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Apple Launches Ping, Social Network For Music
The march toward all things social just snared a big one. Apple announced on Wednesday its new product, Ping, its social network for music, which CEO Steve Jobs described as Facebook meets Twitter for music. Ping is accessible through iTunes, Apple’s music store, and allows users to follow others in the style of Twitter. including artists or friends to find out what they’re listening to or what they’re creating. Ping will be available for iTunes on the desktop, as well as iPhone and iPod Touch.
Will social network + online music store (with 160 million users) threaten social music sites MySpace, Last FM, Spotify and Pandora, to name a few? According to the WSJ.com, they certainly will be worried. For example, while rapper 50 Cent uses MySpace to talk and interact with fans, they are sent to iTunes to make a purchase. Last FM, meanwhile, does what Ping says it will do, that is it tracks iTunes users listening habits and publishes them on a web page and allows them to follow other users for recommendations. Read the full WSJ.com article here.
September 2nd, 2010
Godwalla Moves Beyond the Check-In
The location-based social networks began to crop up, check-ins were considered the cutting edge, but now that Facebook has launched its Places feature, its fast becoming a commodity. Godwalla, one the more popular social location sites, has launched a new feature that tries to move beyond the mere check-in: Highlights.
The feature asks users to enter in their Top 20 locations and to tag them. When a user checks in close to a friend’s highlighted tag, they’ll get a message alerting them to it. Or, users can visit the Highlight page around their location and see what others are saying about it, or the places near it.
Co-founder Josh Williams told Techcrunch the idea for what he calls a “social geo atlas” came about when the company was creating its iPad app, as its easier to manipulate a map on the iPad. The new feature is available on the web and will be available for mobile and the iPad shortly.
Viral Videos Overrated?
Are viral videos overrated? According to Jim Louderback, CEO of internet television network Revision3, viral videos are nothing better than “a fluffernutter white-bread sandwich, delivering little or no value to anyone.” In an AdAge.com column, Louderback argues that viral videos are bad for a number of reasons. For advertisers especially, he notes that Revision3 has seen in the last five years that advertising associated with viral videos has only a small fraction of the impact of an ad that runs inside, or alongside, an episodic video program.
And while the recent Old Spice Guy videos has many marketers trying to mimic its success, Louderback notes that the whole campaign—of which the viral videos were just a part–actually started with a Super Bowl ad. He adds, “Each subsequent piece was part of a well thought out development of an engaging character, with the entire story arc and timing scripted in advance. They created a compelling, episodic video show, and spent millions up front to promote it.”
Read the full column here.
Audioboo – the new radiostar?
audioboo
Audioboo, the social sound company that enables users to upload record and upload audio to share across the web and mobile, is launching a ’social answerphone’. This new service allows people to send direct, private messages to each other, like Twitter does, but with audio rather than text. There’s no need for a direct mobile phone number, messages can be sent to other audioboo users. Audioboo CEO, Mark Rock, told The Guardian, “It’s difficult to actually talk to people you’ve connected to on social networks since you rarely know their telephone number. What private boos allow you to do is simply to connect to them via voice, which is often a much richer experience than text. When you add in the location and image data we provide, then we think private boos are going to be a really interesting way for people to stay in touch.”
It all gets very interesting. In the future, imagine receiving a personalised boo from a celebrity or a favourite brand.
Stephen Fry likes it.
Simplifying social search
The real-time, social search market is getting busy. But it hasn’t stopped another optimistic start-up 48ers joining the fray. Alongside companies like OneRiot, Scoopler and Collecta, 48ers is a real-time social search engine, helping users keep in touch with what people are saying about a chosen topic right now.
48ers is trying to simplify this world with a user interface similar to Google, returning relevant results within one page. It’s very early days for this self funded start-up, which has just a few thousand users. The founders told The Guardian that: “We are the only service out there which delivers up-to-the-second realtime search results from the biggest social networks on the web (Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Delicious and Digg) and present this back in an easy-to-read way. For the first time, brands and companies can instantly track and react to what people are saying about them online, wherever it is being said.”
This market is going to grow in importance and popularity. But who is going to rule real-time search?
http://venturebeat.com/2009/06/20/who-rules-real-time-search-a-look-at-9-contenders/
Twitter serious about making money
Twitter is getting more serious about making money. It has appointed Adam Bain, former president of the News Corporation’s Fox Audience Network, as Twitter’s president of global revenue. It has also hired a number of senior sales execs from Google, Facebook and Yelp to help boost revenues. The New York Times reports that, “The hires round out Twitter’s sales executive ranks, and indicate that the start-up is moving into a new phase, focusing on revenue.”Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams has previously compared his company to Google in the early days. “It was the classic story of not worrying about monetization yet and getting their product right,”. Let’s see.
Coca-Cola Facebook village
An excellent integration of digital and real worlds.The Coca-Cola Village takes place in Israel and this year they ran the event through Facebook. Teenagers needed to collect 10 Coca-Cola lids, get eight friends to do the same and register for exclusive entry through Facebook. Once there, they were all given wristbands, which once swiped, automatically updated Facebook status. They generated 35,000 posts a day for three days, leading to over 100,000 posts for the event.
Fight. PPC vs SEO
SES Francisco pitched a panel for the ultimate search marketing battle, PPC or SEO? In the real world, it’s not a black and white issue. But one interesting tip from Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz was to focus efforts on video SEO as you can achieve page one results relatively easily.
Here’s a summary on the advantages of using both in a holistic search strategy.
1/Using PPC and SEO will provide significant lift for each listing than only appearing in one or the other
2/Ability to reach the entire search audience
3/ Increased revenue from the non branded searches
4/ More efficient budget allocation of PPC campaigns based on natural results
5/ Less space for the competition
You can read the blog post on the heated debate here
Scaling up your SEO campaign, tips from SES Francisco
This is Covario’s Russ Mann’s tips on scaling up to handle growth and SEO globally
- Create a sense of urgency
- Form a coalition team
- Create the vision of success
- Communicate the vision
- Delegate and empower others to act on the vision
- Plan for and create short-term wins
- Consolidate improvements and create more change
- Institutionalize new ways of doing business
Brightedge’s Jim Yu had some key lessons on enterprise SEO.
1. SEO is an enterprise-wide responsibility. Everyone who touches the website impacts SEO.
2. Define SEO standards and processes early. Training is essential, as is standardizing best practices, pro-active audits, metrics, workflow, and the use of scalable technology.
3. Plan for a wide range of SEO knowledge across all different kinds of people. People need clear goals and instructions tailored to their level of SEO knowledge.
4. Tailor performance and compliance reports at all levels (company-wide, business unit and individual). It’s important to focus these reports back to business impact and ROI. This really helps to align and drive behavior.
5. Remember to include the long-tail in your SEO planning because between 20 and 25 percent of all Google searches are unique and the tail is getting longer.
Facebook’s who, what, when and now where…
Facebook has unveiled its new location service, Places. Location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Hot Potato (which the social network is reportedly interested in buying) are finally starting to take off and Facebook’s entry could make the idea of sharing locations mainstream.
Facebook already has 150m mobile users and the new service will enable them to check in to a business or address and then immediately share this location with their friends. Users could also find other people who’ve recently logged in nearby. The commercial imperatives for Facebook launching a location-based service are clear. Location-targeted advertising and deals with venues and retailers has huge potential.
So what took Facebook so long? That’s what early adopters will be thinking, but LBS opens the social network up to a massive privacy backlash, if it takes a step wrong. It’s crucial for Facebook to get the privacy settings right on this new service. They need to be crystal clear and secure. If they get it right, Facebook may be able to persuade half a billion people, mostly uncomfortable with location-based features, that it’s going to be OK.
Read the official statement from Facebook here.
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