Is Group Texting Google’s Next Social Circle? Texting is one of the most personal of communication technologies, it is ubiquitous and typically reaches into the most intimate social circles a user has. It has always been a one to one or a one to many product. Group texting does it one step better and puts any given circle of users into the same context and allows many to many communications through an online hub. The players in the field, GroupMe, Disco.com, Huddl, FastSociety and Beluga offer up pretty much the same basic functionality of being able to create a new group of texters and an associated voip number via an online interface or a smart phone app.
When a message is sent to the group’s unique number by any member, all members of the group receive the message. To experiment with the technology I created a group for my four family members. There is a business use case for the technology as well as a personal one. Obviously the big boys think the space is important.
Have you tried any of the services? The Difference A Company’s Size Makes In Social Media. Maybe the size of a company has never been pondered by the employees or consultants who are managing their social media campaigns. However, whether or not a company is considered a small business or a big company can make a significant difference in overall strategy, timeliness, and overall presence on social networks like Facebook, FourSquare, and Twitter. Small businesses may automatically be thought of as the “underdogs” when compared to large brands and multi-million dollar companies.
But when it comes to social media, this isn’t always the case. Many small businesses have used their size as an advantage to create an innovative and successful online social media marketing strategy. On the other hand, large businesses have used their influence and history to extend their heavy brand presence into the digital forum. The Innovation Brewing In Small Businesses The Power Of Big Businesses A company’s success and the methods it used to get there may also occasionally be its downfall. 5 Truly Creative Uses Of Social Media.
The biggest news in the world of social media over the last few weeks has been the IPO of LinkedIn, the upcoming Groupon IPO, and the slew of floatations these two are likely to herald. And, of course, underpinning all of this has been the simple question of whether the valuations these companies are receiving mean that we are in a bubble. Whilst I’m in no way qualified to answer that (though I tend to agree with the analysis by multi-media consultancy Broadsight that all of this activity suggest that we definitely are in a bubble), what I can say is that nearly all of these companies rely on marketing, if not direct advertising dollars, for their business models. This worries me because at present all of them seem to be enabling, if not actively encouraging, incredibly uncreative communication strategies. As a colleague of mine, who had his doubts about social, once said to me, “Are there any great social marketing campaigns that don’t rely on bribing the user”. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Social Profiles: It’s Quality, Not Quantity. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at the excellent SMX Sydney conference. As usual, it was a great show with any number of fantastic speakers. Before my last session, I was preceded by the also very excellent Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz; his presentation on Social Media For SEO was, as with most of his content, must-have info. However, for once, I found myself disagreeing with Rand on at least one point. Towards the end of his deck, Rand showed the names of 15 different social platforms and said that every brand or company should be using, at a minimum. He felt that it was essential that brands create, maintain and use all of these in order to maximise the likely benefit to SEO. But I have to say that I think he’s wrong on this one. In my recent post on how to plan & implement social strategies, one of the areas I said you need to cover is your approach.
Whilst there are undoubtedly some platforms that require little management, such as Slideshare or Scribd, others most definitely do. Simple Methods to Clean Up Your Digital Life and Manage Information Overload. Marchex Acquires 800-Free-411 Owner Jingle Networks. Marchex announced this morning that it was buying Jingle Networks, operator of free directory assistance service 800-Free-411, for $62 million in cash and stock.
Founded in 2004, Jingle Networks also has a pay-per-call mobile ad network. Jingle’s 800-Free-411 competed with GOOG-411, which was closed down last year, and Microsoft’s Bing-411, which is still operating. However Jingle was the leader in the “free directory assistance” segment. At one point I called free-DA “local-mobile search for the rest of us.” That was before the dramatic growth of smartphones, which have continued to erode traditional DA call volumes. Marchex has evolved its business over time to focus on calls and has built a call-based ad network that spans traditional media, online and mobile.
Jingle’s revenues for 2011 are estimated to be $26 million. Postscript: Here’s a statement from Pete Christothoulou, Marchex COO: Related Entries. “Like,” “share,” and “recommend”: How the warring verbs of social media will influence the news’ future. It appears that Facebook has settled on a central metaphor for the behavior of its 600 million users. See an interesting article? Want your friends to see it too? Facebook’s offered up two primary verbs to bring action to that formless desire: “Share” and “Like.” But the writing’s been on the wall for “Share” for some time. Facebook seemed to abandon development on “Share” in the fall. But I’m less interested in the details of the implementation than the verbs: sharing (tonally neutral, but explicitly social) has clearly lost to liking (with its ring of a personal endorsement).
There’s actually a third verb, “Recommend.” “Share”: Los Angeles Times, ProPublica, Talking Points Memo, Reuters, ESPN, The Guardian. Now, that’s an unscientific sampling. And that’s understandable: Newsroom culture has long been allergic to explicitly connecting the production of journalism and the expression of a reader’s endorsement. Emotion = distribution Or take the Penn study by Jonah Berger and Katherine L.
Social Media and the Want of a Nail — Knowledge Center — NewComm Collaborative. Statistics: "Worlds Top Social Media Sites" Tuesday, 23rd November 2010 Statistics: "World’s Top Social Media Sites" Cidney Carver from the SocialNomics blog has compiled and posted a chart with user numbers for more than 20 social sites. In a brief intro Carver writes that the sites listed are, "networks like Facebook, while others focus on a niche like photos, country, age, dating, etc. " This means social sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, and e-Harmony are included.
While this lists many services there are many more. For example, if you're going to include services like e-Harmony you probably should list other large online dating services. Although, much smaller what about other media sites like Last.fm, MusicBrainz, Clicker, and Justin.TV? Finally, what about email lists and even discussion boards? Coming up with a comprehensive list would be a real challenge since these days just about every web site has or will probably soon offer some type of social media. Direct to Socialnomics Chart of the "World’s Top Social Media Sites"
6 Content Tips: How To Write When You Have Nothing To Write About. When I tell a client/friend/colleague they need to add X pages of interesting content to their site, I typically hear one of three answers: 3% of the time: “No problem, I’m on it.”75% of the time: “But I don’t have anything to write about.”22% of the time: “No one wants to hear about my product/service. It’s boring.” I’ll ignore the obvious replies, like “If it’s so boring, why does anyone buy it?” Or “Then why can you talk about your product for 2 hours at a party?”
I understand how tough it can be to come up with material. When you spend all your time working in your business, day in and day out, it can start seeming routine, mundane and so second-nature, you can’t imagine what people would want to know. Here’s a list of a few ways I come up with material, and how I present them to give the most bang for the SEO buck. 1. My favorite option can seem like a cop-out, but there are potential clients and customers out there with questions. Get the most SEO value 2. 3. 4. And it really was. 5. World Map of Social Networks. January 2017: a new edition of my World Map of Social Networks, showing the most popular social networking sites by country, according to Alexa & SimilarWeb traffic data (caveat: it’s hard to understand the impact of Google+ because it is part of Google domain traffic).
There are a lot of news since last January: Facebook is still the leading social network in 119 out of 149 countries analyzed, but it was stopped in 9 territories by Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte and Linkedin. It’s interesting to see that in some countries, like Botwana, Mozambique, Namibia, Iran e Indonesia, Instagram wins and that some African territories prefer LinkedIn. Overall LinkedIn conquers 9 countries, Instagram 7, meanwhile VKontakte and Odnoklassniki (part of the same group Mail.ru) grow up in Russian territories. In China QZone still dominates the Asian landscape with 632 million users and Japan is the only country where Twitter is the leader. But what’s going on behind the first place? InShare1,047 inShare1,047. By The Numbers: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs. Google Buzz. Twitter caused a stir Monday when it lifted its curtain enough to show us how much activity the service is seeing currently, and how it’s grown since 2007.
And while many reports talk about visits to Twitter.com flattening, Twitter’s own chart showing the number of tweets its users are publishing is staggering. Twitter says it’s currently seeing about 50 million tweets per day, which breaks down to about 600 per second. But how do those numbers compare to Facebook, the king of social networking, and Google Buzz, the new kid on the block? In an early blog post published just two days after Buzz launched, Google reported that the service had already received nine million posts and comments, and an additional 200 posts per minute via mobile phones.
For its part, Facebook has a statistics page that says its users post more than 60 million status updates per day. Let’s do the math and try to make the most even comparison we can out of all this. Updates/Posts. How Prototype Theory Influences A Social Media Strategy. Social media experts, typically self-appointed, trumpet their belief that social media marketing (SMM) “throws out the rules” and is a “game-changer.” However, the extent to which SMM can change the rules depends very much on how thoughtful its practitioners are, and how well they understand the connection between the various ways people associate things and ideas, even at a neurological level.
One scientific approach involves mastery of a new approach to linguistics, called Prototype Theory. Prototype Theory: The Basics The generally accepted thesis about how we put things in category buckets and how we decide whether some object falls into a specific category involves a yes/no examination of characteristic attributes of the thing being described. For example, we would identify some big animal as a cow by evaluating whether it meets the criteria that defines a cow, like “four legged,” “has hooves,” “does not have feathers,” “has a second stomach,” etc.
Response Times, Priming & Exemplars. Hot At Sphinn: Article Spinning, Search Behavior, SEO Advice & More. Do you remember the best piece of SEO advice you ever received? Do you think “article spinning” is spam? And are you up on the latest research about how consumers use search engines? Those were some of the hot topics last week on our sister site, Sphinn, where the community interacts by commenting, tweeting, and liking articles. Sphinn’s “Discussion of the Week,” which asked What’s the Best Piece of SEO-related Advice You’ve Ever Received? , picked up the most comments (12) and tweets (100) over the past week. If you’re looking for some good nuggets of SEO wisdom, don’t miss the comments there. But if you’re looking for our favorite comment of the week, that came in a story called Article Spinning – Spin like a pro. As a copywriter, spinners, whether manual or automatice, make my blood boil! Agree? Most Comments DOTW: What's the Best Piece of SEO-related Advice You've Ever Received?
Most Tweeted Comparing SEO & Social Media as Marketing Channels – One more piece on the SEO vs. BrightLocal Conducting Local SEO Survey. Pew Studies Internet Use & Income Levels. The PEW Internet and American Life Project has come out with a new study about internet use based on household income that includes some data on how these segments use search. There’s also interesting stuff here about how income correlates to likelihood to rate and review products, pay for online content, book travel, and access online news.
The top-level conclusions are that Americans in higher income brackets (over $75,000 a year) use the internet more often than those in lower income brackets. Those in higher income brackets are also more likely to have broadband access), which PEW has previously correlated to higher internet usage. the study correlates income to mobile device usage as well as PEW found that a greater percentage of higher income households (95% vs 83%) own cell phones. How Americans In Higher Income Brackets use the Internet The study found that 95% of Americans making over $75,000 a year use the internet and that among them: On a given day: Details On Specific Usage. Google Roundup: No Groupon Deal But Two Acquisitions; "Updated" Becomes "Realtime"; Turnkelang to LinkedIn; and More.
What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? Both Google and Bing have added many social search features over the past year. There’s also been talk about using “social signals” to help rank regular search results. But are either of the major search engines actually using those social signals to rank regular search results? A bit, they tell me. In particular, your stature on Twitter could help influence how a page ranks in web search. I gave Bing and Google six questions about how they use social data from Twitter and Facebook. In particular, I wanted to know how that data influenced regular web search results, not the impact it has on the dedicated social search tools they have. Social Search Ranking… For example, both Google and Bing offer a way to see results that are written by or shared by your friends, search that’s directly influenced by people you know: Both Google and Bing also offer a way to see content being shared in real time on the social networks: …Isn’t Web Search Ranking Web Page Authority Vs.
PageRank, Meet SocialRank? Key Problems With Current Social Link Graph Signals. With the roll out of Google +1 Buttons For Websites, almost all the key players in the on-page social button space are ready for the fight to truly be joined. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and old stallwarts Sharethis and Add-This all provide content creators with the ability to embed shareability, and signals which can be studied (Note to Bing: it’s not that hard.
Make a little b! Codelit and we will figure out what to do with it for you). As a linking strategist, I totally dig social buttons. At the same time, I have never been a fan of “wisdom of the crowd” or “grouplink” signals. Social sharing was fine when it was not a search signal. Nice Pants Jim…No Really My friend Jim is a great guy, and I’ve known him a long time. Why? There’s a bit of forced comformity lurking underneath the social link graph, and that is, in my opinion, evil. This leads me list a few ideas that would give me more confidence in allowing a social circle to affect search results. Twitter Facebook Google +1. Why Groupon Makes Sense (to Google) Amazing: Groupon Rejects Google Mega-Offer. 2011: The year when 80% of Social CRM projects will #fail ...
How Many Spam Mails Does It Take to Sell $100 of Viagra? Walmart Buys Former Search Engine Kosmix To Power Social And Mobile Shopping.