twitter lists « Five Feet of Dynamite

Social Media News 11/25/09

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

(Covering the social news from 11/14 through 11/24)

With 2010 just on the horizon, we’re beginningto hear social media predictions and the new strategies that advertisers will be rolling out next year. Here’s a quote I liked from Chris Bruzzo, VP of brand, content and online at Starbucks: ”People are saying this is going to be a big year for social media and we’re a microcosm of that. Whereas last year it was a curiosity, this year it’s a core part of the program.” Starbucks is planning to cut back on its TV spend and invest quite a bit more in social media. Read about their strategy in this story from Ag Age.

LinkedIn has been busy working on sweeping changes to its features and services. Earlier in the month Social Media News reported LinkedIn’s plans for a homepage redesign and the new ability to link Twitter with LinkedIn updates. On Monday, LinkedIn announced that it will open its API to third party developers, a strategy that has been critical to the rapid success of other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Last week, LinkedIn announced a new program for advanced group pages, called Custom Groups. Currently, LinkedIn group pages are little more than discussion forums. With Custom Groups, organizations can transform their group page to a central, multimedia social hub that will allow groups to post videos, white papers and feeds. The program costs $50,000 a month, however LinkedIn will include advertising support to drive traffic to the custom groups. Lastly, LinkedIn and Microsoft are joining forces to sync Outlook contacts with LinkedIn information. In the 2010 release, Outlook users will be able to quickly view LinkedIn user activity and information of their contacts as a subpane of the email window. These are very smart updates to the LinkedIn product offering, and will ensure that LinkedIn becomes an even more powerful business social networking tool for individuals as well as businesses and organizations.

A couple small updates on the Twitter front:

The Twitter Geolocation API has been officially released, however we won’t see anything new on Twitter.com just yet. For now, the release is significant for several third party developers that have built applications that will utilize the Geolocation feature, like Foursquare and Seesmic.

Twitter has also made a small improvement to its new Twitter Lists feature, allowing users to add descriptions to their Lists. It’s a nice-to-have, but personally I can’t wait to see Twitter roll out the ability to search Lists. I believe the lack of a search feature is the single most crippling disadvantage for Twitter Lists.

HootSuite is a Twitter publishing and management tool preferred by many, including myself. New updates launched this week allows HootSuite users to connect their Facebook and LinkedIn accounts for the first time. In addition, HootSuite users can create new columns to pull in their Twitter Lists feeds.

YouTube also released new updates this week:

YouTube Direct is a new platform for professional news organizations to solicit and utilize video content from citizen journalists. It’s an API that news media can incorporate on their existing websites to allow individuals to submit video coverage around current events. The news organization’s moderate can preview submitted material on a backend interface, then choose whether to approve the material to be linked from their site. Get the details from MediaPost.

Google has matched its speech recognition technology with YouTube’s caption feature to unveil a new automated video captioning service. Laurie Sullivan from MediaPost explains how the new service will have a big impact on SEO.

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday!

Social Media News 11/7/09

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Welcome to the Social Media News double-hitter! This week’s post will also cover last week’s headlines in social media. For the first time since I’ve been writing the Social Media News, I missed last week’s recap due to illness as well as being out of town. So here’s a two-for-one post to make up for it.

Twitter’s new List feature has been the talk of the town in social media during the past two weeks. I first made mention of the new feature in the 10/23 SMN post. Since then, there’s been thousands of articles and blog posts written up about Lists. Some of my favorites are these: Twitter Lists: FAQ and Strategies, Twitter Lists and Real-Time Journalism, 4 Ways News Organizations are Using Twitter Lists, and The Brilliance of Twitter Lists and Suggestions for Improvement. Twitter Lists are fantastic for grouping tweeps based on interest or profession, organizing various Twitter streams into topic categories, and allowing users to quickly access specific tweeps without having to be a follower. More over, an unexpected benefit from Lists is the creation of another way to judge popularity, authority and/or influence of every Twitter user: each Twitter profile displays how many times a user has been “Listed”. In addition to how many followers one may have, the number of Lists that a user has been listed on gives us a quantitative value of their Twitter social status.

Lists have been praised as the most useful improvement ever made on Twitter. However, the TwitterPeek is a new gadget hailed as one of the most useless Twitter tools of all time. The TwitterPeek is a small, smartphone-sized device meant for one thing, and one thing only: connect you to Twitter. It doesn’t do anything that just about any smartphone can’t do, and I believe the price tag is a little steep for a one trick pony: $99 for six months of service ($8/month after that), or $199 for a lifetime service plan. I much rather have a new Coach wallet, thanks.

On Wednesday Apple announced that it’s iTunes App Store has reached 100,000 iPhone apps. But as ReadWriteWeb reports, new data from AppsFire reveals that of those 100,000 available apps, only about 20% of them are currently used. The other 80% of apps are not actively installed on iPhones, iPods or iTouch devices. Classic 80/20 rule. Click here for the long-tail graph from AppsFire.

Following the news of Bing and Google’s deals with Twitter to include tweets in search result a few weeks ago, Google announced a new Google Labs experiment its calling Google Social Search. Here’s the idea: you create a social graph on your Google user profile by linking all of your social networking accounts like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed as well as Google products like YouTube, Picasa and Blogger. Once your social graph is complete, information from those networks will be integrated into Google search results. When you search Google for a product, service, destination, or anything else, recommendations and comments from your friends, family and other contacts would be displayed alongside the normal Web results on the search page. In this way, the Google search engine becomes a recommendation engine. If this idea becomes mainstream, it will be a game-changer for SEO and SEM marketers, as organic search listings will compete against word of mouth from the user’s social circle. Watch the demo video and get all the details straight from the Google blog, and be sure to check out this great article from ClickZ: Social Media, Meet Search.