Instagram. It's Angie's List meets Pinterest. By Catherine Dunn Matt Ehrlichman FORTUNE -- Matt Ehrlichman was between jobs 18 months ago when he and his wife started on that most old-fashioned of projects: building a home. Like many, he found himself frustrated by the challenges of finding good contractors and design inspiration to transform their parcel of land in Northeast Seattle. So the tech entrepreneur did what entrepreneurs do: Ehrlichman co-founded a new digital endeavor, Porch.com, a site that adds social networking to home improvement and officially launches today (after three months in beta). Think of it as an Angie's List—featuring Pinterest-worthy photos—meets a LinkedIn intended to connect users to professional plumbers, painters, and design firms.
MORE: In-flight Internet connections pick up speed The idea is to give an "old school" industry a makeover for the social-sharing era, Ehrlichman says, so that homeowners can easily find out who does good work on homes like theirs, and how much those projects typically cost. Adobe's Bold Plans for Online Ad Business Don't Include Advertising. Tune-In Was Big for MTV's VMAs -- What's Twitter Got to Do With It? - Mike Isaac - Social. The numbers are out and the verdict is in: You really, really liked watching Miley Cyrus’s train wreck of an awards performance on Sunday. That much was certainly apparent on Twitter, which had big numbers for MTV’s annual Video Music Awards .
The network saw heights of more than 300,000 tweets per minute during the Miley moment, and upward of 4.5 million mentions of the pop starlet’s name over the course of the three-hour broadcast. It wasn’t just apparent in the tweets. Nielsen released its stats on viewership for the VMAs on Monday afternoon, a big win for the cable broadcast network aimed at teens and millennials: It attracted a total audience of 10.1 million viewers, ranked as cable’s top entertainment broadcast of 2013 among those age 12 through 34. Is Marissa Mayer About to Buy Tumblr for $1 Billion? In a deal that would vault Yahoo into the premiere league of social media, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is said to be closing in on a $1 billion acquisition deal with David Karp, the CEO of New York-based Tumblr.
Details of the talks leaked out earlier Thursday via AllThingsD, a site which prides itself on its Yahoo sources in particular. A later report in AdWeek, via its own sources, cited $1 billion as the figure currently under discussion. Coincidentally, that is said to be the valuation Tumblr was going to get at its next funding round. Both sites were cautious to emphasize that the talks could come to naught. Mayer is clearly interested; she's known and admired Karp's New York-based site for years. SEE ALSO: Users Stay Longer on Tumblr Than on Facebook, Karp Says Given its aging audience, Yahoo's biggest problem with advertisers right now, the hunt for cool companies is high on Mayer's agenda.
Facebook Begins Big Push to Bring Mobile Users "Home" - Ina Fried - Mobile. GoPro Sends Reviewer A DMCA Takedown Notice, Internet Explodes — But Wait! It Was An “Unfortunate Miscommunication” Word travels fast on the Internet. Especially when you don’t want it to. Early this morning, DigitalRev (a hybrid blog/photography store/photo sharing social network) replaced a review of GoPro’s Hero 3 with the text of a DMCA takedown they’d received. “@GoPro is bullying us with DMCA. We’ll have to remove this article soon”, they tweeted. According to DigitalRev, GoPro was claiming foul on the site’s use of the “GoPro” and “Hero” trademarks. (That’s ignoring that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act only applies to copyright infringement. Hence, uh, the name.) Within a few minutes, the sharpening of pitchforks could be heard from all around.
I reached out to GoPro’s head of communications for confirmation and comment, who responded “Hey Greg, We are posting to Reddit.” Er, weird. Hey all- I’m out at X Games Tignes right now with the Director of PR for GoPro. Tl;dr: Whoops — we weren’t trying to have the review taken down. “But wait!” What a mess. Extreme Harlem Shake Catapults Red Bull to Top of YouTube Tracker | Digital. Pinterest Launches Business Pages to Get Cozy With Brands | Digital. Facebook Takes Mobile App Ads Out of Beta, Hints at App Center Potential. Back in August Facebook began letting a limited numbers of mobile app developers pay for their apps to be promoted within the Try These Games box right in the middle of the mobile News Feed.
On Tuesday the company said that test is rolling out of beta, giving all developers access to that prime real estate. Plus, Facebook has released some performance stats on Try These Games placements to help spur adoption. For gaming company TinyCo, the ability to get in front of mobile Facebook users with a link urging them to install its apps (via the Apple App Store or Google Play) led to a 50 percent increase in clicks, according to Facebook. The social networking giant also let some of its Preferred Marketing Developers in on the test: AdParlor saw 1 to 2 percent clickthrough rates, while Nanigans’ mobile app ads averaged $0.18-$0.60 cost-per-click rates with at times 3 percent or higher clickthrough rates. First Results Are In: Facebook’s New Custom Audience CRM Ads Increase Conversions And Lower Costs.
Just three weeks after Facebook formally launched Custom Audience ads that can target people by lists of email addresses or phone numbers, TechCrunch has attained the first reports on their performance and they’re promising. Not as amazing as Facebook Exchange retargeted ads, but they boost clicks and conversions, reduce costs, and deliver ROI according to Facebook and three adtech startups. Custom Audience ads let businesses upload a privacy-protected hashed file of email addresses, phone numbers, or User IDs, and then select these sets of people as ad targets. This allows businesses to reconnect with existing customers or contacts, and are the link between customer relationship management systems such as Salesforce and Facebook ads. By layering Facebook’s biographical, interest, and social ad targeting parameters on top of these lists, businesses can segment and reach customers with more highly personalized messages than they could without Facebook’s help. Twitter Dubs a New Design VP - Mike Isaac - Social.
Microsoft Aligns With Klout, Makes Strategic Investment and Integrates - Liz Gannes - Social. 50% of Consumers Value a Brand's Facebook Page More Than Its Website [INFOGRAPHIC] Google Buys Facebook Ad Startup Wild - Peter Kafka - Media. VW Hands-Free Banner Ad Promotes Hands-Free Calling System | Creativity Pick of the Day. Salesforce Radian6 Launches Insights to Make Sense of Social Data. Like a guy looking at a double rainbow, marketers have been staring at their brands’ social data and asking themselves, “What does this mean?!”
The job of CRM giant Salesforce’s social analytics arm Radian6 is to help them find an answer, especially since the volume of social data has skyrocketed from companies dealing with a few thousand social conversations per month to 100,000 or more, said Rob Begg, vp of marketing at Salesforce Radian6. To help brands deal with all the social content being lobbed their way, the company’s built the Salesforce Radian6 Insights in order to siphon social data into a dashboard. “People talk about Big Data kind of loosely, but if you really look at the huge volume of social conversations out there, that really is Big Data and it’s real-time Big Data and it’s really hard for companies to be able to find truly actionable and truly insightful content on it,” Begg said.
Weather Channel, Lufthansa Take Advantage of Foursquare's Enhancements. Lufthansa "Badge" earned by flying on the A380 Of the slew of branded third-party apps that Foursquare revealed yesterday, The Weather Channel (TWC) and Lufthansa stood out. TWC will offer weather forecast information to Foursquare users if they frequently check in to certain establishments, businesses or public areas around the country.
For instance, if they check in to their workplace or a Starbucks regularly, said Mike Zarrilli, vp of product for TWC, based on Foursquare’s algorithms, they’ll see his company’s branded local weather info. Zarrilli said the Foursquare effort represents his Atlanta-based company's first major play on the geo-social app, while also underscoring TWC’s increased focus on what he calls “next-step content” marketing. “We are trying to insert our brand into existing paths of usage in terms of consumers and their devices,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s through social, Foursquare, search portals or whatever.
What Facebook's Embrace of Real-Time Bidding for Ads Really Means. Facebook Mobile Ads Now Open to Masses | Digital. How Instagram Is Taking Over Major League Baseball. Instagram and baseball have a few things in common — they both invite reflection and facilitate nostalgia, for example. Now it seems they go together like 7th Inning and stretch. The photo sharing network is completely dominating in Major League ballparks this season. A month into the 2012 season, there has already been a 400% increase in Instagram photos posted from big league parks compared to the entire 2011 season. In total, more than 40,000 photos of ballparks have been posted to Instagram. Which teams lead the charge? The Giants are extremely active in social media, play in a gorgeous stadium and are located in the heart of the American tech scene.
Yankee Stadium, Atlanta's Turner Field, Chicago's Wrigley Field and Boston's Fenway Park round out the top five. The social media tool VenueSeen compiled these stats and more from publicly posted Instagram photos to create the infographic below. SEE ALSO: Baseball Home Openers: Social Media’s Best Shots [PICS] Facebook Begins Testing New Timeline Design [PICS] Facebook is testing a series of cosmetic changes to the top of users' Timelines, the company has confirmed.
Screenshots of the new design were posted on Talking Points Memo Tuesday morning. The images (below) show a condensed version of Timeline, in which a user's details (name, occupation, education, location) appear in reverse type on top of — rather than below — the cover photo. The carousel of thumbnail images highlighting friends, photos, places, likes, etc. has also been compressed.
Images are now replaced by thumbnails. Next to these, a new "Summary" section appears, presumably to highlight key events on a user's Timeline. The new version: The old (current) version: It's not clear if the new design will give users greater control over the appearance of their Timelines. What do you think of the new design? Top image courtesy of iStockphoto, -Oxford-
Hate to Shop Online Alone? Try This Site. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Motilo Quick Pitch: Shop and style fashion products with your friends. Genius Idea: Like going to the mall with your best friend, online.
Sofia Barattieri and Maysoune Ghobash wanted to shop together. And so they were inspired to launch Motilo in April 2011. When they're finished browsing and styling, users can click through to purchase their looks from their respective retailers. It's a well-designed site, and a neat solution for those content to shop from the (mostly high-end) retailers included. Try it for yourself and let us know what you think.
Image courtesy of Flickr, andrewarchy Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark. Infographic Confirms It: Advertising People Are Not Normal. Those who work in advertising often wonder if they live in a sort of bubble. You wonder, are civilians as active on social media and as inclined to pay attention to what brands are doing on Twitter, and is the rest of the world as preoccupied with that award-winning ad campaign that industry types can’t stop talking about? The unsurprising answer is no, according to a study commissioned by San Francisco-based advertising agency Heat and conducted this past March by iThink, which found that people who work in advertising and marketing are worlds apart from the "normal" people when it comes to how they use social media and how they view social media marketing.
By the way, the survey also revealed that ad professionals tend to engage in more bad behavior at office holiday parties. More on that later. First, mull these findings on how advertising/marketing professionals use Facebook as compared to the general public: Facebook Adds “Good Enough” File Sharing To All Groups. Dropbox Should Worry About Growth. Today Facebook begins rolling out file sharing to all Groups, and while it’s got many restrictions, it could be good enough to limit the long-term growth potential of cloud storage / file sharing services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive. Music and any copyright files aren’t allowed and file size is capped at 25mb, as Mashable first reported. But this is just the first version, and you can be sure Facebook will keep hacking away at it. Last month, the social network started letting users share files within Groups for Schools, but now we confirmed with Facebook that within a few days all Facebook users should have the option to upload and share files from the Groups post composer.
Facebook users often talk about downloadable files, but now they’ll be able to share those Word docs, images, e-books, PDFs rather than having to upload them elsewhere. File sharing could help Facebook fight its public image as a distraction from getting real work done. 4 Facebook Features Marketers Can't Afford to Ignore. Justyn Howard is the CEO of Sprout Social, a social media management platform that empowers leading companies to effectively manage their social channels.
Follow him on Twitter @justyn and read his blog at SproutInsights. If you have a brand or a business to market chances are you're using a social media management application to monitor online mentions, schedule updates, and generate reports. But if you really want to be an effective marketer, you need to develop a deeper understanding of which networks are most vital to your company, and what network features are key. In Facebook's case, we're talking about some powerful community management components that are unmatched by its competitors, and often overlooked by marketing pros.
Here are the four that simply can't be ignored. SEE ALSO: 3 Reasons Facebook Brand Pages Are Good for Businesses 1. Facebook's activity log is like a Facebook Timeline for every interaction that fans have with your page. 2. Netflix is a prime example. 4.