After four days I am finally back online! Lasy Thursday I was trying to upgrade to a newer version of WordPress and something went wrong. Luckily I had backed up my database before I started the install, but when I uploaded the database, Wordpress could not see it.
After many hours on the phone with BlueHost (who were great) I was finally able to configure Wordpress so that the site was back. But to make matters worse I could not log in!
Recently I wrote about my new iPhone and how that Yelp was well positioned to take advantage of the mobile component of social networks. eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.
Some of the early mobile social numbers are pretty impressive. MySpace recorded over 7 million unique visitors to MySpace Mobile in the US in the six months since launch. “It wasn’t until we rolled out m.myspace.com that we got a sense of how powerful demand was for MySpace on cell phones,” Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development for MySpace, told eMarketer.
Harris Interactive reported in its April 2008 issue of Youth Trends that more than half of US girls ages 13 to 15 used social networking Web sites in 2007. Overall more than twice as many children ages 10 to 12 reported using social networking sites in 2007 as did in 2006.
US teen girls take a much more active role within social networks than boys according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the National Commission on Writing conducted from September to November 2007.
This last month or so has been crazy with travel and deliverables, but I anticipate that I will be back on a normal posting schedule this month.
A couple of interesting things I have come across recently.
For those of you who have ever wondered if social media will ever work in your ‘boring” industry then you need to read 97th Floor blog. Every Friday Chris and Mat take a traditional industry and illustrate hwo you can use viral marketing in that space. Some of there posts include virial marketing ideas for a Dry Cleaner, Appliances Company, and Preschool.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams is adding some social media components to Dilbert.com (http://www.dilbert.com). In the “Cartoon Mashups” section, Adams has opened his strip to the editorial choices of his audience. Now you get to replace Adams’s punch line with your own, and the community will vote for the funniest punch lines.
Some of the other social media additions to the site are:
There are very few communities that are as devoted as the “Twitters”. A lot of people (including me) use Twitter, but how big is it compared to the other major networks? Well according to Heather Hopkins at Hitwise Twitter is still very niche.
On the positive side traffic year on year to Twitter is up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.
As the following chart from Hitwise illustrates, the growth has been slow and steady with an acceleration in the past few weeks.
Compete has some interesting data on the top Wikipedia articles for February and March.
It is quite apparent that Wikiepdia is the destination of choice for people looking for more information about people in the news as Eliot Spitzer demonstrates. Spitzer’s Wikiepedia page saw a 5316% increase in views after news of his scandal broke.
Most popular articles on Wikipedia during February 2008.
We have been playing around with creating some video files for client sites and submitting them to the social video sites. One site that we have found very useful in the submission process is Tube Mogul. TubeMogul is the video equivalent of SocialPoster, but the big difference is that TubeMogul has a dashboard that lets you know how many people viewed your video across the different video sites. This is a very cool tool and it the biggest reason that we use Tube Mogul.
Before you start shooting your first video here are a couple of optimization types to keep in mind from WebVideoUniverse.com.
I recently upgraded by phone to an iPhone. I have been a long-time Verizon user, but I wanted a phone with a real browser and Verizon doesn’t have anything that browses as good as the iPhone.
It seems that I am not the only one who wanted the iPhone for web surfing. According to Internet Retailer:
A survey by Viewpoints.com, a rating and review site, found 48% of iPhone users frequently use their iPhones to look up specific information online, compared with 5% of other cell phone users. And 45% of iPhone owners frequently use their phones to browse online, compared with only 6% of users of other brands of cell phones.
Heather Dougherty at Hitwise had an interesting post last week about people are spending more time on video web sites and search engines and social networks are now accounting for an equal share of referred traffic to these sites.
What I found most interesting was this graphic about the demographics of the YouTube audience.
Video web sites have started to attract a more mainstream (older) audience. For the 4 weeks ending April 12, 2008 the percentage of YouTube’s traffic of 18-24 year old declined from 30% to 21%. The biggest percentage jump in traffic came from the over 55 age group. Who would have thought that 20% of YouTube’s traffic came from those over the age of 55?