other companies to follow in their own efforts to protect consumers' privacy online," Markey said in a written statement. "When it comes to its users' privacy, Facebook’s policy should be: ‘Ask for permission, don’t assume it."
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Photo: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg greets a student as he arrives to speak at Harvard University. Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard in 2004, met with students as part of an East Coast trip to recruit for the social networking company. Photo credit: Kelvin Ma / Bloomberg
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Facebook’s IPO: Could it come in the first half of 2012?
posted by Technology @ 8:56 PM
Monday, November 28, 2011
Facebook's initial public offering has been the source of Wall Street speculation for months. Some thought the IPO would come this year, others have reported that it wouldn't arrive until late next year.
And on Monday, the Wall Street Journal added fuel to the Facebook IPO fire with a report that the world's largest social network, with more than 800 million users, is prepping to issue its first public stock offering in the second quarter of 2012.
The Facebook IPO could be a $10-billion offering based on a $100-billion valuation of the Palo Alto-based company. But as to when in the second quarter the IPO would come, well that hasn't yet been decided, the Journal said in its report, citing unnamed "people familiar with the matter."
As reported by my colleague Walter Hamilton over on our sister-blog Money & Company:
The timing of Facebook's IPO is likely to hinge in part on the condition of the stock market, which has not been kind lately to some other prominent tech IPOs.
In a major disappointment, shares of one of this year's most closely watched IPOs, online-coupon company Groupon Inc., have plunged recently. The stock closed Monday at $15.24, far below the $20 price at which it sold shares to investors earlier this month.
Earlier this month, Facebook co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a PBS interview with Charlie Rose that indeed, his company was planning an IPO, but that the company hadn't yet decided when.
Zuckerberg also said that an IPO isn't something he spent "a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about."
"We've made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we're going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way," he said. "Now, the promise isn't that we're going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon. The promise is that we're going to build this company so that it's great over the long term, right. And that we're always making these decisions for the long term, but at some point we'll do that."
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– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Photo: Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks around Harvard University in Cambridge on Nov. 7, 2011. Credit: Brian Snyder/Reuters
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Social Geo-location Strategies for Black Friday
posted by AllisonH @ 12:00 PM
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Big names in the retail industry are jumping on the geolocation bandwagon, especially for the busiest shopping weekend of the year.
For example, Sports Authority is offering $25 cash cards for customers that check-in with Foursquare and spend $100 or more, JC Penney will donate $25 (up to $100,000) to the Salvation Army for every Foursquare check-in, while American Eagle is unlocking a 15 percent off coupon to every customer that checks-in on Foursquare. However, these promotions don’t have to be limited to big name corporations, small businesses can jump on the geolocation bandwagon too.
Here are three tips for merchants that want to create social geolocation promotions for the busiest shopping weekend of the year:
Foursquare Specials - Foursquare provides merchants with the ability to create many different types of offers that are available for customers upon check-in – which can be very valuable during the busiest shopping weekend of the year. For instance, merchants can create a discount with purchase offer, like $10 off of a $50 purchase, or free gift with purchase specials. So if your business isn’t already on Foursquare, use this as an incentive to create a merchant page today.
Facebook Contests – It is time to think outside of the box. Organize a contest that gives away a free gift through a random drawing of the customers that check-into your store on Facebook Places over the weekend. Also, to ensure your winning customer comes back and shops more, make the free gift a $50 gift card to your store.
Reward the Early Birds - Although your store may not be opening at midnight like many other retailers on Black Friday, merchants can still reward the early birds. Promote a free gift or special discount for the first twenty customers that check-in either on Facebook or Foursquare on Friday morning.
For more holiday-related social media tips, check out these tips from Website Magazine.
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5 Ways to Market your Online Content
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Thursday, September 22, 2011
5 Ways to Market your Online Content
You now have a finished piece of content on your website. How can one go about getting the most visitors to the new piece? Having faith that users will magically gravitate to your new page is extremely optimistic. The following contains 5 actionable tips for marketing your website content.
* Pretend it’s for Print
It all starts with the quality of your content. Treat the piece that your writing as if it’s not easily changed after you’ve put it out there. Publishing content on the web has made us all a bit lazy with this. Knowing that we can just go back to fix or tidy up after the fact puts a little less pressure on us to produce perfect content. Remember that people are taking time out of their lives to focus their attention on you. Make it worthwhile.
* A Dash of SEO with that Please
After you’re happy with the content take a once over for the search engines. Don’t bastardize it. But if you want to get the most long term exposure for your content try to align your web page’s message with your website’s search engine optimization strategy.
You could adjust:
-Your page title and meta description. Remember that these are the only two elements that search engine users see on search results pages. Try to have it read like a newspaper headline.
-The name of your post. If you can have good keywords here by all means do so.
-The permalink. Adjust your URL to be relevant to your content, keep it void of unnecessary words like “and, the, or” and include keywords.
-Your on-page headlines and actual copy. Skim through all of this for keyword opportunities that will ADD to the quality of your piece.
Just make sure that you are covering your bases seo-wise. If you set up your page properly you will give your writing every chance possible to be picked up by search engines down the road.
* Remember Email Marketing?
If you’ve built an email list over the years then send out a quick campaign about the article. I wouldn’t suggest that you copy all of your post content into the email. I would use the email as a teaser. Give the email recipients reason to visit your website and read it there. My reasoning for this is that there are many more viral opportunities if the content is digested on your website vs in the email itself. Be sure to give enough useful information in the email itself though. This way if they don’t click through they wont feel their time has been wasted.
* Feed the Birds
After you’ve done this go share your post on your favorite Social Media Channels like Facebook and Twitter. Be careful not to sound too sales-like here. People can get easily turned off by this. Ask for reciprocal links in a non demanding way. Saying things like “The most brilliant post on widgets EVER!” will get you no-where fast. If a comment is left make it a priority to respond.
* Make it Easy to Share
Be sure that you give your readers every chance possible to share your content with their tribe. This is where the real potential of Social Media Marketing begins to shine. Someone sharing your post with all of their community has just exponentially increased your articles reach. It’s free marketing! Most content management systems have ways to add this functionality to your posts and if you aren’t using a CMS it’s not hard to hand code. Take a look at the bottom of this post for an example and feel free to try it out 
.
There are many more venues for reaching out than what I’ve described above including Pay Per Click Advertising, Article Distribution marketing and Direct Mail to name a few. Following the steps above is a sound strategy and a good starting point for giving your work the help it needs to be seen.
Size Really Does Matter When it Comes to Twitter
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Back in the days when newsletters first hit the Internet, they were usually published in text format because many email clients did not support HTML email just yet. One of the problems many publishers faced was long URL’s being split in half and not being clickable to the reader. To solve this problem, shortening services started to spring up that would take a long URL and cut it down to a reasonable size.
With the popularity of Twitter and the confines of 140 characters, URL (link) shortening services are in high demand once again. When you have such a small amount of space to work with, no one wants a long URL cutting into that precious real estate.
There are a variety of shortening services to choose from, each having their own specific features and benefits. Most of them do work hand in hand with Twitter, allowing you to Tweet the link once it’s been shortened. If you’re an avid Twitter user this is a useful feature to have.
Some only provide a basic shortening service, but many allow you to view stats and metrics on your newly shortened links if you register. If you’re doing any form of social media marketing, it’s nice to be able to see if anyone’s actually clicking on all the links you’re sending out to the “Twitosphere”, or posting on Facebook and other sites. Tracking will give you an indication that you’re being heard and that people are actually paying attention to what you have to say.
Another important thing to look for is whether or not the shortening service uses 301 redirects. This is the most search engine friendly, and forces the search engine to look at the destination URL, not the domain of the shortening service itself. A 301 stands for a permanent move, not temporary. What this means is, you want the links you’re sending out to be given acknowledgment by the search engines, not the shortening service itself. Make sense?
Many allow custom URL’s, which allows you to use your name or company name in the links you create. This is great for branding purposes. Think of it as a vanity license plate. Instead of being just a regular URL it’s your special creation.
Let’s review a few options:
1) http://TweetBurner.com – A bare bones tracking service which allows you to shorten any link and then share it instantly with your Twitter followers or Friendfeed. Basic stat tracking is available so you can see how many people clicked on your link.
2) http://Cli.gs – A shortening service which includes full analytics. You can create links that include your brand in them. Free to use. It’s easy to send your links to Twitter with one click.
3) http://Bit.ly – This is Twitter’s default shortening service and used by Tweetdeck.com. It allows you to track performance of your links in real time. Easy to share generated links on Twitter, Facebook, even Gmail. It also offers many extra tools and plug-ins such as a browser bookmarklet and browser sidebar.
4) http://MyTwitterToolbar.com – Free to download and comes complete with a massive list of URL shorteners as well as over 50 Twitter tools. Also includes 100 Twitter tips.
5) http://www.TwitClicks.com – A fairly simple service that allows you to shorten a URL immediately and tweet it. Can also see complete stats. Detailed stats show percentage of browsers used and locations of those who clicked. Check out a short video on how to use it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ScPeCd6X4.
6) http://www.ExpandMyUrl.com – This service takes a shortened link and gives you the true URL that it points to. Perfect for the paranoid individual who wants to know where the shortened link will send them.
7) http://www.TwitPwr.com – A short URL service which also includes analytics and stats. Their home page shows the top 25 users with the most TwitPwr and also a “hot URL” list of those URL’s that get the most clicks. Free to use.
http://1link.in – A multiple link shortening service. Simply type in a list of links and get one link back for all. If you click on the newly shortened link it goes to a page showing details of what sites that link points to, and asks if you want to open them all. If you answer yes, multiple windows will open for each site.
9) http://Go2.me – A different type of link shortening and discussion service which creates shorter links which also contain a chat window to exchange comments with your readers. It’s also easy to share on Twitter, Facebook or email with one click.
10) http://Tw.itter.me – You can customize the shortened link with your name or company name. From what I saw no stats are available.
11) http://budurl.com – Another popular service which shows you a real time view of your inbound clicks. This free service allows you to track up to 250 Budurl’s. They provide 3 pay levels of service from $4.00 a month to $49.00 a month. There is a 21 day free tríal on any paid service. You can start out free and upgrade your account at any time.
12) http://Tr.Im – Trim those long URL’s and instantly share them on Twitter. If you want stats, you’ll need to register. Offers many different tools and extensions to make for easier sharing, such as a Firefox extension that allows you to view your tr.im stats and tweet your new links quickly.
13) http://short.ie – Keeps all your shortened links in one place. Tracks clicks and allows you to instantly share your list with friends. It can also be connected to your Twitter account for more features. Customization of URL’s also available.
14) http://hootsuite.com – Not really a URL shortening service, but has the ability built-in. Hootsuite is a “Twitter Toolbox” loaded with features which are all free. They use ow.ly as their built in link shortener.
If you haven’t tried a url shortening service, you’ll want to find one that fits your needs and start to really utilize it in your marketing activities. Finding out who’s clicking on your links, time of day, where they’re from and other information will be very valuable in your ongoing efforts as an Internet Marketer.
Remember, when it comes to social media marketing T.M.I (too much information) is a good thing, unlike when your Aunt Ethel wants you to sit with her and go over every detail of her latest vacatíon [grin]. One is helpful, the other just downright painful.
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