Feed: "Social Media" via Carlos Lorenzo in Google Reader - AggScore: 83.9

How did Facebook all started?

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

The Rave of Facebook

Not long, about 3 years ago, Friendster was still like the hottest social networking site locally. I could still remember how we used to tell our friends to write us testimonials on Friendster, comparing how many friends and testimonials we had. But right now, people mention only ‘Hey, I just poked you!’. Apparently, this ‘poke’ application was a hit for Facebook. When everyone first started using Facebook, ‘poking’ was the most common thing that happens almost every other min. The next hit was the games that Facebook offered. Examples of such are Restaurant City, Bejeweled Blitz, Mafia Wars and many more.  In my opinon, these may be like any other games, nothing extraordinary about them, but it’s how Facebook amazingly link friends and games together that made it a hit. Facebook enables friends around the world to play together as teams and challenge each other in games. It beats playing games on your own and challenging lifeless computer. What’s more, you still can keep in contact with your friends across the world.

But this is not all that Facebook can offer today.

Facebook as Social Media

Right now, many companies are using Facebook for customer service, an excellent method in cutting cost and boosting revenue, without having to sacrifice its reputation. 

A light note to share and prove my point. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporebusinessnews/view/446807/1/.html

Indeed, using Social Media is a smart choice to save cost on printing, employment and etc. But that’s definitely not the main factor in choosing Social Media. These big players see that Social Media is massively reaching out to both potential and unintended audiences. For a fraction of the cost, the audiences reached is probably a million times more? Though there might be unintended audeience, what’s the harm? Wouldn’t it be good too to let them know as well? It could be good and bad pubilcity, but there is still pubility, which is what that matters. As a business player, what will be your call on that? Won’t you greatly accept and hit on this new marketing tool too?

Rupert Murdoch, media titan whose News Corp empire includes The Times, The Sun, and many other dailies, announced last week that his organization was going to take the strategic step of blocking news content from the websites of his various newspapers such that they do not appear on Google Search.

Since then, he has been derided by the online community, including the founders of Twitter and LinkedIn, for what they perceive to be his short sighted approach to the “open” internet community.  I’m not so sure his approach is so wrong for the following reasons:

1)  Those making the most noise are those that stand to lose the most from the removal of credible news sources.  The majority of tweets are news headlines, endlessly retweeted, and not generating a dime of income for the source.

2)  Similarly, News Corp doesn’t stand to lose any money in the near term.  Their subscribers still have access to their content and I doubt that their income from online advertising is high enough to be of significance.

3)  Those online news parasites have little loyalty and will switch from News Corp to Fox to whoever gives them free info.  If all news channels start to charge, then this will get harder and harder, effectively marginalizing sites like Twitter, Youtube, etc…that are almost dependent on them to keep their followers.

4)  This brings us to a key point.  If other media organizations follow suite and bar their content from Google searches, and open their sites only to subscribers, then we might really see a fundamental change in the nature of the industry.  I’m not saying these media giants will ultimately win the day, but at the very least, innovative models to deliver credible news content might start to spring up.

I’m neither for nor against this move as I get my news in various ways (usually paid).  However, those that draw similarities between the music industry and the news industry are sadly misinformed.  The music industry was riding upon a high margin business and what iTunes did was merely to make it more accessible to the layman.  The sheer volume of incremental sales justified the move towards a low price, high volume model.

News on the other hand, is an inherently low margin business.  How much do you pay for that daily?  $0.75?  How much lower do you think this can go?  Some newspapers are already free, relying on advertising to fund their operations.  Maybe this is the model of the future.  The weakness of these papers is usually in their commentary and analysis…but nowadays, everyone wants to be a critic or commentator so the days of commentators like William Safire are probably over.

Actually, I think that the future lies not in News Corp sized conglomerates but in large numbers of specialist newspapers/sites, most of whom may consist of a single person acting as reporter, copywriter and editor.  Aggregators can then subscribe to them to form the columns in a more traditional newspaper or e-zine.  Its happening already….don’t we have popular blogs that we subscribe to??

http://kulturekonomi.se/om-emma/

Heder åt min kollega och vän Emma Stenström som har en bloggmoral! Det borde fler ha. En förebild!

There are a number of things that are certain to piss me off (apologies for the language), my kryptonite if you will:

1. The over use of the word ’strategy’ in my industry
2. Calvin Harris
3. Blokes wearing flip flops
4. When people refer to digital is below the line

Now as you may know, it’s been nigh on 2 months since I last posted on here; I’ve been that busy, however 2 of my fatal four have compelled me to make a post this week 1.) Calvin Harris attempting to rationalise his appearance on x factor last week as some moral gesture for the good of music – I’m not even going to acknowledge that one… utterly bizzare.

However what I am going to blog about is people refering to digital marketing as below the line. I’ve had a conversation this week with people from ‘Above the Line’ backgrounds who refer to what I do as below the line. I do find this enormously frustrating because of the fact that the term is used as some dismissive reference. That’s not to say I have any issues with people in DM etc. or who would consider themselves as BTL specialists.

Digital can be Above the line – agencies like Dare, AKQA  or Glue I would consider digital above the line agencies i.e. agencies who at their core hold a strong sense of brand experience and creating these compelling brand experiences online – that’s not to say however that is all they do. I suppose for me the issue has always been how digital agencies and in fact the discipline itself is perceived. Old School marketers assume that their remit is to ‘own the brand’ etc. which I feel is too grand a leap for them to make particularly if you consider a brand’s perception from a search engine perspective in relation to a keyphrase they would like to rank for. Other  aspects include brand reputation online, website user experience, social media integration as well as rich engaging online ads.

I previously worked on a well known sports brand who when they ran asupporting TV campaign to support their online only programme only saw a moderate lift in traffic and engagement when compared with the social media strategy we implemented.

The debate will rage on no doubt as to ‘where digital fits’ and no doubt there are different agency models and indeed specialisms within digital marketing, however the one thing all aspects of digital marketing has in common is the fact that it is goal driven – be that SEO, UX design, online advertising etc. So maybe instead of debating if digital is above the line or below the line we should consider it over the line…
Rant over.

November 20th, 2009 | by Adam Ostrow

Some of the recent numbers being put up by live video events on the Web are giving TV a run for its money. Take for example the New Moon Premiere, which attracted 3 million viewers in total, a U2 concert on YouTube that reached 10 million, and the red carpet event for This Is It, which saw 1.8 million tune in.

Today, we have yet another big number to share, this time from last night’s Ustream premiere of 50 Cent’s movie “Before I Self Destruct.” In total, more than 255,000 users watched at least part of the 90 minute screening, which included the hip hop mogul answering questions live from fans.

Although not as huge as some of the other events, it’s perhaps more significant. As opposed to debuting the movie on MTV, VH1, or BET, 50 took to the Web and reached an audience of comparable scale to what he might have found on TV. Granted, he’ll still use other mediums for promotion, but in light of his numbers and those of others, expect a lot more events like the Self Destruct premiere in the near future.

That’s not to say the Internet is going to be as destructive to television as it’s been to print media, but we’re certainly starting to see it emerge as a strong compliment, if not competitor, to more traditional means of video distribution. We knew this was coming, but a combination of bandwidth proliferation and integration with social sites seems to be pushing live video to a tipping point. And where 50 goes, the money typically follows.

 

Image by [JP] Corrêa Carvalho – يوحنا بولس via Flickr

As previously seen in Biznology:

Social media is often compared with traditional communication vehicles such as newspapers, radio and TV as antagonists where the new replaces or challenges the old. The blackout in parts of South America last week showed a different side of this relationship: a symbiosis between radio broadcasts and microblogging. I was in Brazil visiting family and friends during that event and witnessed what a major power outage looks like in the era of social media and our increasing dependency on electricity.

As a matter of fact, I had the unusual, err, opportunity of being in two of the top five power outages in history: I was in Toronto when the Northeast blackout of 2003 happened, and in São Paulo during the Brazil and Paraguay outage last week. The one in 2003, of course, happened before the “broadcast yourself” era, with plenty of daylight left, so my major concern back then was finding a pub with cold beer and some food.

Last week, the blackout started at 11 pm, and most people had no idea of how widespread the problem was. Try to imagine a city like São Paulo, with 18 million people and 6 million cars in its metropolitan area, with no traffic lights on a hot summer night:

São Paulo during the 2009 Blackout – Photo by Andreia Reis, Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0

Of course, as power was restored a few hours later, the other media channels started to catch up with the event, as can be seen in aggregators such as BlogBlogs. One of the interesting stories was that of a married man stuck in his lover’s house, as the garage door was power operated (article available in Portuguese only, sorry).

This fantastic video posted by Tiago Compagnoni in YouTube registered the whole blackout event is fast motion:

“She is not a girl, and she is not a pinup.”

Susan Estrich, Columnist, on Sarah Palin, saying she hates defending her, but is annoyed at Newsweek for featuring her on the cover in running shorts.

“I am applauding Bebo …I don’t understand the  logic for the others not following suit.”

Jim Gamble, of Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), saying social networking sites need a help button for children to report predators  bullying.and bullies

“we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good,”

Barack Obama, conceding that the Copenhagen summit would not come up with a binding agreement on global warming.

“A portable device with an appropriate wifi connection, and a very powerful browser.”

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt’s definition of a Netbook, in a broad discussion of the future of the internet.

“Huh? If you’re already a Fortune 100 company, ‘brand awareness’ is probably not your biggest problem.”

Fast Company, commenting on a study by Weber Shandwick, that says only about 3/4 of Fortune 100 companies have Twitter accounts, few follow best practices, and most are chasing after brand awareness.

“Would I be cynical if I said I believed Apple was secretly fueling the hype by leaking bits and pieces of information to raise expectations? Does it matter?”

Linda Vandevrede, at ValleyPRBlog, on the role of PR in hype, or whether it evolves in some ‘organic’ way.