User-Controlled Media: Where You Need to Be - ClickZ. InShare0 Marketing, journalism, advertising, and media intersect at user-controlled media. How are you leveraging it to get yourself where you want to go? User-controlled media. That term sums up where marketing, journalism, advertising, and media intersect. Not unlike user-generated content (UCG), user-controlled media (UCM) is the media users control, leverage, rate and review, forward, tag, and ultimately decide if it's worth our time, our friends' time, and everyone's time. UCM gives a greater sense of what's really happening online and how it transforms our society, including marketing.
All marketers must ask themselves a new fundamental question before they launch any campaign: Is this UCM, direct marketing, or broadcast marketing? Direct marketing we know well. But because of our training, we lump everything into broadcast or direct marketing without considering the new category. A couple of real-life examples popped up this week. The UCM mantra applies to all online fundamentals.
Sharing Emails Via Social Networks. A third of Internet users visit social networking sites at least monthly, and 40 percent of email users visit social sites to gather product information and recommendations, according to a new study by Silverpop. The study "Emails Gone Viral: Measuring ‘Share-to-Social’ Performance," found that shared emails delivered an average increase in reach of 24.3 percent and this is set to increase as sharing becomes more mainstream. On average, social sharing leads to an additional 1 percent of opens.
The majority of opens and clicks of shared emails took place in the first couple of days following posting on a social site. On average, the last click on shared emails occurs about seven days after the initial share, with activity ranging from 1 to 44 days. While specific creative elements did not factor heavily into emails shareability, emails most frequently shared were more likely to feature a brand name or product in the subject line rather than a specific offer. User-Controlled Media: Where You Need to Be - ClickZ. Are Women Really Ignoring Social Network Marketing? Social media marketers have noticed the millions of women taking to social networks and blogging as a prime target. But research from Q Interactive presented at ad:tech Chicago may be causing marketers to rethink those efforts. According to the “Women’s Survey,” despite more than one-half of women active in social media visiting social networking sites at least daily, 74.8% reported not being influenced by social networks when it came to their purchase decisions.
A little more than one-fifth of respondents said they were somewhat influenced, and only a tiny 3.3% reported great influence on their purchase decisions by social networks. About 15% of respondents to the survey reported not using social networks at all. Further, the top social networking activities of responding female Internet users—who have been touted as a group highly likely to share product information with their online communities—were sending private messages to friends and sharing photos. Uganda Unveils Online Gorilla Tracking - Green Inc. Blog - NYTim.
A Web site where visitors can pay to track Ugandan gorillas will open at the end of September. The Uganda Wildlife Authority plans to introduce online gorilla tracking as a new initiative aimed at the global demand for conservation tourism. For a minimum donation of $1, subscribers will be able track the movements of individual gorillas through a custom-made Web site. Strategically placed cameras in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest will stream video footage of gorillas to audiences worldwide.
The service – scheduled to begin this month – will also allow users to “befriend a gorilla” on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. “The project aims to bring attention to the plight of gorillas,” said Lillian Nsubuga, a spokeswoman for the Uganda Wildlife Authority, “and any money raised will be put towards conservation efforts.” The online tracking initiative hopes to add an additional $700,000 a year. Permits for such journeys are often fully booked months in advance.
Business Implications of Facebook Lite: Advice for Social Media. Five Possibilities for the Future of Facebook - PC World. Now that Facebook has hit the 300 million members mark and shown that its free service can rope in dough, we have to wonder what will happen to the social networking giant ten years down the road. Here are five possibilities for the future of Facebook. Evolved Gaming Interactivity Facebook has already embraced the allure of interactive gaming -- almost to the point of obnoxious saturation. (Honestly, do you really want to see one more Mob Wars update?)
The gaming platform will likely evolve into a more graphics-heavy, MMO-type experience; a true utilization of Facebook's social networking abilities. More Aggressive Advertising Facebook reached "cash flow positive" status through its advertising. A Pointless Offshoot Imagine a Facebook phone, a Facebook OS, or a Facebook retail store. A Busy Catch-All A Brick Wall Social networking will eventually plateau, skid, and fall off a cliff.
Fallacious Celebrations of Facebook Fans - O'Reilly Radar. Publishing “top 10″ lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers’ eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: “Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans.” For the record, this list is topped by the White House with 327,592 fans, followed by the Marine Corps, Army, CDC, State Department, NASA, NASA JPL, Library of Congress, Air Force, and Environmental Protection Agency. Congratulations to all these hard-working agencies. But what exactly are we celebrating here? The fact that government agencies are embracing new technologies that the citizens they serve actually use? Are we applauding the government’s fan numbers? Still, the White House shouldn’t feel too bad about those stats.
But perhaps I’m being too harsh. If you think I’m joking about that, you probably have no business working with social media for the government. The Enemy Of Social Media | The Relationship Economy...... In an article on SmartBlog titled Making the case with Valeria Maltoni By Mary Ellen Slayter ask: At what level in an organization do you think tends to be the most resistance to using social media? More than resistance there are skepticism and sheer bandwidth issues. That’s why it’s so important to speak the language of business when describing social media. Listening will help you create a baseline for the business. Run a test case. Pick a niche, or a region where to test a simple implementation, and then come to the table with results from your activities. What are the three most common mistakes you see people make when pitching social media to senior management? Lack of strategy. Do you think different strategies are needed to sell social media at large, established organizations vs. small firms ?
Large organizations are more siloed and less organic [than smaller ones]. Where have you encountered the greatest resistance to social media in your organization? Google Docs – Good Polling Solution : Buzz Networker - As an avid Google fan, namely because they make things simple, easy to use and of course FREE :) One tool which I don’t think gets the same promotion is the forms facility. I have used this to do surveys on several occasions and it is so easy.
All you do is You can create a form from the Docs list or from any spreadsheet. Creating a form from your Docs list: Click New > FormIn the form template that opens, you can add any questions and options you’d like.Click Email this form once you’ve finished adding your questions.Add the email addresses of the people to whom you want to send this form.Click Send.
Creating a form from a spreadsheet: Click the Form drop-down menu and select Create a form.In the form template that opens, you can add any questions and options you’d like.Click Email this form once you’ve finished adding your questions.Add the email addresses of the people to whom you want to send this form.Click Send. But Google have now enhanced the form tool even more. iFixit: Apple Mac, MacBook, iPod, and iPhone Repair Parts. Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging: #1 Being Fake | I'd Rather B. I’ve decided to write a series of posts about what I consider to be the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging (because sins always seem more interesting than virtues). Basically, I’m preparing for some presentations on blogging, and I’m hoping to get some scrutiny and feedback on these ideas. I plan to cover each one of the sins in depth with separate posts over the course of the next two weeks.
My version of the seven deadly sins of blogging are as follows: being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive. Fake Hurts the Currency of the Blogosphere If there’s one advantage blogs have over other media, such as television, magazines, and even newspapers, it’s trust, because bloggers aren’t supposed to be fake. This sense of trust is key to the blog’s appeal. At the end of the day, trust is the only real currency in the blogosphere, and people who read blogs have the expectation that they’re getting at the truth — in whatever form the truth is to them. 205 Facebook apps created by brands *supercollider. Sure, today the trendiest kids at the marketing party are iPhone, Augmented Reality and Twitter. But less than two years ago, Facebook apps were right up there with UGC as the keys to unlocking new media nirvana. Time magazine even went so far as to call 2007 the ‘Year of the Widget‘.
I’ve always loved the idea of the widget. Provide people with a social-media friendly utility, something that they can get some use out of every day, and they will reward you with oodles of earned media in return. With case studies like Trip Advisor’s Cities I’ve Visited and Travel Channel’s Kidnap apps showing huge measurable ROI, it was hard not to get caught up in the hype. These days Facebook themselves generally recommend brands focus Pages instead of Apps. So it was with a mixture of morbid fascination and lingering optimism that I went about trawling through tens of thousands of Facebook apps page-by-page to find every one that was created by a brand as of mid-April 2009.
Games Gifts Competitions Reward. Measuring the Business Effects of Web 2.0. New Web technologies that generate buzz may seem attractive, but businesses must keep an eye toward measurable benefits before investing. ROI is a top concern of marketers, in tough economic times more than ever. McKinsey Quarterly’s “Global Survey” polled companies about the benefits gained from using various Web 2.0 tools, both internally and externally. The study found that several technologies were a boon for relationships among employees as well as with customers and external partners.
When it came to customer-related benefits, blogs were the most useful tool, bringing measurable benefits to 51% of responding companies worldwide. That was followed by video-sharing and social networking, at 48% each, and RSS feeds, at 45%. Technologies such as wikis, podcasts, ratings and tags were less useful, but still benefited customer relationships for about one-quarter to one-third of companies worldwide.
Keep up on the latest digital trends. Facebook redesigns friend request e-mails | Webware. The 5 Types of Social Captialists. “Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work. ~Robert Orben Is it possible to work smarter rather than just working harder? Are there ways to increase the odds of you or your company’s success without a substantial monetary investment? I’ve personally found that building your network is the most effective way for reducing risk and improving your odds of success.
Among the people I’ve spoken with who have had large successes, their network always appeared to be extremely important. These individuals also tend to make their success seem effortless. Before diving in to the five types of social capitalists, let me first define what I mean by a “social capitalist”. Bricklayers are hard workers. The only problem with the bricklayer is that they only thing they can do is build walls.
While advanced development requires creativity, setting up 100 WordPress installations for clients can become a fairly repetitive process. Socialwok is a FriendFeed for Google Apps - ReadWriteEnterprise. Google Apps is an impressive productivity suite. But however good Docs and Gmail are, organizations using Apps are left without the kinds of social software they're used to having outside of work. Singapore-based startup Socialwok is attempting to fix that by offering a social app that lives on top of Google Apps. Socialwok resembles FriendFeed in many ways. The real-time stream of information can include attachments in-line and can be divided into topical feeds.
The big difference is that all of it is nested securely under the umbrella of your Apps login. Social Feeds for Organizations The aim of Socialwok is a provide a communication and collaboration platform on top of Google Apps, one that draws in all kinds of information that needs to be shared quickly in an organization. "In Socialwok the concept is all around feeds," said Socialwok CEO Ming Yong in a demo video, "You can have feeds for a project, feeds for engineering, feeds for accounting, feeds for anything.
" What about Wave? With Smartphone Adoption on the Rise, Opportunity for Marketers. Chris Quick, Client Services Manager, Mobile Media We have seen that the mobile industry is on a fast-track, with massive growth in mobile marketing, advertising and paid-content for users. But what is really leading this growth is the increase in quality devices and fast, affordable data. While smartphone ownership was once just a business tool, more consumers than ever are using smartphones in their everyday lives. In the past year alone, the total number of smartphone subscribers increased 72% quarter-over-quarter, growing from 15 million subscribers in Q2 2008 to 26 million in Q2 2009. Italy Leads in Smartphone Adoption Despite America's reputation as a nation of big talkers — the U.S. is not setting the pace in smartphone adoption — ranking third when ranked by penetration.
Smartphone Gender Gap Continues With the continued expansion of smartphone ownership in the U.S. and the availability of more affordable devices, the market is opening up to a wider range of consumers. Start tracking your favorite TV shows | Webware. Google Chrome after a year: Sporting a new. Bloggers accuse Human Rights Watch of online 'sock puppe. Thirteen Steps to Write and Publish a Free Ebook In Thirteen Hou. The Return of the Optical Startup — Cyan Optics Launch. Influential Marketing Blog: The 5 Big Myths Of Social Media. How to Install Skype in Ubuntu. The New York Times falls victim to a sophisticated ad scam | Blo. What Cell Phone Provider is Best For You? | FlowingData. Google Fast Flip: The platypus of news readers | Rafe's Rad.
RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to b. Cache and Carry: A Humorous Review of the Kindle: Scientific Ame. The Three Spheres of Web Strategy –Updated for 2009. Tweeting, more than just self expression. Why Can't You Decide? | The Relationship Economy...... Road Map For Collective Storytelling. Umoo offers fantasy stock trading for those who don’t. Forget Gen Y: Gen X is Making Real Change - ReadWriteEnterprise. Tweetmi: Another Twitter Search Engine with a Twist. 10 Ugly truths about modern journalism :: 10,000 Words :: multim. Remembering September 11th. Hidden Google Gem: Google Mobile App. Jump to the Relevant Section of a Google Search Result.
Afghanistan and its Election on Twitter: The Macro Picture : We. Incompatible Browser.