Social Media News 4/12/10

Twitter ads are here. Just launched last night, Promoted Tweets is a platform that allows advertisers to push messaging within Twitter search results. Twitter is expected to expand the ad system beyond search, one day allowing advertisers the ability to push paid tweets directly to user streams. User acceptance is critical, and Twitter has stated that branded messages will be “clearly labeled” as advertisements, according to AdWeek.

The Promoted Tweets vehicle isn’t the only new development currently brewing at Twitter. Recently, the micro-blogging service had acquired Atebits, the developer of  Tweetie for iPhone and Mac. This move signals a vital shift in Twitter’s evolution: Twitter will now compete directly with third party developers and produce its own proprietary software. Notorious as an open platform, Twitter couldn’t be what it is today without the programmers who have built over 70,000 applications that have made Twitter more accessible to many users. With dollar signs in their eyes, Twitter is bringing some of that development in house and is putting itself at odds other developers.

On that note, friction also continues to rise between Apple and Adobe. Hostility has reduced these multi-million dollar corporations to childish antics and name-calling. Read for yourself: Apple Gives Adobe The Finger With Its New iPhone SDK Agreement; and Adobe Flash evangelist: ‘Go screw yourself Apple’.  Can’t we all just get along?

Out with the old, in with the new. In the midst of ever declining market share, Palm is rumored to be looking for a buyer. News of the possible sell coincidentally come the same week that Microsoft unveils two new social media centric phones, Kin 1 and Kin 2. No word yet on whether Microsoft will pay royalties to Dr. Seuss for the names of the new devices.

Social Media: Strategy

How to Develop a Sound Facebook Fan Page Strategy: Step 1 – Ignite Social Media

Remember Google’s Super Bowl Search Ad? Now You Can Make Your Own (this is an awesome viral campaign)- TechCrunch

Twitter Launches A New Guide For Media Organizations – Tech Crunch

Yahoo Opens New Firehose of Social Media Data to Developers – Mashable

Zappos CEO on How To Deliver Happiness with Social Media [INTERVIEW] - Mashable

10 Essential Social Media Tools for B2B Marketers – Mashable

Social Media: Consumer Electronics

Adobe Flash evangelist: ‘Go screw yourself Apple’ – cnet news

Verizon CEO: U.S. Tops in Cellular Service – PC Mag

Sharp to launch advanced 3D panels for mobile gear – Reuters

Palm Said to Tap Goldman, Quattrone to Find Buyers – Bloomberg

Next, a Kin: Microsoft to try new consumer phones – Washington Post

Microsofts Project Pink phones now official, known as “Kin 1″ and “Kin 2″ - TechCrunch

Digital Advertising

Yelp makes two major changes in the way reviews are posted – LA Times

Source: Twitter’s Ad Platform Launches Tonight – TechCrunch

Twitter Starts ‘Promoted Tweets’ Ad System – AdWeek

The Multi-Billion Dollar Question: Will Users Click on Twitter Ads? – Mashable

Into Hand: Jobs Unveils iAd, Says ‘Search Is Not Where It’s At’ - Media Post

Internet Trends

Google Docs Overhauled, Microsoft Should Be Worried – Fast Company

Tensions Rise for Twitter and App Developers – New York Times

Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in Twitter twist – Reuters

The Real Reason VCs Think Foursquare Is Worth $100 Million – Business Insider

HuffPo Launches Separate ‘Twitter Edition’; More Focus On Real-Time News – Paid Content

Apple Gives Adobe The Finger With Its New iPhone SDK Agreement – Tech Crunch

Social Media News 3/29/10

It’s iPad Week. The new Apple tablet will begin shipping this week, and iPad has been at the center of a media frenzy. The articles below are what I found most interesting in iPad news, including speculation about Apple’s mobile advertising platform called iAd, and rumors that Best Buy will stock the iPad later this week (if only a very small supply of them…).

In early February, Google announced a new endeavor to build an experimental fiber network and asked state, county and city officials across the US to respond to a RFI to be a part of the program. The selected communities would be eligible to become partners with Google in building the new broadband network. Everyday citizens were invited to participate by nominating their community for consideration. The deadline for responses was last Friday, and Google announced this week that they received over 1,100 official applications.  You can learn more about the project at Google Fiber for Communities.

Just when you thought you knew all the ins and outs of Facebook, Facebook changes something. This week, Facebook sent a memo to advertisers that “Become A Fan” will change to “Like” within Facebook ads and Fan Pages. The decision to change apparently comes from data testing “Like” buttons against “Become A Fan” buttons within Facebook ad units, in which users were twice as likely to click on the former. When this goes into effect, users that click “Like” on a Facebook ad will become a Fan of that advertiser’s Page and receive News Feed updates. There could be a very large backlash from users on this change (after all, there’s always some kind of backlash when anything changes on Facebook.) The question is, will users blame Facebook, or blame the advertisers?  See the memo from Facebook, or read this article from RWW.

iPad Week

MTV Developing ‘Co-Viewing’ Apps for the iPad – AdAge

iPad Out to Prove Itself as Gaming Platform, but Will Users Play Along? – AdAge

iPad App Store Preview Leaks: App CoverFlow – Fast Company

Apple posts up iPad Guided Tours… lots of Guided Tours – Engadget

Best Buy’s iPad supply: 15 per store – CNNMoney.com

Apple’s iAd Could Bite a Chunk Out of Google’s Mobile Ad Business – Fast Company

Social Media: Strategy

Viral Complexity (a review of ROI from 2009′s most viral videos) – Brandweek

Social Media Boosts E-Mail Marketing – Brandweek

Lessons From Leno and Twitter Bombers: 3 Rules for Next-Gen Marketing – Fast Company

The Two Most Important Questions in Social Media Marketing – Ignite Social Media

Social Media: Consumer Electronics

This Is What Cars Might Look Like On Your Next Kindle – Gizmodo

Android Devices Crave Google’s Attention - Wired

CTIA End-of-Convention Roundup: Android, 4G, and Even More Android – Fast Company

LinkedIn for BlackBerry Released [SCREENSHOTS] – Mashable

Digital Advertising

What Type Of Social Media Ads Are The Most Effective? – MediaPost

Apple’s iAd Could Bite a Chunk Out of Google’s Mobile Ad Business – Fast Company

Do You Like Us Or Like Like Us? “Become A Fan” Changing To “Like” On Facebook – RWW

Internet Trends

Facebook Will Rule the Web During the Next Decade – AdAge

Google Receives More Than 1,100 Official Applications for Fiber Broadband Network – Fast Company

Gowalla + Foursquare + Brightkite + Yelp + Google Maps=Checkin Mania – Fast Company

Social Media News 10/23/09

Twitter made multiple headlines this week. Most significant of which, Bing and Google will now index Tweets in real time and display them along with search results. Bing has a public beta now available, but as far as I know Google hasn’t disclosed when they will begin to integrate. If you can’t wait for the official release, check out a new broswer plugin called Kikin. The plugin will allow you to integrate content from multiple social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon) with search results from your favorite search engine.

The Twitter announcement was made Wednesday at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco. At the same conference, venture capitalist Sean Parker gave a presentation that has spurred a lot of conversation. Parker made the distinction between “network services” like major social networking sites, and “information services” like search engines. In his slide deck, Parker claims that network services will trump information services and ultimately shape the future of the internet. “Companies that harness the power of networks will dominate the internet. Collecting data is less valuable than connecting people.”

If Sean Parker is right, then the Bing and Google deal with Twitter is a good move. This week, the Pew Internet Project reported that Twitter and other microblogging services are used by 19% of internet users, which has increased from 11% of users 6 months ago. Also this week, Twitter hit a significant milestone on Monday with the 5 billionth Tweet, now known as the “Pentagigatweet”. (The Tweet has since been deleted by it’s author Robin Sloan, for whatever reason.)

The final word on this week’s Twitter news comes from co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams. The New York Times reported on Williams’ remarks from the Web 2.0 Summit, at which he announced that later this month Twitter will release its “Lists” feature, currently in beta for a few thousand users.  Lists allow Twitter users to better organize Twitter feeds that they are interested in, and I believe it’s going to be very similar to Amazon’s Listmania feature.

Facebook debuted a new feature of its own this week with a redesign of the Facebook user home page. Users can now toggle between “News Feeds” and “Live Feed”. The change was made without much explanation to Facebook users, thousands of which were left wonder what the heck was different between the News and Live feeds. Here’s I how explained the difference: The Live Feed are all the status and news updates that Facebook users are accustomed to seeing on their homepage; The News Feed is the feed of events from the Live Feed that the site believes will be most interesting to the user, based on how popular the post is, and based on the user’s past interactions on the site. This feature was developed in response to user feedback, but as with any major site change, there has been a minor backlash to the upgrade.

Mashable

Twitter: 5 Billion Tweets Served

Facebook Adds Digital Music to Gift Store

Tech Crunch

MySpace Adds Full Music Video Archives, Deep Artist Analytics

Sean Parker’s Rise of Facebook And Twitter, Fall Of Google Presentation (Full Slide Deck)

The ‘I Automatically Hate The New Facebook Home Page’ Group Gets Some Big Support

Kikin Personalizes Search By Tapping Into Your Social Graph

Ad Age

Google, Microsoft’s Bing to Include Twitter in Search

Controversial Amp App Gets Dumped By Pepsi

Brandweek

McAfee’s Documentary ‘Reverse Migrates’ to TV

Google Makes a ‘Banner Move’

Pepsi Pulls Amp iPhone App

19% of U.S. Internet Users Tweet

Wired

Amazon Dumps Sprint for Kindle 2, Embraces AT&T

Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released

Blogs & Other News Sources

Amazon, Facebook, and Google back FCC on Net neutrality

Twitter’s Chief Talks About Lists, Traffic and Revenue

Facebook Revamps Homepage, News Feed

RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!

Twitter hits 5 billion tweets

Goodbye Blogger. Hello WordPress!

The 5ft TNT Blog has some new digs, what do you think? After about a month of using Google’s Blogger platform, I have moved the blog over to WordPress. I likey.

Blogger is a great tool if you need a really basic blogging platform, don’t want to spend any money, and have the ability to edit your HTML. I decided to move over to WordPress for several reasons:

1. The backend dashboard is more robust and provides better tools for maintaining and optimizing the blog. It took me a while to figure out where everything is located, but once I got my barrings the WordPress dashboard proved to be much more efficient. It’s cleaner, and the layout makes better use of page space: all my settings and tools appear above the fold.
2. I’m really fed up with Blogger’s WYSIWYG editor- if you’re particular about layout and formating of your posts and you don’t know HTML, Blogger will drive you nuts. It’s fine for quick, down and dirty posting, or if you write blog posts without embedding a lot of media. The WordPress editor has a lot more bells and whistles, and to me it seems like the formatting is more accurate and stable.
3. WordPress allows you to easily create pages. It’s more than just a blogging platform, it’s a publishing platform. You can actually create an entire website using WordPress as a CMS. Check out magazine.wsj.com, which is powered by WordPress. Amazing huh?
4. I’m a contributor to the corporate R&R Partners blog, Moving Minds, which is powered by WordPress. Because some of my posts go to both blogs, my life is going to be a lot simpler just using one platform instead of two.

I don’t want to completely bash Blogger, there are a few things I’ll miss. For instance, I’ll miss the simple Reading List on my Blogger dashboard, which would feed all the latest posts from my blog roll in an orderly and easy navigable list. I haven’t found a similar feature in WordPress, but maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. WordPress does offer something called Tag Surfer, which allows me to search other blogs that use the same post tags that I’m using. That’s going to be great for discovering new blogs.

Also, one thing that I’m actually pretty sore about is not being able to implement my Google Analytics code into WordPress. WordPress does offer it’s own analytics, so I’m not completely in the dark about my traffic, but this was still a big let down. Blogger gives you access to your blog’s HTML, WordPress doesn’t. I have seen several WordPress plugins available that are supposed to allow me to use my Analytics code, but I still don’t have a comfort level with that yet.

So I feel like Blogger was a good set of training wheels, but WordPress is the big girl’s bike. What blogging platform are you using? How do you like it? Leave a comment and tell me about it.

Local Newspaper found me on Facebook

First, a confession. I am a Rennie. I go to Renaissance Fairs, I’m part of a guild and I make my own costumes and wear them. So aside from the computer interwebz nerd that you know me for, behold I’m also one of those fantasy nerds- Lord of the Rings, role playing, ren fairs, etc. At fair I’m known as Eibhleann of the Fae. Ok, stop laughing.

So, my fantasy nerd channeled my interwebz nerd and posted photos from last year’s Age of Chivalry fair to the AoC Facebook Page. An assistant managing editor from View Newspapers, a local Las Vegas neighborhood newspaper, found those photos and contacted me through Facebook. A week later, an article was posted with one of my photos and comments I made that were taken solely from the exchange we had in Facebook messages: Fairy guild gives fair a touch of fantasy

I thought that was pretty cool. Though now I wonder if it was such a good idea to have probably the most ridiculous photo I’ve ever taken get published in a paper. Just goes to show that you can’t post photos online unless you want the whole world to see them. Lol. Any press is good press, right?

Social Media News 10/2/09

Obviously the biggest social news this week was the release of Google Wave through 100,000 invites. Google also announced that some of those 100,000 invited users would receive Wave invites that they could pass along to their friends, much like how Gmail was first released. This started an invite frenzy, with websites going live that connect invite haves and have-nots (i.e. googlewaveinvites.com), users on twitter promising invites to other users if they follow and RT, as well as actual Ebay listings of invites for sell. And no, I didn’t receive my invite in the first round, I’m trying to source my contacts to get one.

 

Social network advertising continues to demonstrate better engagement, while the industry news sources continue to report the ineffectiveness of CTR. A new study shows that 85% of the clicks on banner ads are generated by just 8% of the total internet population. Only 16% of internet users click on banner ads at all. For the first time ever in a major market, online advertising has outpaced TV ad spend in the UK. And studies show that more users are connecting to social networking sites via mobile web.

 

Last but not least, Twitter began to release it’s geolocation API feature this week. This new feature allows third party apps to display tweets and the exact location of the user when the tweet was sent. It doesn’t seem to be available to the larger public just yet, as some bugs need to be worked out among the third party developers.

 

 

Mashable

If Your Twitter Followers Really Love You, They’ll Create a Fantar

STUDY: Social Media Leads to More Time Spent on Email

Ad Age

What to Measure? Only 16% of the Web Is Clicking Display Ads

Turn Your Web Photos Into Product Placements

In a First, Web Advertising Outpaces TV in U.K.

How to Mobilize Your Social Media

Red Robin Calls in a Facebook Favor From 1,500 Fans

Microsoft Wants to Help Marketers Manage Messy Social Media

Brandweek

Smartphone Social Networking Surges

Ad Tracking Widely Opposed

Social Net Ads: Fewer Clicks, More Engagement

 

TechCrunch

Confirmed: Twitter Has Begun Geolocation Rollout

Sidebar Will Deliver Personalized Mobile Apps And Content To Your Phone

NPR Gets $3 Million Grant For Hyper-Local News Initiative

Design Community Decorati Will Be Your Personal Interior Decorator

First There Was Pirate, Now Facebook Comes In Latin

Easy Does It: Google Friend Connect One-Ups Facebook Connect’s Install Wizard

Blogs & Other News Source

Amazon Settles Kindle Deletion Lawsuit For $150,000

C4 notes: Developers cool towards iPhone projects

US to share Internet review amid worldwide growth

Apple’s Tablet Could Be Print Industry’s Lifeboat

SAP, Salesforce.com Make Apps With Google Wave

YouTube a star as US online video viewing soars: comScore

China Unicom Ready To Sell iPhone in October

How desperate are you for a Google Wave invite?

Desperate enough to try following a potential spam account on Twitter?
One of many Twitter accounts promising invites if you follow and RT

Desperate enough to buy one on eBay?
eBay listings for Google Wave invites

Know of any other insidious ways you can try to potentially get an invite? Leave a comment and tell me.

David Ogilvy: We Sell or Else. It’s all about measurement.

Found this gem of a video on YouTube, a message from the “Father of Advertising”:

Not too sure about the context of this video, why it was produce and for whom (so if you know, leave a comment.). And perhaps we could get hung up on the debate of direct marketing vs. branding/general advertising, but that’s not the point of this video.

I believe what Mr. Ogilvy was trying to convey is that advertising must go hand in hand with measurement. Why do any kind of advertising if you couldn’t measure the results with accuracy? That’s just throwing money away.

All components of an ad must be considered for their individual and collective impact on conversion. Ogilvy is famous for his print ad layout, the most traditional layout of one of the most traditional forms of advertising, taught in marketing text books across the globe. Visual, headline, caption, body copy, signature. The Ogilvy layout works, because it’s optimized based on how consumers process information on a page. And further, each component of this layout can be independently optimized and tested for response and conversion.

Multi-variate testing, as with online banner ads and landing pages, would be David Ogilvy’s dream come true. I believe that those of us in interactive advertising are blessed, truely blessed, because everything we do can be measured. I can tell you how many people clicked on my banner, how many people visited my page, how many people watched my video on YouTube, how many people subscribe to my blog. And I can tell you how long they spent here, and where they went after they left, and whether they bought something. How many people saw your billboard? Online advertising is the envy of all others for the precision of measurement.

R.I.P. Mr. David Ogilvy.

I love this commercial.

Social technology is awesome. I don’t believe we are erroding our social skills with increasing adoption of social media, I believe we are getting more out of our social life thanks to it.

This commercial is a current favorite of mine, but I still hate AT&T    …and who is Tyler Hansbrough anyway?

Social Media News 9/18/09

New features and services announced by Google and Facebook this week. On the Google side, the much anticipated Google Doubleclick Ad Exchange (advertising), plus Google Data Liberation (download data from Google services like Gmail, Blogger, Calendar, etc) , and Google Fast Flip (visual news reader). Watch out for reports from beta testers on Google Wave (revolutionary communications platform) set to launch for 100,000 invited users on September 30th. I’m keeping my fingers crossed to be selected as one of the 100,000 lucky users!

In the Facebook world, I’m loving the new @Mentions feature  (a Twitter-like tagging feature enabled in status updates) that debuted last week. Twitter/Facebook users can also take advantage of SocialToo’s app that allows tagging of Twitter users in Facebook status updates.  A new program, Facebook Prototypes, was announced this week- it has been described as the Facebook equivalent to Google Labs.

Mashable
Fast Flip: Google Launches a New Way to Read the News
STUDY: 57% of TV Viewers Use the Web Simultaneously
HOW TO: Get Your Data Out of Google
Bing Launches Visual Search
Google Still Dominates in Search Engine User Testing
One in Five Tweets Are Free Brand Advertising
New York Times Latest Victim of Malware Ad Injections
Tag Twitter Users in Your Facebook Status Updates With SocialToo
HOW TO: Use Facebook’s @Mentions Status Tagging
Facebook Prototypes: Facebook’s Version of Google Labs
Google Launches New Ad Marketplace; Display Ads Will Never Be the Same
Is Google Wave Ready for Its Debut?


Wired
Seeqpod-like SongBeat 360 Charges for Search, Not Music


Ad Age
How to Spot Social-Media Snake Oil
Your ‘Social Netiquette’ Questions Answered
What Adobe’s Omniture Acquisition Means for Advertising


TechCrunch
Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us
TC50: Clicker Wants To Be TV Guide For The Web


Blogs
7 Moves Facebook Has Made to Outflank Twitter in the Last 6 Months
Filtering the Real-Time Web