"As a longtime squinter at Delicious clones, I was surprised this week to see a couple of social bookmarking-type tools that actually seemed quite well-built and distinctive. Will making a product snazzier make it mainstream? Not necessarily. But Clipboard and Mural.ly both caught my jaded eye."
"It’s become clear that social media sites like Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram have ushered in visual marketing as a new breakout trend for 2012...if you want real results, you have to show it...it really looks like that today 'a picture is worth a thousand words.'"
"Gadget lovers are eagerly awaiting news from Apple's media event in San Francisco on Wednesday, when the company is widely expected to introduce the iPhone 5 after months of rumors. Wall Street analysts — and economists too — will be paying close attention. That's because a new iPhone could provide a huge revenue windfall for the world's most valuable company. It could also lift business for related firms such as wireless carriers, suppliers and accessories sellers."
"Today is Amazon's turn. The Seattle-based company is holding an event today in Santa Monica, California, where it is expected to launch its new Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablet. An ad, which aired last night, showed the new Kindle e-reader and new Fire."
"Social media is here to stay but Connolly sees Facebook and Twitter as less relevant for the next generation in terms of restaurants. People will adapt those sites for the long-term, 'like keeping in touch with family, grandkids,' they won’t be searching on them, he predicts.Young people will create their own next-generation social media technology. Whatever form it takes, it will remain a digital form of word-of-mouth, which essentially is what social media really is."
"...when perhaps the most secretive company in tech holds an event, everyone thinks they know what's going to happen -- but no one knows exactly what's going to happen...'It's like the Super Bowl and the Oscars of technology all rolled into one,' Ritchie [editor-in-chief of iMore, an Apple-centric blog] said.
Well, yesterday was a relatively busy day out there! GoDaddy's outage was big news, but Medium (brought to you by the founders of Twitter) and Oscar Mayer's new campaign made waves as well - and there's plenty more to keep you busy reading. Without further ago, here are the top news & views you missed yesterday:
"Measuring whether [social media] efforts are successful is difficult because there's no immediate return. But this anecdote about shoppers at Target shows why investing in social media is worthwhile for retailers...research determined that fans of Target on Facebook were 97 percent more likely to spend at Target, and friends of fans were 51 percent more likely than the average population to spend at the retailer."
"With more than two-thirds of buying decisions now informed by online reviews, merchants are being forced to take a closer look at how they should handle customer feedback when it’s posted online...to find out how merchants should be dealing with these issues, we spoke to five experts in the field and asked what businesses should consider when managing their online reviews."
"Have you ever wished you could tweet from somewhere else in the world, without having to actually go there? The arctic circle? The great pyramids of Egypt? Or how about the Bermuda triangle? Well, now it seems like you can. A little website entitled “Please Don’t Stalk Me” allows any Twitter user to alter the location data attached to their tweets."
"News broke recently that Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone had launched a new social media network centered around something we really love: sharing quality content...posting access to curate collections on Medium is currently limited to 'friends and family' of the founders. As a Beta Member, I am able to view and vote on content, which currently includes the boards “Been There, Loved That,” a collection of gorgeous images from around the world. Did I mention they were gorgeous?"
"Many people... [have] heard the lottery slogan, 'All it takes is a dollar and a dream.' Now comes an actor, comedian and writer, seeking to make his way across the country in the next two weeks with only a dream and, oh, yes, instead of a dollar, a trailer filled with 3,000 pounds of a new bacon.
The actor, Josh Sankey, will embark this week on a promotion for the Oscar Mayer division of Kraft Foods that is being called the Great American Bacon Barter. The promotion includes a Web site, baconbarter.com; social media like Twitter; and a public relations campaign."
"GoDaddy, the domain registrar and Web hosting company, experienced outages Monday, perhaps taking millions of websites down as a result...a quick call to the company's customer service line resulted in a voice message stating that the company is aware of issues involving several services, including web hosting and emails. The company suggest following its Twitter page for updates...Twitter accounts thought to be associated with the hacking group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attack."
Is it much of a surprise that Apple news and analysis surrounds their big September 15th unveil of their new products? Not for this fella. That being said, the Planned Parenthood case study and Flipboard news were heavily clicked by my social audience, and I thought Flipboard's foray into commerce could potentially be a move that resonates for a long time to come. Here's what you missed this weekend:
"Is there really a reason for Google and Apple to be scared of the on-going success of Amazon? Apple has been in the mobile business for a while. Google, on the other hand, is a well known software company. And what of Amazon?"
"Crutch words are those expressions we pepper throughout our language as verbal pauses, and sometimes as written ones, to give us time to think...quite often, they do little to add meaning, though. Sometimes we even use them incorrectly. Almost always, we don't need them at all, which doesn't mean we won't persist in using them. Here's our list of frequently used crutches, and what your crutch of choice has to reveal about you."
"When Planned Parenthood first learned that Susan G. Komen was going to cut its funds, there were many pleas made to regain the commitment of nearly $700,000 in funding for 19 affiliates. What exploded when the news went public is a valuable lesson for any nonprofit harnessing social media and traditional media."
"Pandora shares took a pounding on Friday as Apple is reportedly in negotiations with record labels to license content for a Pandora-esque music-streaming service. That's more bad news for a company that already had a lot of it. Its advertising-supported model isn't yet profitable, and its prospects aren't great given the competition...Apple's latest move is just another reminder to Fool analyst Anand Chokkavelu that he recommends Pandora's service but not its stock."
"Flipboard, known for its beautiful “social magazine” on tablets and phones, has just announced the launch of its first in-magazine store on both iOS and Android, in partnership with Levis. This is Flipboard’s first step into ecommerce, and given the popularity of the service, adding a shopping layer could leave a massive impact on the company’s future. Flipboard calls this move a “social catalog,” and it’s especially telling given how monotonous online shopping has become, where long pages of visually-uninteresting grids are standard."
English: The "Made for iPhone" emblem appearing on Apple-approved iPhone accesories. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
"Wed., Sept. 12 -- the long-awaited day Apple fans are expecting to finally see the debut of the sixth-generation iPhone, unofficially dubbed the "iPhone 5" -- is now less than five days away. The highly-anticipated event, scheduled to take place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, is also expected to introduce a new "iPad Mini" to Apple's tablet lineup...here are 15 features and tech specs we're expecting to see in the new iPhone at its unveiling this week."
"Mixer is a new social mobile application for iPhone that lets you converse with people on a location...users can post text and photos to the local feed and others can comment. Via a nice visual interface you can zoom out from your locality to join conversations far away or zoom back in to your neighbourhood. But when you leave a location where a conversation happened you can continue to converse with those people."
"Search #NYFW and the word “diet” right now on the social media site and you’ll find lots of tweets linking back to the CNN article mentioned above. But if you go back a bit further, you’ll find women tweeting about their actual diets. Just yesterday, fashion stylist Elizabeth Tran tweeted “So my one-cube-of-cheese-every-hour diet starts tomorrow. Well, I think it will…#lesigh #NYFW“ Let’s not forget this shockingly sad picture tweeted out almost a month ago by PR rep Keisha McCotry. Yep, you read that right: a bowl of broccoli and a glass of water is her dinner. She told CNN she began her fashion week diet in July, and that, 'Perception is reality in this industry, and unfortunately, you have to look the look to get the clients.'"
"New York Fashion Week is one of the fashion industry's biggest events of the year, the culmination of months of planning, organizing, schmoozing ... and dieting? When it comes to the biannual fashion shows, which kick off Thursday, models aren't the only ones looking to drop a few pounds before hitting the tents. Some publicists, bloggers and fashion editors have been counting calories for weeks in anticipation of the week-long event, where to some, networking and being seen are just as important as the collections debuting on the runways."
"These are a few of the many benefits offered to you for taking your precious time and creating a great piece of content, such as a case study. One of the benefits I’d like to discuss in much more depth is the social link bait benefit. But before I get into it, I want to just make sure everyone understands what social link bait is."
"...today, the company officially unveiled the newest version of its API, v1.1, and updated its “Developer Rules of the Road” and display requirements.One of the more notable changes we’ve seen so far, brought to our attention by Steve Streza’s tweet, is that developers will have until March 5, 2013 to switch over to the new version of the API. After that, v1.0 will be “kaput” — to use the technical term."
While it was easy to see the loss of XML coming — Twitter has slowly dropped support for XML in favor of JSON over the last year and a half — dropping support for RSS and Atom is a major shift. RSS and Atom are the two major formats for serving up web feeds. These feeds can include text, audio, video and other types of media. While most users use RSS as a way to subscribe to web content from a blog or podcast — the format can also be used as a way to subscribe to tweets. Since its inception, Twitter has allowed developers to access Twitter timelines and search queries using RSS. As a result, lots of social aggregators have used RSS as an easy way to pull in tweets alongside messages for other services.
The last 24 hours saw a nice mix of news, from Coca-Cola and The Walking Dead's major milestones to a hot new startup, a great piece on how to best leverage Google+ to make connections, and more. Let's get to it:
"Chain.ly is a community board that wants to impact the world by making Internet-driven connections less serendipitous. While Twitter hashtags or Reddit campaigns can sometimes lead to success, Chain.ly hopes it will be a go-to platform for people to find the help they need...co-founder Bruno Ligutti added, 'We want to position Chain.ly as the Craigslist meets Kickstarter — not a fundraising website but a social platform for asking for help.'"
"After a long wait, Quora just arrived on Android today...Quora is launching the Android app simultaneously in Google’s Play store and Amazon’s appstore. The app allows you to do almost everything you can on the site."
"The untouched missing element in LinkedIn is the lack of any means of real-time communication...contrast this with Google+: people search terms and tags, come upon content-sharers whom they may not already be following and Circle us or comment on our posts."
"AMC’s The Walking Dead just passed the 10 million fan mark on Facebook. That’s a big number — especially for a television show on cable TV.To celebrate the event, AMC created an awesome graphic to thank fans of the show. A pitch-perfect homage to the movie poster from 2009′s The Social Network, the graphic even has its own tagline: 'You don’t get 10 million fans without eating a few.'"
"Twitter announced a new feature today that’s supposed to make it easier for publishers to embed a timeline of relevant tweets — the company describes it as a way for 'publishers, writers, developers, and any Twitter user to drop a rich, interactive piece of Twitter into their websites.'”
"Coca-Cola passed 50 million fans on Facebook shortly after 9 a.m. Tuesday...[it] is the first retail brand to hit this milestone. Disney, Converse and Starbucks, three of the other most popular retail brands, each have fewer than 40 million fans on Facebook at the moment."
"A new monthly delivery service, MistoBox, describes itself as “the BirchBox of the micro roasted coffee industry”...the company, which was founded by Connor Riley and Samantha Meis while in an entrepreneurship program at the University of Arizona, launched in June after just passing its Kickstarter goal of $9,000 in funding."
"In 2008, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Macworld Expo and shared what seemed like a startling statistic: “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year…People don’t read anymore.” Many are saying this statement could be seen as a foreshadowing of the explosive growth in visual content. But that wouldn’t really be accurate. Direct marketers have long known this; creating compelling visual content has been at the center of their world for years."
"In a study of the major countries in Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, 31 percent of smartphones were found to be running Android. Apple’s iOS has about 19 percent of the market with Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Phone rounding out the remaining shares."
"“The next 12 months are the make or break time for social media, but I do think the investments have been there. People have sizable communities and want to make them ROI [return on investment] positive. We will really see if the metrics prove one way or another,” said Maureen Mullen, New York University think tank Luxury Lab, or L2, director of research ."
"Nearly 50% of my Facebook friends are married, which adds up to 123 people total. Meanwhile, 20.1% or 51 of my friends are in a relationship, and 13 are engaged. All this information I now know thanks to a new “Facebook Report” by Wolfram Alpha, which will gift you with more knowledge than you could possibly ever want to know about yourself and your Facebook profile."
"Back in early August, there were reports that new CEO Marissa Mayer intended to do what Google's cofounders have always done: review every single new hire the company makes. Now, according to a Yahoo executive involved in hiring, Mayer is actually doing it....Yahoo has about 15,000 employees and it is hiring all the time, so this is no small task."
Welcome back to work, guys! Not surprisingly, there wasn't a tremendous wealth of news & views out there to curate from the long weekend, but here are some of the highlights you may have missed:
"The password management service My1Login offers a smart way to remember all of those passwords and key phrases by literally boiling them all down to one. Now it is also offering a Web page where visitors can find out why they might need a password manager and measure the strength of passwords they might consider to be safe."
"Marketo released an infographic recently with 5 steps to success using Instagram in your marketing. They are...Curate…Snap…#Hashtag…Engage…Repeat…[and one more,] Measure and Improve."
"In a lot of ways, a contact manager can incorporate new, innovative services to not only help users take a smarter approach to meeting new people but also transmit readily available information from social media profiles directly into that contact profile...here’s a breakdown of five applications that are breaking the barriers of the traditional contact managing system on the computer as well as mobile devices."
"First impressions are everything, but sometimes they creep up on you. As a job candidate, 86% of potential employers will look at your social profiles — even if you don’t explicitly share those links...Column Five Media put together an infographic [included below] of tips for using social media to make first impressions — and included a few things every job seeker should avoid."
"Entertainment continues to dominate the list of most popular Facebook pages, according to our PageData tool, which counts the number of fans added to a page daily. After Facebook’s own pages for its mobile app and main company page, the most Liked pages are those of entertainers, athletes, TV shows, games, and a few international brands."
"Facebook updated its site integrity system today in an effort to crack down on fake likes, a move that the company says will benefit legitimate users and page owners.The company says the improved automated efforts will detect and remove Likes obtained by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users or purchased mass Likes. While Facebook says it has always protected against these threats, the new system will specifically be tailored to identify and erase suspect Likes."
"No matter now compelling your content, how widespread your reach, how generous your reward, community attrition will be the undoing of any social media campaign leaving you to constantly rebuild sand castles at the foot of waves.To avoid this a brand of any size launching nay campaign must studiously walk through five stages:..."
"Brands wanting to connect with fans need to be even more creative about the content they post, especially if you plan to use Sponsored Stories. Your fans still want to look smart in front of their friends, share funny photos and feel like they have a connection to something larger than themselves. Even if you pay for that positioning, these rules still apply."
"Today, Bing announced and released ‘Friends’ Photos,’ a tool that allows you to search the social giant for specific pictures that your friends have uploaded....Bing’s recent redesign includes Facebook integration, but this new tool is a singular tool, unlike the right side-bar in the New Bing."
"Twitter launched a new certified products platform Wednesday. The program is initially launching with three verticals Twitter says are “based on the needs we see from partners every day” — Engagement Products, Analytics Products, and Data Reseller Products...the 12 partners launching today are Attensity, ExactTarget, HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, Sprinklr, SocialFlow, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, Topsy, DataSift, and Gnip."
"Google (GOOG) supposedly wants to sell a portion of its recent acquisition of Motorola, and has hired Barclays Plc (BCS) to do the dirty work of finding a buyer. Google wants to sell the “Home Business” division of the messy ex-techno-giant, which it acquired for $12.5 billion in May. Bloomberg opines that this unit might net about $2 billion."
"In another social-media first, President Barack Obama took to Reddit today to become the first sitting head of state to moderate the site's "AMA," or, ask me anything, series.
The chat lasted an hour, and got so much attention that it shut the site down during his post."
By all you know the drill: I share the stories y'all found most interesting over the last 24 hours. So if you disagree with the picks, you'll just have to comment/retweet/favorite things more tomorrow ;)
April Rudin of The Rudin Group shares her story, which isn't really an anti-social media rant as you might think. Instead, April shows how "social" has always been present in her life, and where she thinks "social" will be going in the near future.
While there hasn't been as much buzz around Flipboard lately, it's interesting to see how the adoption of their news aggregation apps haven't slowed down one bit - in fact, they're growing at a 300% clip.
Jason Keath of SocialFresh delivers a great piece (as always) summarizing a recent SocialFresh webinar, and outlines 8 steps to take to properly analyze social media shiny objects.
TechCrunch shares how SumAll, a data visualization firm, has launched SumAll Social Metrics, which can help a company track all of its social activity against KPIs such as web traffic and revenue. Another example of how the conversation is changing from how to get your company to engage, to how your company can monetize that engagement.
This Forbes piece by Dorie Clark (a writer you need to be following) on how to walk the fine line between representing yourself well online, and embarrassing your company. Dorie's tips are great ways any employee can start thinking about their own approach to social media.
Here are some best practices these apps employ in order to resonate:
#1: Make signing up easy. It's not just fitness apps that use Facebook Login to help drive easier sign-ups from mobile, but they are many cases of them doing it quite well.
#2: Make stories social. Fitness apps should add friend tagging, if it's relevant to their app. Nike gives a good example of this, allowing runners to tag who they're running with. On the whole, stories that tag others are more likely to be engaged with.
#3: Help users share achievements. Facebook offers explicit sharing functionality to Fitness apps (and apps in general), so app users can share milestones and other non-routine activity. RunKeeper is one example of an app using Facebook's explicit sharing API to ask users to post their completed activity, such as a new distance milestone.
#4: Make stories visual. Visual stories can often lead to better Facebook click through rates. Fitness apps can publish stories using the map layout for a more visually compelling narrative.
