In its recent Terms of Service update, Facebook has explicitly banned the growing practice of selling one’s status update. Such practices are commonplace on Twitter, and I agree with Van Grove’s assessment that Facebook has made a wise choice by banning the practice.
Now, if only it would ban those damn quizzes from my news feed…
Facebook: No Sponsored Status Updates Allowed.
…by putting the pilot on Facebook, NBC is able to force would-be viewers to fan the show’s Facebook Page, and in turn tap into the activity feeds of 250 million Facebook users. Additionally, they can encourage viewers to share it will all of their friends and post show comments that also get pushed out to user profiles.
Does this mark a turning point for Facebook, which has had difficulty competing with MySpace in the realm of multimedia?
NBC Debuts “Community” On Facebook.
Robert Scoble asks “How can anyone follow 10,000 or more?” The answer: not very easily. Although Scoble provides some tools to help you manage the press of tweets, the real nugget here lies in his distinction between Follow and follow:
There is a difference between Following (with a capital “F”) and following, the way Chris and I are doing it.
Over on FriendFeed I was using groups to follow a small number of people very intimately. My wife, for instance, and my son, were Followed (capital F) very closely in a group. I saw 100% of what they write. Another group, of tech thought leaders was followed pretty closely. I probably saw 80% of what flowed through that group. But the other groups of 25,000 people? I randomly saw what they were writing. I saw maybe 10%. So, if you wrote 10 Tweets I might see one of those.
The moral of the story?
Who you follow defines you.
How can ANYONE follow 10,000 or more?.
LinkedIn, the veritable career networking site, has registered its 45 millionth user, according to a tweet from its Marketing Project Manager, Florina Xhabija:
LinkedIn remains the dominant player in the career networking space, despite attempts from other social nets to gain a piece of the market. Facebook, in particular, stands a good chance of giving LinkedIn a run for its money if it implements more effective privacy features which allow you to decide, on a granular level, what each of your friend groups sees about you.
LinkedIn Reaches 45 Million Users .
Facebook’s Srinivas Narayan writes a fascinating note about the preparation that occurred in Palo Alto prior to Facebook opening up its platform to vanity URL’s:
Since it was difficult to get accurate estimates on the number of users that would login at launch time to get a username, we tested our systems under fairly high load – in fact, we stress tested our system with more than 10x the load we actually saw at launch time. The load testing helped us identify several problems in our infrastructure including but not limited to (1) improperly configured networks (2) bottlenecks in our database id generation mechanism (to generated primary keys for certain objects) (3) capacity bottlenecks for write traffic originating from our east coast data center.
The site may be frustratingly slow at times, but this kind of advanced preparation is what makes Facebook stand apart from sites like Twitter and MySpace, whose users continue to suffer from the sites’ inability to adequately scale.
Claiming your corporate brand is an important part of your social marketing mix. In addition, grabbing your personal URL is important for controlling your personal brand. I was one of the first people to register a vanity URL: less than 5 seconds after the opening bell, I had registered www.facebook.com/sagar . I even got a friend request a few weeks later from another Facebook user named Sagar who said he simply wanted to know the person who had beat him to the punch.
Ain’t social networking grand? Of course, I accepted his friend request.
via Facebook | Designing the Facebook username land rush.
This must be among the more clever, if simpler, social media ad plays:
At the very beginning of this year, Jason Sadler started a quirky experiment: I Wear Your Shirt, a project where every day, Jason would wear one shirt from one company per day and post his image on YouTube, Twitter, Ustream, and more. He would be a walking, talking billboard.
He also had an intriguing price structure: it only cost $1 for a company to have him wear its schwag on January 1st, $2 on the 2nd, etc. until December 31st, where the price would be $365. While each amount isn’t that big, it added up. So did the attention.
The result: he sold out every day and will make over $70,000 this year alone ($66,795 + other contests and deals). Talk about a social media payday.
Now, Sadler has refined his plan by hitting the social networks to increase coverage– a kind of CPM model in which images of Sadler wearing advertiser shirts replace the traditional display ad.
Novel idea, but how long before the novelty wears off? Ideas like this are reminiscent of Alex Lew, whose Million Dollar Homepage really qualifies as the opening shot in these creative ad schemes.
via Social Media + Wearing Shirts = Lucrative Career?.
According to AdMob, iPhone and iPod Touch users discovered the 1.5 billion apps they’ve downloaded through search and browsing, which is hardly surprising. (What else could it be? Recommendation engine? Social recs?)
The surprising nugget was that a full 20% of respondents claimed they discovered apps through ads in other apps. If true, this could point the way for companies hungry to promote their brands through iPhone apps. Instead of relying upon the Field of Dreams school of product promotion (“If you build it, they will come”), they could promote their apps through targeted advertisements in current popular apps which offer the best spillover effects. (Of course, determining spillover potential is an art unto itself.)
Now, a couple of caveats:
So take these results with just a little grain of salt.
via CHART OF THE DAY: How Do iPhone Users Discover Apps? (AAPL).
The type of marketing experiment described in this piece is fairly typical of how large companies are approaching social media tools like Twitter: somewhat randomly. It is a far cry between slapped-together efforts such as this and a full-fledged embrace of social media, such as what has recently taken place at companies like Zappos and Ford.
The money-quote (pun intended)–
But though there seems to be no question these Twitter-marketing events can generate buzz, like Twitter itself, its not quite as clear how the buzz translates into dollar signs.
And can we agree to instantly retire the stillborn phrase Twitterati?
via Can the Twitterati help sell your soda pop? – CNN.com.
In an effort to breathe new life into its brand, Gap Inc. is engaging in a centralized re-branding campaign in which social media will play a significant role.
In a manner similar to Starbucks’ recent efforts to establish its grassroots origins, Gap is emphasizing its heritage over innovation:
The campaign, which gets under way on Thursday, promotes the newly named 1969 Premium Jeans line with the theme “Born to fit,” which lends its name to a microsite, or special Web site (borntofit.com).
The year in the name is a tip of the hat to the 40th anniversary of Gap, which opened in 1969 selling Levi’s jeans and records. (Gap’s own jeans label arrived in 1974, and the chain sold its last denim made by Levi Strauss & Company in 1991.)
The campaign is meant to convey that Gap has “taken our heritage, denim, and re-energized it,” said Ivy Ross, executive vice president for marketing at the Gap division in San Francisco. “It’s like building a new house.”
Although the campaign features several social networking tools, including–
–it is not limited to social media. The campaign will integrate traditional TV and print outlets. This holistic, integrative marketing approach is exactly what most companies fail to undertake. Instead, quick-fix efforts are greenlit in a desperate attempt to “get social”, rather than consider how social media fits into the organization’s broader marketing goals.
While the campaign is just getting underway, I’m going to stick my neck out and predict it will be a huge success for Gap.
via Advertising – Covering Many Bases for a Brand of Blue Jeans – NYTimes.com.
Retweeting is the act of re-posting another Twitter user’s comments under your own username, and crediting the other user by inserting the text “RT @username” in front of the forwarded message. (Replacing username with the original author’s Twitter handle.) Twitter users know the power of the retweet. It is the engine which drives viral topic reach on Twitter. It is also a convention which originated with Twitter users due to a lack of formal accreditation on Twitter. All that’s about to change now. Twitter recently announced it will formally incorporate retweeting into its service. Mashable’s Van Grove explains–
They’re opening up the flood gates so that developers can tap into the four new APIs and update their applications, or build new ones, in preparation for the official release, which is expected to happen in just a few weeks.
Twitter’s ability to listen to its users when determining its product development is a model for other companies. The use of mentions (sending a publicly-visible message to another Twitter user by placing @username at the front of your message) was another innovation that had its origins in user-initiated etiquette. I can’t wait to see what this looks like when it goes live. Project Retweet: The End of RTs as We Know Them?
