Archive for May, 2007
Social Media Links
There is a lot going on in the social media world. Some interesting blog posts that I have read over the last couple of days are:
Social Powered Search Comes To Life in 50 Matches is an interesting article by Pablo about 50matches.com which is a social powered search engine. What does that mean? 50 Matches only crawls websites that are voted by people on sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, & Delicious.
Mark Blair at SMO Blog has an article about MyBlogLog and their new tagging feature that identifies social media optimization as spamming.
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : May 30th, 2007
Facebook Gets Facelift
The #2 social networking site last week unveiled a new look with some pretty cool features. While MySpace gets all the media (and user) attention, Facebook has had a pretty good 12 months.
At the unveiling of Facebook Platform, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerman rattled of the following numbers (courtesy of Mashable.com).
General Growth
- More than 24 million active users
- More than 100,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
- An average of 3 percent weekly growth since Jan. 2007
- Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept. 2006
User Demographics
Filed under Brand Marketing, Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : May 29th, 2007
Social Marketing to IT Pros
Interesting news that Microsoft has launched a new niche social network called Aggreg8 aimed at IT professionals. Aggreg8’s launch comes on the heels of a study just released by Universal McCann and KnowledgeStorm in which participants said social networks are best used in a business environment for collaboration and knowledge sharing.
A few points from the survey:
- 45.3% of respondents have a profile on a social networking site.
- Over half of them have a profile on LinkedIn.
- Other social networking sites popular with tech pros are MySpace, Orkut and Ryze.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : May 24th, 2007
Using Blogs to Sell Books
I have just finished reading Timothy Ferriss’ new book, The 4-Hour Workweek. It is a very interesting look at how to put big chunks of your life on autopilot with everything from personal outsourcing to online businesses. What I like about the book was that Tim gave specific examples of how he managed to make the transition to a 4 hour work week.
So I found it very interesting that Steve over at Micro Persuasion wrote this very interesting post on how Tim used the blogosphere to sell his book.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : May 23rd, 2007
Not Dependant on Google
Google’s announcement last week that it was launching its Google Universal Search (GUS) interface once again has SEO’s running to see how this latest change impacts their rankings, and thus their traffic.
What GUS does in short is reduces the number of organic listings available on the home page. No longer is getting to the first page of Google good enough. Now you need to be in the top 5 or 6 positions as the rest will be taken by video and news.
As search for Chris Angel for example on Google brings up the following results. Notice the Metacafe videos that now occupy 3 of the top 5 positions.
Filed under Brand Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : May 22nd, 2007
Checking on MySpace News
An article at Techcrunch about MySpace news recently caught my eye.
MySpace news was supposed to be the social networking giant’s equivalent of Digg. Stories would be submitted and then users would vote on then similar to Digg. The articles with the most votes would appear on the home page.
But as Michael Arrington wrote “But the front page of MySpace news shows most stories with zero votes. Two stories have a single vote. None have more than that. Perusing through the various categories shows the same thing - page after page of stories with no votes or other evidence that anyone is visiting the site.”
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : May 21st, 2007
Everyone Loves User Generated Content
Interesting news from Jupiter Research that shows nearly half (49 percent) of online users have engaged with user-generated content (UGC) in the past month by actively creating or simply reading material posted by others. In a study titled “User-Generated Content: Strategies for Media Sites”, JupiterResearch reports that UGC is now a mainstream activity for millions of consumers.
According to the study, users under the age of 25 are especially active participants. Three-quarters of users 18 to 25 are reading or writing UGC, and few of them are passive participants.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : May 18th, 2007
Green Niche Social Networking Site Launches
The continued growth of niche social network site continues with the announcement that Care2, the largest green social media site added a new area to its Web site dedicated to healthy and sustainable living, with the first environmentally focused social news service.
According to the press release Care2 Green Living features C2NN—Care2’s popular social news service—now with a dedicated environmental focus, allowing members to submit breaking “green” stories and rank them based on popularity. As global warming and sustainable living issues hit the mainstream, more than 7 million members have joined the Care2 community – with a record 2 million members joining in the past year to learn, share and take action to improve the world around them.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : May 17th, 2007
B2B Not Fans of Social Marketing
Interesting note in B2B Online about a survey from InfoWorld Media Group and Palmer Research about how B2B marketers view social networks. The study showed that while 56% of marketers say they are members of online social communities, only 38% are members of business-related networks online.
What was most interesting was that 69% of executives feel social media networks are not important, while 31% indicated they are somewhat to extremely important. “Most users are not yet sold on the value of social networks said Paul Calento, senior VP-strategic development at InfoWorld.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : May 16th, 2007
An Interesting Week
It was a week where I was buried in client work, but some of the news I noticed was that Neil Patel from Pronet Advertising launched his own web site Quicksprout. I met Neil at the recent Elite Retreat in San Francisco, and Neil’s knowledge about social media sites like Digg is second to none.
Neil’s partner at Pronet is Cameron who recently launched his own web site. Both of these are on daily must-read list.
Two other sites I am enjoying is Seven Mile the blog of domain expert Frank Schilling. Frank is way ahead of the curve, and reading his blog is a great education. Another Frank Antonellis recently launched his SEO blog Seopranos.
Filed under Brand Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (4) : May 14th, 2007
