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11 Essential Social Media Stories for July 2009

by admin on July 5, 2009

There were unknown lifeforms, #moonfruit, Firefox 3.5, and the sale of The Pirate Bay making social media news this week. From the shocking $7.8 million sale of the web’s pirating hub to the release of Firefox 3.5 and its killer features, social media events kept rolling in.

There were also some insightful and useful resources that got people’s attention this week. If you’re interested in gorgeous Twitter visualizations or how to get retweeted on Twitter, social media provided the answer. Here are this week’s top 11 social media stories:

1. 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations – Stan Schroeder takes a close look at six of the most beautiful Twitter visualization apps around.

2. Sneak Peek: What’s On Tap for Firefox in 2010 – While Firefox 3.5 may have come out this week, Mozilla’s already hard at work on version 3.6. Josh Catone explores what’s coming for the popular browser.

3. The Pirate Bay Sold For $7.8 Million – Global Gaming Factory X AB shocked the technology world this week when it announced its acquisition of The Pirate Bay. Why did they sell? And what’s next for the controversial peer-to-peer website?

4. Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer: A Monstrous YouTube Hit – It’s the breakout YouTube hit of the week, and nobody’s quite sure what it is. What is this thing that has piqued the web’s curiosity?

5. Twitter Promotion Done Right: #moonfruit – There’s a new hashtag-based marketing campaign making buzz on Twitter. Learn how they got right what #squarespace got wrong.

6. HOW TO: Get Retweeted on Twitter – Pete Cashmore explores some interesting data on retweets, and how that can apply to getting retweeted more often.

7. Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 – Firefox 3.5 is a huge upgrade over its predecessor. Find out what sets this new version apart as a browser.

8. Facebook Page Frenzy Due Today: URLs Available to All – While Facebook opened up vanity URLs for profiles earlier this month, it left smaller Facebook fan pages to wait until this week to claim their usernames. Pete Cashmore explains the details.

9. Twitter Increases API Limit – Twitter has upped the API call limit by 50% this week, making your favorite Twitter apps a lot more useful. Learn why this is important.

10. 10 Ways to Find People on Twitter – Josh Catone discusses 10 different ways to find new friends and people on Twitter.

11. Michael Jackson Died in 2007, Says Google – With the world turning to Google and the web for information on Michael Jackson, some information was a bit…off.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AndrewJohnson

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Why Forums Are Relevant in Social Media Marketing

by admin on May 12, 2009

I have long considered online forums to be an early form of what we now consider to be social networks. They’ve been around much longer than Facebook, Twitter and the rest, and have allowed users to create profiles and communicate with each other on the web.

They have profile pages, private messages, and public conversation where other users can respond and add to the conversation. They are also indexed by search engines. Do you value forums as social media marketing tools? Tell us what you think.

In a post a few months ago, I referenced a WebmasterWorld thread discussing how Google values forums. WembasterWorld founder Brett Tabke said Google was devaluing forum links, but there is a bigger picture I think that Jaan Kanellis pointed out (which was also referenced in that article).

“It is normal for Google to favor forum threads for certain queries. Naturally websites do not optimize themselves for long-tail queries that forums are automatically optimized for by way of user-generated content.”

Forums have marketing benefits. And they’re very much the same as the benefits that come from social media marketing. In fact, I would say that social media marketing plans should include forums in the mix when applicable. When it is about the conversation, that conversation is generally not confined to Twitter or Facebook. That conversation is very possibly being extended into the Blogosphere, and yes…online forums.

Forum participation allows for reputation management strategies, brand awareness tactics, and even link generation, similarly to where social media fits into the SEO equation. Of course, many marketers have known this for ages now, but forums seem to have taken a backseat in the mind’s eye to the newer, trendier networks.

But the forums are still there. And they’re there in niches. And niches mean relevant and related content, audiences, and engagement.

Of course, there are benefits to forum participation beyond just marketing. They often provide destinations for help with specific problems that can be hard to find elsewhere. They are still a fine venue for networking with other professionals, and just being involved in the conversation often simply translates to staying in the loop for current trends within your industry.

With social networks like Facebook and Twitter, do you still have time to participate in forums? Tell us about it.

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5 Ways Traditional Media is Going Social

by admin on May 5, 2009

Woody Lewis is a Social Media Strategist and Web Architect. He authors a blog at woodylewis.com about social media strategy for newspapers.

Social media has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our public and private lives, from the White House providing access to its official photostream to a coffee shop that takes orders via Twitter. Businesses have been quick to respond, adopting new and sometimes radical processes while keeping an eye on earnings that reflect the poor economy.

As faltering brands look for new strategies, and the newspaper industry desperately searches for a way to keep a portion, if not all of its print business alive, traditional media companies are using social media to engage their audiences.

1. Widget TV

Verizon will soon push a software update to its FiOS service that will allow customers to connect their set-top boxes to the Web. The company has developed a software development kit (SDK) that its in-house engineers have used to build widgets integrating Facebook and Twitter into its legacy video product. These are base cases, where the viewer can send messages from her set-top box to her social network while she watches programs. Verizon will offer the SDK to third-party developers, and will encourage the creation of apps that tie tweets, for example, to the specific show being viewed.

The SDK, due this fall, will be written in LUA, a popular game programming language, and will support what the company says will be an open platform for shared widgets users can download to their set-tops.

2. Pitch the Editor-in-Chief

BusinessWeek.com may not be the first magazine site that comes to mind in a discussion of new journalism, but John Byrne, its Editor-in-chief, has taken the lead on an initiative that’s sure to spread. His Twitter handle maps to a page full of news bytes mixed with personal messages that include tweets congratulating Wired and Rolling Stone for winning at the National Magazine Awards. Not exactly what you’d expect from a conventional business magazine. Byrne’s profile links to “What’s Your News Story Idea,” a page where all submitted pitches will be reviewed by him and a community editor, with a commitment to assign at least one per week to a BusinessWeek journalist.

3. Newspapers on YouTube

Over a year ago, the Dallas Morning News and the St. Petersburg Times explained that YouTube was a natural extension of their efforts to reach current readers and to attract new ones. Old-school editors seem to have made the leap of faith with little fanfare. The New York Times YouTube channel currently features a piece called “Cracking the Whip in Pakistan,” the story of two brothers who built a successful business turning out leather goods for sexual fetishists. With nearly 12,000 subscribers, the Times’ channel is a growth opportunity. That point is not lost on other papers, such as the Washington Post, whose YouTube channel currently features country star Taylor Swift playing a Virginia high school. This trend of newspapers featuring videos of special interest stories shows that cross-media social marketing may become the rule.

4. Now playing at a Bookstore Near You

Not to be outdone, book publishers have been posting trailers on YouTube. Random House author Annie Burrows stars in a poignant piece about her best-seller, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. As she narrates the story of this World War II novel, we’re treated to a Ken Burns-style production: closeups of images mixed with stock footage, accompanied by an uplifting music score. When she informs us that her aunt and co-author Mary Ann Shaffer died before publication, we experience a real-life tearjerker moment that’s bound, intentionally or otherwise, to provide a model for the genre.

5. Literati as Twitterati

Last year saw the proliferation of Twitter novels, long-form works broken up into 140-word bytes to match the new medium. The initial efforts of individual writers convinced publishers to experiment in this space. We Tell Stories features “Digital Fiction from Penguin”: the serialized work of six authors published by this legacy imprint. Readers can follow the story of Slice, an adventurous British girl, in a blog written from the eponymous heroine’s point of view, and another from her parents’, with commentary from matching Twitter handles. Perhaps the Brits favor this area. The Booker prize-winning author Ben Okri recently published a poem exclusively on Twitter, one line a day, with the entire piece linked from his Facebook page.

Stateside, HarperStudio, has extended the Harper Collins brand into cyberspace, using this mission statement as proof of its commitment: “We believe traditional publishing models are broken and are experimenting with new ones. We believe in embracing technology. We believe the future is now.” The HarperStudio Twitter handle offers a light-hearted and refreshing take on literature.

North of the border, Erin Balser works by day in the marketing department of the University of Toronto press, and moonlights as the founder of Books in 140, a feed offering book reviews in tweet format. An example shows why this could be quite effective, particularly given the fate of many newspaper review pages: “BOOK OF DAVE/Self: Difficult, rewarding tale of post-apocalyptic UK. Rich in imagination, social commentary. UK detail tough for NA readers.”

These are just a few of the ways legacy media companies have embraced the new order. It’s an exciting time for content owners and distributors. When the economy recovers, those brands that have survived by innovating should benefit from the social media tools they’ve put in place.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- 10 Ways Newspapers Are Using Social Media to Save the Industry
- Finding Your Social Media Purple Cow
- Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy
- Why Big Brands Struggle With Social Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, blackred

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: journalism, legacy media, List, new media, newspaper industry, old media, publishing, social media

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Google Reader Still Failing On Whole Social Thing.

by admin on May 5, 2009

A lot of people use Google Reader as their primary RSS feed reader, so you’d think its social features would be extremely popular. But they’re really kind of lame, and extremely underpowered. And Google knows this, that’s why it’s continually shifting the way it presents the social elements. The latest change today allows users to more easily find and share with friends of friends. That is to say, if you have a friend sharing an item with you, and another one of their friends comments on it, you can now get access to that friend.

This idea isn’t really anything new, in fact, FriendFeed (aka the primary source of Facebook’s innovations these days), has been doing something similar for a couple of years now. The reason for doing this is obvious: If you don’t have a lot of friends on a service, the friend of a friend element pipes more content into your stream to make things more active, and thus, more appealing to use. But FriendFeed is doing this much better than Google Reader is, so far.

Trying the new functionality out, it seems a bit weird that I would be asked if I want to share my updates with a certain person who I probably don’t know. Instead, wouldn’t it be better to have the option to see their updates? Of course, Google Reader doesn’t work that way. Following its snafus when it first ventured into social sharing, the company made it awfully hard to share stuff. So whereas you can subscribe to anyone on FriendFeed (at least anyone that has an open feed, just like on Twitter), to see items on Google Reader, they have to share stuff with you. The problem with this is that most people don’t care to take the time to explicitly set their sharing settings to include all those people that may want to be included.

And there’s another problem with Google Reader’s social aspirations. The product from a sharing standpoint is extremely clunky. Sharing is tucked away in its own drop down menu, something which I routinely find is just about my last item to visit (and is normally relegated under the “Mark all as read” umbrella). The problem here is that all of my individual friends’ names are listed below the “Friends’ shared items” banner, so I keep it minimized to avoid clutter. I also keep it minimized because rarely do my friends ever comment on items. And if they do happen to, it’s even rarer that another person will comment as well, giving you — get this — a conversation. That’s something that FriendFeed does extremely well. Google Reader? Not so much.

It was smart of Google to tie the Google Reader profile into the newly emphasized Google Profiles — this is something we’re going to see more of across all its properties, no doubt. But what Google Reader really needs is some way to spur social usage. It needs either a main page where the most shared/most talked about items are listed, that gives you a rundown of who shared what. It sort of has a recommended area, with its “cool” feed, which shares popular items across the Google Reader ecosystem, but that’s far from social.

Or maybe it should add a list comments you leave on shared items to your main Google Profile. This would be a micro-blog of sorts with your take on stories. Of course, that would require that you allow anyone to see your shared items, which is something, again, you cannot do within Google Reader. But oddly, you can see others’ shared items if you know their public Shared Item page URL (which is a bunch of ugly numbers and letters and should be turned into their Google Profile name as well, if Google is going to go in that direction). It’s really quite a confusing mess.

As I noted, a ton of people use Google Reader as a primary way to go through items on the web. It seems natural that this would be a powerful social tool as well, but Google has effectively made it one of the most closed social networks around. It’s closed and its clunky. That just reeks of inactivity.

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