social media advertising « Five Feet of Dynamite

Social Media News 4/12/10

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

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 News 3/29/10

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

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.