The Internet and social media have fostered a new type of marketing communication: inbound, vs. the outbound traditional marketing via TV, billboards, and radio.
Technology – such as the ability to skim past TV ads, listen to ad-free radio, and even block online display pop-ups – increases the importance of inbound marketing.
The two-way communications of inbound marketing requires a company to earn a consumer’s attention with engaging content, whether blog posts, podcasts, Facebook interaction or tweets.
Here’s an infographic from Voltier Digital examining the two types of marketing:
There is a surprising finding in the Performics 2011 Social Shopping Study. It found that men are more likely than women to conduct five of six social shopping activities.
Contradicting commonly held beliefs about gender and social behaviors, the study showed men more frequently research product information, read reviews, compare products, find product availability and get store information via social networks, shopping and deal sites; while women reign supreme when searching for deals, coupons and specials on similar sites.
Aside from Facebook, men frequent social networks (at least once a month) substantially more than women:
YouTube (54 vs. 34 percent)
Twitter (37 vs. 24 percent)
Google+ (36 vs. 24 percent)
Myspace (31 vs. 20 percent)
LinkedIn (20 vs. 16 percent)
Facebook (96 vs. 97 percent)
“Women are reported to control about 80 percent of household spending, so it may be surprising for some to see men play a more dominant role in the social shopping and research process,” said Dana Todd, SVP, marketing and business development for Performics. “But given recent reports of ‘digital dads’ and increases in shared shopping activities across genders, this new data is intriguing.
“We’ve layered social network behavior with shopping patterns and the results are helpful for marketers trying to predict how social shopping figures into upcoming holiday campaigns. Many may not have considered specifically targeting men in social ads.”
Aside from key gender differences, the study, conducted by ROI Research Inc., also revealed that active social networkers most often turn to shopping sites like Amazon, eBay or brand websites to begin the purchase process when searching for a product (87 percent) and right before they commit to a purchase (83 percent).
They are more likely to turn to social networks such as Facebook immediately after the purchase to share their experience (59 percent).
“Many people have integrated social media in all phases of the shopping process, particularly because Facebook is how they connect with friends on mobile devices and at home. We all do it—asking friends, family or colleagues to weigh in on a purchase, or posting a great find,” added Todd. “But it’s not all about social activity; shopping and deal sites are certainly holding their own and offer an excellent opportunity for marketers to participate with customers.”
Online activity while shopping in-store is also gaining popularity—many respondents said they occasionally or frequently conduct in-store social (20–50 percent) or search (18–62 percent) activities. In fact:
Sixty-two percent said they conduct competitive price searches while in a retail location
Forty-five percent “check-in” at a store
Forty-one percent use a search engine on their mobile phone to look for information
Thirty percent use a barcode scanner on their mobile phone to shop for prices
Twenty-five percent pause while at a physical location prior to finalizing a purchase in order to seek advice on a social network; 41percent said they wait between five and 10 minutes for advice on social sites before proceeding with their purchase
The study explored the role of social networks, shopping sites and deal sites across many different aspects of the shopping experience, including phases of the purchase process, product categories, in-store shopping behaviors, gender differences and more.
LinkedIn has introduced new company status updates so users can see breaking news about the company, employee moves, relevant job opportunities or the latest on their products and services including multimedia content — directly from the companies they follow.
The company, which describes the new service on its company blog and in a video, says that it has seen tens of thousands of users follow more than 2 million firms since it introduced “company follow” a year and half ago.
Users following specific companies will now see status updates from the company in their homepage news feed.
Here’s the LinkedIn “in tips” video on the new service:
A majority – 63 percent – of data loss incidents with Google Apps is due to user error such as accidental deletion, 8 percent due to hacking, and 3 percent due to third party app corrupting data. But all were beyond help from Google, meaning the data was gone, according to cloud-based social media backup service Backupify.
Backupify offers independent backups of Google Apps data and an archive backup of a users social media and web app accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
The company has released a report on data loss via Google App services.
Here’s an infographic summarizing the report’s findings:
Social network ad revenue is going to hit $5.54 billion this year – with 2.74 billion spent in the U.S. market, and is headed for 10 billion globally by 2013, according to a new eMarketer report.
U.S. revenue growth in social network ad spending is “solidly in the double digits,” eMarketer says, but growth is even more rapid globally.
By 2013 the report says, revenue from outside the U.S. will reach 51.9 percent of a $10 billion worldwide total.
Most of the ad spend will go to Facebook with a smaller share to Twitter and other social networks. LinkedIn says it expects to account for 3 percent of worldwide social ad network spending this year at $140.8 million, and although is growth has slowed, it triped its ad revenue over three years.
The gains in social network ad spending is increasing that sector’s share of all digital ad spending, sucking up 8.8 percent of all online ad dollars this year in the U.S. and 6.9 percent globally.
Charlie Sheen's Twitter meltdown is cited as one of the ten top social media events.
In advance of Social Media Week, September 19th, event organizers released list of the “Top 10 Social Media Events that Shook the World.” These events, from the Arab Spring to Wikileaks to Charlie Sheen, were all fundamentally shaped by the use of social media, and in many cases would have never happened without social networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Social Media Week was launched by Crowdcentric in 2009 as the world’s first truly global conference designed to help increase understanding of the complex and integrated role social media plays in society. Unlike other conferences, Social Media Week is free to anyone, and those unable to attend in person can participate online to in many of the more than 450 events around the world.
Top 10 Social Media Events that Shook the World(In no particular order of impact)
1. Arab Spring and the uprisings in the Middle East
The “Arab Spring” uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, have proven that social media can transform society and politics on a global scale. Throughout the past several months, social media has been used to organize protests, highlight injustices and government crackdowns, and sway public opinion. Whether democracy will flourish remains to be seen, but social media’s impact in the movement so far is indisputable.
2. Japanese earthquake and tsunami
Millions of people from around the world watched the aftermath of a 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan in real-time via social media. Tweets and videos from Japan were posted within minutes, and viewers across the globe witnessed what would have been impossible to document before the widespread use of social media and handheld devices.
3. Wikileaks scandal
Is Julian Assange a champion of transparency in democracy and freedom of speech? Or is he just a criminal? Wikileaks continues to spur controversy, but the fact is Wikileaks would not have been possible without the rapid advances in digital and social media.
4. Charlie Sheen’s meltdown/use of Twitter
Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown spawned the hashtag “#winning,” which quickly became America’s favorite new catch phrase. Sheen subsequently amassed one million Twitter followers, faster than anyone else in history, and proved that our cultural obsession with celebrity is only growing now that we have more ways to interact online.
5. Anthony Weiner Twitter scandal
This was America’s first political scandal that unfolded – and then broke — over social media, putting a spotlight on the way social media tools are utilized both publicly and privately and will undoubtedly impact the way politicians communicate with their constituents and the public for years to come.
6. Rebecca Black’s viral YouTube hit and subsequent backlash
How is celebrity defined in the age of social media? Does Black’s music video “Friday,” which racked up hundreds of millions of views on YouTube earlier this year, count as a ‘hit’? The answers are up for debate, but it’s a fact that the traditional business models used by the entertainment and music industries are being upended by advances in new technology. (see video at bottom).
7. Social media coverage of British royal wedding
The royal wedding stole the social media show with upwards of nearly one million related Tweets in the month leading up to the nuptials. In the days leading up to the wedding, this single event accounted for more than 70% of all social media mentions.
8. UK Riots
After three nights of rioting in London, politicians blamed the violence on text and instant messaging on mobile devices. British police broke into smart phones to thwart planned attacks on local establishments, and even considered blocking access to social networking sites altogether
9. Hurricane Irene
Storm chasers didn’t need to leave their home to follow the path of Hurricane Irene, as it made its way up the East Coast in August, conjuring tweets on par with the traffic after the Japan earthquake.
10. Social Media IPO’s
Successful startups like Pandora and LinkedIn have gone public and there is growing speculation Groupon, Xanga and Facebook will soon follow suit
“2011 has been a profoundly important year as platforms and technologies have become so ubiquitous that the conversation has shifted from what they are, to how they are being used,” said Toby Daniels, founder and executive director of Social Media Week.
“Globally, the use and application of social media is changing lives, disrupting business, reshaping governments and redefining popular culture, and it’s our responsibility as a global platform to advance people’s understanding by capturing emerging trends and insights.”
The growth of digital social media has been more meteoric than any digital phenomenon except perhaps mobile – which itself extends social media reach to our shopping trips, business travel, and entertainment excursions. The infographic below, from Simplyzesty.com, graphs the growth of social media giants Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia. We would add Tumblr, which is gaining users through what comScore calls “the network effect,” meaning that once a social network hits critical mass, it’s growth explodes. Google+ is clearly going to be an important player going forward, although as a different kind of electron animal than Facebook or Twitter.
Which social network do you think will grab all the buzz next?
Responsys, Inc. (NASDAQ: MKTG), a provider of email and cross-channel marketing solutions, has found that retailers are more focused on using their email marketing programs to promote their social communities and less focused on email for social sharing in a its Viral & Community Links in Emails 2011 report.
Email marketing continues to be a key tactic for raising awareness of and driving traffic to retailers’ communities on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Among the top online retailers tracked by the Retail Email Blog, 88% of them include community links in their promotional emails, up from 75% in 2010, approaching near universal adoption.
“This report is a strong endorsement of email’s ability to raise awareness of and drive traffic to brands’ social media pages on an ongoing basis,” said Ed Henrich, Senior Vice President of Professional Services at Responsys. “It’s also further evidence that cross-channel integration is increasingly vital to future marketing success.”
Facebook and Twitter dominate retailers’ community efforts, although YouTube has grown to become a strong third-place contender. Every retailer in the study linked to Facebook from their emails; 84% linked to Twitter; and 29% linked to YouTube.
However, fewer retailers are including share-with-your-network (SWYN) links in their emails, instead relying on their websites to spur social sharing. The percentage of retailers that include a SWYN link in every promotional email dropped to 25% from 26% in 2010 after rising from 12% in 2009.
“Three times as many retailers include share-with-your-network (SWYN) links on their product pages as regularly as they include them in their emails,” said Chad White, Research Director at Responsys and author of the Viral & Community Links in Emails 2011 report. “That’s a strong indication that retailers are sold on the benefits of SWYN, but that placement further down the sales funnel is more effective in general.”
Meanwhile, forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) usage continues its long-term decline, dropping to 41% from 44% in 2010 and 48% in 2009. Overall, 52% of retailers now include some viral mechanism — either SWYN or FTAF — in their emails, down from 56% in 2010.
Vocus Inc. (NASDAQ: VOCS), a provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, says it has seen 11,500 users sign up for its new social media strategy tool, a free online app that lets businesses build custom social media strategy frameworks in six simple steps.
Developed using expert data from MarketingSherpa, the tool features an intuitive interface allows that allows users to drag-and-drop their goals and answer a series of questions to select the route and resources that suit with what they want to achieve from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging and more. The tool then generates a custom 35-page workbook featuring a detailed plan based on each user’s needs, as well as links to resources, worksheets and next steps. Blank workbooks can also be downloaded and completed at users’ convenience.
The tool, which takes 10-15 minutes to complete, guides users through six simple steps:
1. Setting goals
2. Determining social media maturity
3. Identifying potential challenges
4. Targeting the right audiences
5. Determining how to track and measure success
6. Selecting tactics
“As more companies become active in social media, creating a social media strategy is vital“, says Kye Strance, Director of Product Management at Vocus. “However, many businesses are still overwhelmed with the amount of information available and unsure which tactics are right for them. There is no one-size-fits-all solution; rather, each organization needs a strategy tailored to its specific objectives. This is what our new tool offers, free of charge.”
The U.S. Federal Communications System says it won’t permit LIghtSquared’s proposed middle broadband service to interfere with GPS signals.
The FCC is considering whether or not to let LightSquared’s service proceed.
Some tests showed that GPS receivers pickup interference from spectrum beyond that used by the devices.
In a backgrounding event for reporters, FCC officials said that it won’t allow the LightSquared proposal to use spectrum from 1526 to 1536 MHz and a satellite service in part of the 1600 band if it interferes with nearby GPS spectrum at 1559 to 1610 MHz.
New Microsoft update fixes 22 security flaws
On 8/10, Microsoft issued 13 security updates that patch 22 security flaws in IE, Windows, Office, and other software. Three are rated critical.
The updates fix, among other things, critical vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 9. Security experts say the IE9 updates should be deployed first. They prevent drive-by downloads of malware when visiting infected web sites.
Market volatility scotches some tech IPO plans
The Wall Street Journal reports (requires a subscription to read entire article) that two of four tech firms planning initial public offerings of stock this week have “hit the pause button.” Both Pandora and LinkedIn shares fell substantially in August and the S&P downgrade, political instability and economic uncertainty are shuttering what once looked like a wide-open IPO window for Internet companies and other tech firms.
VC-backed 3D motion sensor maker InvenSense and Portuguese mobile payment company TIM and Wageworks have all gone into drop back ten and punt mode. Boston-based online backup company Carbonite, still plans to price Thursday night (after slashing its offering range from $15-$17 to $11 to $12.
Amazon releases Kindle Cloud Reader
Amazon For over two years, Amazon has been offering a wide selection of free Kindle reading apps that enable customers to “Buy Once, Read Everywhere.” Customers can already read Kindle books on the largest number of the most popular devices and platforms, including Kindles, iPads, iPhones, iPod touches, PCs, Macs, Android phones and tablets, and BlackBerrys.
Today, Amazon.com has released the Kindle Cloud Reader, its latest Kindle reading application that leverages HTML5 and enables customers to read Kindle books instantly using only their web browser – online or offline – with no downloading or installation required. As with all Kindle apps, Kindle Cloud Reader automatically synchronizes your Kindle library, as well as your last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights for all of your Kindle books, no matter how you choose to read them. Kindle Cloud Reader with its integrated touch optimized Kindle Store is available starting today for Safari on iPad, Safari on desktop and Chrome at www.amazon.com/cloudreader.
Features of Kindle Cloud Reader include:
An immersive view of your entire Kindle library, with instant access to all of your books
Start reading over 950,000 Kindle books instantly within your browser
An embedded Kindle Store optimized for your web browser makes it seamless to discover new books and start reading them instantly
New Kindle Store for iPad is built from the ground up for iPad’s touch interface
Your current book is automatically made available for offline use, and you can choose to save a book for reading offline at any time
Receive automatic software updates without the need to download new software
Select any book to start reading, customize the page layout to your desired font size, text color, background color, and more
View all of the notes, highlights, and bookmarks that you’ve made on other Kindle apps or on Kindle
Sync your last page read across your Kindle and free Kindle apps so you can always pick up where you left off
Kindle Cloud Reader is available for Safari on iPad, Safari on desktop and Chrome starting today. Kindle Cloud Reader on the iPad is optimized for the size and unique touch interface of iPad. Without even leaving the app, customers can start shopping in the Kindle Store and will find a unique and immersive shopping experience built specifically for iPad’s Safari browser.
Kindle Cloud Reader will be available on additional web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, the BlackBerry PlayBook browser, and other mobile browsers, in the coming months.
Amazon.com customers can start reading their Kindle books immediately using Kindle Cloud Reader at www.amazon.com/cloudreader.
In the last 60 days, fully 59 percent of online Americans posted something to their own Facebook page, as compared to 10 percent who posted onto their own LinkedIn page, according to a study by Atlanta’s Polaris Marketing Research Inc.
Similarly, 61 percent of online Americans posted to someone else’s Facebook page, while only 8 percent of respondents posted something to someone else’s LinkedIn page in the last 60 days.
Facebook and LinkedIn activity also varied by demographics:
Female respondents were significantly more likely to post onto Facebook while male respondents were significantly more likely to use LinkedIn.
Respondents under the age of 50 were significantly more likely to post to Facebook or LinkedIn.
Respondents with higher incomes ($75,000 or higher) are significantly more likely to post to Facebook or LinkedIn than respondents with incomes less than $30,000.
“Clearly, in our survey, Facebook activity in general far exceeds activity on LinkedIn. It’s interesting that the disparity is also evidenced in their respective market valuations,” said Polaris President Jan Carlson.
Polaris conducted online surveys with a representative sample of 1,000 American consumers during the week of July 18, 2011.
Founded by Jan Carlson, Polaris Marketing Research is a full-service firm that provides state-of-the-art online interactive marketing research reporting, interviewing and data collection, quantitative and qualitative research expertise and personalized project management.
Atlanta-based Polaris Marketing Research is affiliated with the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, the American Marketing Association and the American Society for Quality.
If you've logged in through a box like this, you've probably used Janrain's engine.
Janrain, the Portland, OR-based company that provides those boxes with “Sign in using your account with Facebook, Google, Paypal, Twitter, Account” etc., has closed $15.5 million in financing. Emergence Capital Partners led the round, and is joined by previous investors Anthem Venture Partners, DFJ Frontier, RPM Ventures, Tim Draper, and founder Larry Drebes with participation from Square 1 Bank.
The investment will be used to add resources and employees across all existing functional teams and further support the accelerated growth the company is experiencing.
Janrain provides SaaS solutions that help organizations increase acquisition and engagement with online users by leveraging the user’s social profile.
These solutions, including social login, sharing to social networks and the analytics required to measure and monitor social activities, as well as turnkey registration and social profile storage, are being rapidly adopted by leading brands across many vertical markets.
Organizations rely on Janrain to access and store detailed user profiles that can then be utilized to better serve their online customers, personalize campaigns and inform future marketing strategies.
Janrain received financing of $3.25 million in December 2009. Since that time, the company has grown 300 percent year over year, and signed customers such as MTV, Tribune, Meredith, AMC Networks, Rodale, HarperCollins, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Sears, Free People, Avis and Citysearch. The company employs 60 people.
Three of the top five marketing tactics being used by more than 125 marketing pros relate to online marketing (website development, email marketing, and Social Media Marketing) according to the sixth annual Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketing Mix Survey that monitors and reports marketing mix plans, activities and performance.
Respondents also reported using marketing practices such as press releases, direct marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and seminars. Other survey questions examine a range of marketing topics, including most-used social media tactics, top areas of marketing spend, and top sources of sales leads.
“Marketers are reporting that our B2B Marketing Mix Survey is helping them to allocate their marketing resources wisely, optimize their marketing mix investments, and maximize business results,” said Mark Schmukler, managing partner at Sagefrog Marketing Group.
Key results include:
The areas of highest marketing spend involve digital marketing, including website development, direct marketing (email and direct mail), and online marketing
Tradeshow and event marketing remains a top source of sales leads
The most utilized social media tactics are social networks (66%) such as LinkedIn and Facebook, blogs (34%), and video sharing sites (29%)
About two-thirds of respondents (68%) reported that their 2011 marketing budget is 5% or less of their overall revenue
Forty percent (40%) of respondents expect their marketing budget to increase in 2012
Everyone said that you and your business needed to be on Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, and every other new social media site or service that has made its debut since then. You linked your webpage and your blog and made sure you had the right apps on your mobile devices to post on the go. You have profiles and pages on multiple services and…. now what?
Losing track of where you and your company are online, over-engaging, under-engaging, and inaccessible content can hurt your ability to reach your audience. Hurdle past these issues and get back on track with your social media strategy by taking the time to assess where you are, and form a plan for moving forward.
Issue: Profile Overload. There are scores of online services and sites where you can potentially place your professional or business profile page. As sites develop, you may feel like you are always chasing the next greatest place to create a profile for you or your business. All of those sites may not be neccessary to make an impact with your customers and clients. Worse than not knowing all of where your accounts are is not knowing what your login information is. Without it you wont be able to act, respond, or correct any mis-information
Solution: Take inventory of where your profiles and pages are and know what those sites are for. Are they equivalent to a phonebook listing or do they require maintenance and interaction? Can you post status messages, photos, or videos? Are they professional or social networking sites? Can they be linked to a networked posting service?
Also make sure you are always in control of your login information. Knowing what each site or service can do for you will help you determine which ones to keep, and which ones to delete. It is far better to have a few well-maintained profiles and services than to stretch your energies across a multitude of poorly created or inactive profile pages.
Issue: Multi-Media Frenzy. Pictures (and videos) might be worth a thousand words, but they might not always be the best vehicle for your business’ message. Let’s take a moment to think about your audience. If your audience is the 9-5 working professional and you want them to be able access your information while they are at work, put your message into text.
Many office environments do not allow streaming internet media. Some outright prohibit content from major video hosting sites like YouTube or Vimeo. Other professionals may not feel comfortable watching your video in the workplace due to noise concerns or the perception of not working when accessing media online.
Solution: Make sure your audience can still access your content even if they can’t push play. Consider making content summaries of your video presentations available. Also vary your postings to include both text and multimedia content
Issue: Social Media Silence. Several high profile celebrities have gone social media silent in support of various charitable causes, but for the average business or professional seeking to maintain and build their network, silence can spell disaster. Many new social media users go from gung-ho when they begin their online presence to burned-out.
You may have intended to keep posting several times a day, seven days a week but the reality is that without help, you just can’t keep up with that kind of effort. It’s exhausting. However, that two month period where you haven’t posted at all is telling potential customers that you don’t care, that the business isn’t doing well enough to pay attention to your online presence, or that you lack the digital finesse to “get it.”
Solution: Networked posting services to the rescue! Services like HootSuite and Tweetdeck can help you organize your content and schedule out your activity. Have a plan to post general content about you and your business on a regular basis, then supplement with the more spontaneous or timely content you create later.
Issue: Over-posting is Overwhelming. Your posting is out of control. You’ve posted three inspiring business quotes since breakfast and you are just about to re-tweet an article you saw on a newsfeed, then a photo of your newest product, then a video about how your stock is doing and….. Stop! Don’t. Push. The Button. Where are you going with all of that activity?
Is it emphasizing your core message? Are you educating and engaging, or just plain annoying your contacts with all of your chatter? Are you revealing more personal information to your business peers than is really appropriate?
Solution: Post what matters when it matters. Strategic and planned posting services can help over-posters too. If you are over-posting because several people have access to your accounts and are posting independently, reel it back in and take control. Establish a review process to make sure you are posting for your business or professional persona.
That includes putting your personal posts on a personal social media account not your company or professional profile. It’s ok to re-post content from other reliable and respected sources, especially pertinent news or industry happenings, but make sure your own message is not lost in all the activity.
Even if you haven’t fallen into any of the above issue categories entirely, avoid reaching social media meltdown by taking the time to assess your social media strategy now before you lose patience, control, or sight of your goals. Don’t worry if you haven’t stayed strictly on task with your social media strategy. The great thing about social media is that it is constantly evolving so you can still get your strategy going and be successful.
Martha Ciske is a legal information technologist and social media consultant in Orlando, Florida. She has worked with professionals, businesses, and non-profit organizations to build their online presence and develop social media strategies. Her interests lie in anything geeky and cool. She can be reached atMartha@marthaciske.com.
CHICAGO – Is there a tech boom or are we in another tech bubble? That’s the question that pops up in the face of extremely high valuations for digital media companies, particularly on the West Coast, and whenever a no-profits company such as Linkedin or Pandora launches an IPO. Sean Harper, CEO of Chicago-based FeeFighters.com, a firm that is like a LendingTree for small businesses looking for services such as credit card processing, says he doesn’t think were in another tech bubble.
“The biggest valuations are similar to those in the bubble era,” he tells the TechJournal, but, he adds, “The companies now have way, way more traction. Companies such as Zynga and Groupon have lots of users and revenues. That’s our perspective,” he says, following the data FeeFighters collected to make the infographic below. “Others could look at the same data and come to the opposite conclusion,” he says.
FeeFighters, a seven employee firm founded in 2009, has raised $1.5 million in backing. It’s provides a shopping platform to help small businesses get better deals on credit card processing, insurance and other financial services. What do you think? Are we in a tech boom or headed for a tech bust? Here’s the inforgraphic:
Microsoft, dammit, you had it right there in front of you. Your much-anticipated “for-real-this-time” entry into the mobile OS game that was going to make everyone forget about the Kin and go head-to-head with Droids and iPhones is now officially in the mainstream with Verizon’s entry, the HTC Trophy, and you never even once considered what could have been an enormous branding coup.
The MicroPhone.
You’re welcome.
Instead, we get Windows Phone 7. And this speaks directly to my problem with the Windows Mobile Strategy since they first figured out it’d be super sweet if the iPaq could make phone calls.
1) All they’re doing is playing catch-up.
2) They’re not sprinting.
Microsoft, I still love you. As a proud former Cassiopeia owner who still has a Windows laptop in a Mac shop even though it happens to have an untouched Vista partition because that was your advice to me when I couldn’t retrowrite it with XP – anyway, I had high hopes for the MicroPhone, and I’m desperately trying to avoid jumping on the bashwagon, but I’m not seeing the mobile strategy equivalent of Halo.
Xbox Live Integration!
In 2011, Microsoft has two things going strongly for it. One, Macs are still expensive. Two, the Xbox.
Everything about the Xbox is exponentially cooler than its competition. The Kinect is a terrible exercise in setup frustration that is rewarded with too few games, but it’s cool. I still can’t watch ESPN3 on my Time Warner Cable connected Xbox, but every time I see the logo on my dashboard, I can’t help but imagine how cool that’s going to be.
Work it out, jerks.
So it stands to reason that Xbox Live integration into the MicroPhone should be heralded as the coolest thing to happen to a phone since someone else’s voice came out of it.
But hold on. It’s Xbox Live.
When I do use Xbox Live on my console to play the occasional online game, it’s because I want to play a shooter or a sports game against someone other than the computer. I want to immerse myself in intricate playability, the unspeakably awesome graphics on my big-ass living room television, and the enhanced 6.1 Surround Sound cranking out of my speakers.
Online! Banking!
HTC Trophy smartphone
The mobile gaming experience is the polar opposite. If I want to play a game on my phone, it’s because I’m waiting in line at the bank. I don’t care about the graphics or the sound or even the depth of gameplay, as long as I can start and stop quickly and do it with one hand.
Which is pretty much the drill for everything you do with your mobile.
Microsoft brought the ages-old PC practice of cheap downloadable non-blockbuster games to the console, and in this they’ve had some hits. So instead of building around the Xbox Live brand to make the mobile gaming experience something unique, they just shoved Xbox Live games into the phone.
But in the mobile universe, WinMo7 is starting out already woefully behind iOS and Android in the app and gaming department, and the Xbox Live brand is just not enough to make Microsoft a mobile gaming contender out of the box.
I’m looking at my game selection right now, and I’m being steered towards Plants vs. Zombies and Angry at the Birds.
No, I typed that last one correctly.
It’s So Much More Than Games!
Every other aspect of the Xbox Live experience is pretty much the equivalent of what you’d expect from an iPhone or an Android phone. Or for that matter the MicroPhone itself. Xbox Live has Netflix. WinMo has a native Netflix app. Xbox Live has Facebook. WinMo has a native Facebook app.
Both have Zune, so there you go.
There’s the Xbox Live community, sure, but I’ll go ahead and admit that I have no friends. Wait. I have Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Google + and actual friends, but since those friends and I are rarely waiting in line at the bank at the same time, we’re probably not going to be mobile gaming together.
In fact, if we were in line at the bank at the same time, we’d probably just put our phones away and strike up a conversation.
Preemptive Comment Strike: I’m sure hardcore gamers can probably get a lot of use out of Xbox Live for MicroPhone, but are you guys really leaving your house that much? Aren’t you there right now?
MS Office in the Palm of Your Hand!
Well…
1) Google Docs: I’m barely running Office on my laptop anymore. In fact, if it weren’t for all the time I spend in bars and movie theaters during work hours and the fact that I’m too cheap to spring for mobile wireless, I wouldn’t use Office at all.
2) Tablets: It’s the size, not the software. A mobile phone is simply not an effective business device replacement. A tablet is.
3) RIM: The convergence of the business mobile device and the personal mobile device has happened. When? A quick glance at RIMM’s stock chart shows it was 2/18/11.
Business functionality requires a small subset of features compared to personal. RIM aced the former and blew the latter. Again, Office isn’t enough of a brand to force a change from iOS or Android for business reasons and give up all the apps.
When I showed my kids Angry at the Birds, they looked at me like I gave them a Paydaycandy bar. Like… thanks?
Even Without Xbox Live and Office, It’s a Perfectly Adequate Phone!
And that leaves all the things that a mobile device is supposed to do. Camera? Check. GPS? You betcha. Email? Of course.
The MicroPhone does all of these. The presentation is beautiful, the navigation is a little shaky in terms of relearning menus (“pivots” scroll across the top). It rings when people call you.
The HTC handset is phenomenal, by the way, once more boosting my admiration of HTC products. (Editor’s note: we recently tested an HTC Windows 7 phone as well and also found the HTC handset an excellent piece of equipment and the Windows 7 operating system the easiest and most intuitive to use of all those we’ve tried.)
Like I said, I had high hopes for MicroPhone™. I’ve gone so far as to ask around hoping my own ignorance had kept me from discovering that new new thing that way.
It may be there, but if it is, it’s down the road. Maybe with the Mango update later this year.
Joe Procopio heads up product engineering for sports media startup StatSheet . He also owns consulting firm Intrepid Company and creative network Intrepid Media and runs the startup social ExitEvent. Joe can be reached via Twitter @jproco and read joeprocopio.com.
To prove his point, Jason highlights a number of Google+ features that beat Facebook’s — features like “Forced categorization of contacts” and “Chrome Browser and Chrome Store integration” and “Android integration.”
And with more than 200 million deeply invested Gmail users, Google would seem to have a powerful launch pad.
So if Google+’s technology is brilliant, its userbase is deep, Facebook’s functionality is flawed and all the pundits are convinced Google will romp, why am I confident that Google+ will fail to beat Facebook?
Because in their Google worship and/or their focus on comparing features, the pundits are forgetting tried and true axioms about how humans adopt technology, axioms documented decades ago by tech visionaries like Gordon Moore and Clayton Christensen. Here’s my rundown.
1) Even the best carpenter can’t build a tree. Though Google+ is an elegant piece of engineering, it’s not a social network. Jason and Jeff love Google’s technical innovations. Sure, normal technology thrives because of technical brilliance, design beauty and marketing megatonnage. But social networks are affected only marginally by those factors.
Instead, in social networks, the users are the product. Users’ habits and passions and commitments to each other are the life-force that makes a social network grow. Just as you can’t build a tree from a bunch of boards, you never could have constructed Facebook or Twitter or eBay or LinkedIn or Wikipedia top-down with a bunch of prefab components.
Launching with one hundred million users or a $100 million marketing budget would have more likely killed those sites, not grown them. (One advantage Google WILL have, at least initially, is fewer bimbots than Facebook.)
2) Wrong launch users. Passionate persistent users, not brilliant designers or programmers or professional commentators, build social networks. Google+ is launching with a diffuse cloud of alpha-tester geekerati who view Google+ as a feature set to be explored, tested and rated. Having the attention span and loyalty of fleas, this jittery crowd will migrate onward within weeks to the next hot-smelling technology that swaggers into view.
Beyond sharing a common identity as “early adopters,” members of this crowd don’t (usually) care deeply about each other or share a common passion beyond a burning desire be first in using a technology. They’re users, not community members.
Google’s diffuse-by-invites strategy works fine for a tool like Gmail, which is evaluated purely as a feature set, but it won’t work for Google+. Evidence: my friend Dan Gilmore, who as an innovator and former reporter for San Jose Mercury News should have more Google+ connections than anybody, went onto Facebook to look for friends who might also be using Google+. With no luck.
It doesn’t matter to you if 1 million or even 100 million people are using a social network, if only one of your 20 key colleagues and friends are using it. With social networks, it takes at least three to tango.
3) Diffuse launch path. Social networks can ONLY start small and tight with a set of enmeshed users, then percolate slowly outward. Facebook started in a Harvard dorm, then spread across Harvard, then to Stanford, Columbia and Yale. Then other Ivy League schools. Then colleges across the US. Then high schools. Then Microsoft and Apple. Only then, 30 months after launch, was Facebook opened up to everyone.
Comparison with Twitter
Likewise, Twitter started with messages between Biz Stone, Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey and their friends in San Francisco in March of 2003. It percolated there for a year, before expanding in March of 2007 into the tightly networked SXSW crowd, folks who were hungery for a way to recreate and sustain their SXSW friendships when they left Austin. That crowd, in turn, evangelized to their social network savvy friends at businesses across the US.
For both Facebook and Twitter, initial users were tightly networked. There was a strong sense of clubbiness among community members through a long initial phase. Those members’ loyalty to the club withstood even repeated outages (on the part of Twitter) and privacy concerns (on the part of Facebook) that would have doomed a normal technology product.
4) Noisy feedback loops. One of the key reasons that launching big is fatal to social networks is because the feedback loop from users to designers to users to progammers to management to newbs to old-timers to programmers gets cluttered with noise. When a tool launches big, its designers end up trying to build a feature set that satisfies all communities — or their own peculiar whims. Most users end up with a luke-warm affection for the service. There’s no ‘sponsor’ community to advocate change or evangelize.
MIT professor Eric Von Hippel has amply documented the importance of users in driving innovation in technology domains as diverse as thermoplastics, semi-conductors and scientific instruments. Is there any doubt that user innovation would be even more crucial in shaping social networks, where the user and the product are so closely entwined, functioning as two ends of the same biocyber synapse?
Rather than launching big and broad, far better to build a “small” tool for one passionate community. Once the kinks get worked out, this template of technology and usage patterns later gets adopted/adapted by other adjacent communities. Using this approach, people like to feel they’re in a human-sized space in which their actions matter, in which their feedback into the system gets processed and used. (Gordon Moore’s bookCrossing the Chasm is awesome about this process.)
(It’s worth noting that Robert Scoble thinks Google+ is just for geeks and will survive by serving that market alone. I think geeks don’t just want to socialize with geeks… for long.)
5) Professional managers. Successful social networks evolve over time, often blossoming out of series of random, non-linear, unpredictable connections and chemistry. In retrospect, the winner’s strategy looks obvious (read Duncan Watts’ book!), but at any given moment, it is impossible to determine what feature set or user base will drive the coming decade’s NEXT dominant social network.
Professional managers, particularly of software projects, can’t tolerate this kind of nonlinear growth. In his post about Google+, Jason notes that he wrongly predicted huge success for Wave, Google’s previous attempt at social software launched with great fanfare two years ago, because Google ultimately stopped devoting resources to Wave. Why should things be different this time?
Google is a big public company that needs high-profile successes not meandering muddles that may eventually pay off. This means Google will likely give up on Google+ before it can take root, just like it killed Wave. Clayton Christensen’s brillian bookInnovator’s Dilemma gives the playbook.
6) No culture. Starting big and broad also kills the chance for a social network to develop a distinctive culture. This is crucial because a great social network is known by its culture, its lingo, its behaviors, its taboos, its history. Some examples:
Overwhelmed by the volume of information flowing from Twitter, Tweeters (not Twitter) created hashtags to keep track of ideas.
Back in 2004, the liberal blog DailyKos was playing a key role in narrating and steering the Democratic party’s primaries. The site was getting lots of favorable press, and I asked Markos Moulitsas, the community’s creator and curator, whether this attention was having a big positive impact on the community. On the contrary, Markos replied. Every time there was big press about the site, the community would flood with new users who didn’t get the site’s culture.
Traffic would spike briefly, but interaction quality would plummet. A big gush of new members busted the site’s chemistry. Then DailyKos would shrink back to its previuos size and start growing organically again. Since then, the Kos community’s richness has spawned its own yearly convention.
(Another example of Kossite culture: to this day, a novel ad campaign can’t run on DailyKos without invoking communal cries of “pie fight,” an insider reference to an infamous, bodacious 2005 ad campaign by Turner Broadcast for a Gilligan’s Island reality show.)
For another example of how growth can kill a social network’s culture, look no further than the Q&A community Quora‘s explosion/implosion early this year. Once a steadily growing service, rich with VC and tech insiders, Quora suddenly went viral in January. New users flooded into the service and quality of interactions plummeted. Despite lots of agonizing over how to sustain the growth, http://quorareview.com/2011/01/27/evolving-quoras-design-for-growth/ the site has fallen back to earth.
In contrast, the Q&A service Stackoverflow, which is tightly focused on serving specific communities and growing organically for the last three years , has overtaken Quora. Notice in the Google trends graph for the two services that Quora has gotten a huge amount of press (bottom trend box), but Stackoverflow is now far bigger.
Am I a Luddite or Google-hater? Judge for yourself. I started tweeting in March of ’07. I was LinkedIn’s 4,154th user. I even own a few Google shares — their ad business is a money-printing machine.
Summing up: Google’s great at carpentry. Gardening, not so much.
Henry Copeland is founder and CEO of Blogads.com. Reprinted by permission from: www.blogads.com
ALEXANDRIA, VA – Whether for personal use, professional use or a combination of the two, 83 percent of business travel manager respondents in June’s The Wire….from AirPlus called “Social Media Jumps in Managed Travel Space,” indicated they participate in social media sites this year, as compared to 77 percent last year.
When delving into specific platforms, LinkedIn users which held virtually steady in 2009 (58 percent) and 2010 (59 percent), jumped to 74 percent this year. Facebook also grew; from a low of 45 percent in 2009 to 55 percent in 2010 and to 62 percent this year.
The study is just one more indicator that social media is steadily boring into our daily business routines.
“More than half (59 percent) of survey respondents believe that social media helps travel managers understand what is most important to travelers and anticipate their needs, this is not a topic to be ignored. With an 18 percent increase over last year’s survey, we see that the business travel marketplace is ripe with platforms for industry conversation and innovation,” said Richard Crum, President and CEO of AirPlus International Inc.
“Examples such as Michelle DeCosta from Sapient and Karoline Mayr form Deltek illustrate that travel managers are empowered when they use social media to communicate with their travelers. AirPlus is an advocate of such platforms for knowledge-sharing to spur conversation and collaboration.”
The Wire…from AirPlus is a monthly pulse report for the business travel industry on timely and relevant topics. Results of this edition are based on a survey of 146 corporate travel professionals in North America and Europe from April 26 to May 13, 2011.
AirPlus International is a leading business travel payment solution with a payment suite of central bill accounts, corporate cards and online management tools that are used by over 35,000 customers worldwide.
Pandora, (NYSE:P) the online radio service, saw its share prices tumble below its offering price of $16 in its second day of trading. The company’s shares were trading at $13.26 Thursday as the markets close.
Although the company’s shares rose as high as $26 following its initial public offering of stock Wednesday, they fell to $17.42 by the day’s close.
Following the smashing success of business social networking site LinkedIn’s IPO, Pandora’s debut on the NYSE was highly anticipated.
The company, however, has yet to make a profit, despite having 90 million users, and much media commentary about the Pandora IPO focused on the firm’s downsides. Those include a small advertiser base compared to its user base, the cost of its contracts with music labels (to which it pays a royalty every time a user plays a tune), and its losses despite increasing revenue.
Every time Pandora gains a customer, it has to pay more music royalties. Pandora also must renegotiate its contracts with the music labels in two years.
Pandora doubled its first quarter revenue in 2011 to $51 million, but also doubled its losses to $6.8 million compared to the same period last year.
LinkedIn (Linkd) , by comparison, is profitable and saw its first quarter revenue rise to $93.9 million, up 110 percent over the same period last year.
Groupon, the daily deal site that has raised a billion dollars in venture backing and filed to go public earlier this month, has also faced significant losses, chalking up a profit only in the first quarter of 2010. It lost $146.5 million in the first quarter this year.
A Rice University study says that daily deal sites are not developing a sustainable business. That could affect how Groupon’s IPO performs.
Contrary to some published reports, social media sites – particularly Facebook, do not seem to be isolating people or cutting them off from real world relationships. Facebook users, a new report says, actually have more close relationships than the average American and get more social support than other people. And those are just a few of the study’s surprising findings.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine SNS in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement.
The findings paint a rich and complex picture of the role that digital technology plays in people’s social worlds. Wherever possible, we seek to disentangle whether people’s varying social behaviors and attitudes are related to the different ways they use social networking sites, or to other relevant demographic characteristics, such as age, gender and social class.
The number of those using social networking sites has nearly doubled since 2008 and the population of SNS users has gotten older.
In this Pew Internet sample, 79% of American adults said they used the internet and nearly half of adults (47%), or 59% of internet users, say they use at least one of SNS. This is close to double the 26% of adults (34% of internet users) who used a SNS in 2008. Among other things, this means the average age of adult-SNS users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010. Over half of all adult SNS users are now over the age of 35. Some 56% of SNS users now are female.
Facebook dominates the SNS space in this survey: 92% of SNS users are on Facebook; 29% use MySpace, 18% used LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.
There is considerable variance in the way people use various social networking sites: 52% of Facebook users and 33% of Twitter users engage with the platform daily, while only 7% of MySpace and 6% of LinkedIn users do the same.
On Facebook on an average day:
15% of Facebook users update their own status.
22% comment on another’s post or status.
20% comment on another user’s photos.
26% “Like” another user’s content.
10% send another user a private message
Facebook users are more trusting than others.
We asked people if they felt “that most people can be trusted.” When we used regression analysis to control for demographic factors, we found that the typical internet user is more than twice as likely as others to feel that people can be trusted. Further, we found that Facebook users are even more likely to be trusting. We used regression analysis to control for other factors and found that a Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day is 43% more likely than other internet users and more than three times as likely as non-internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.
Facebook users have more close relationships.
The average American has just over two discussion confidants (2.16) – that is, people with whom they discuss important matters. This is a modest, but significantly larger number than the average of 1.93 core ties reported when we asked this same question in 2008. Controlling for other factors we found that someone who uses Facebook several times per day averages 9% more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other internet users.
Facebook users get more social support than other people.
We looked at how much total support, emotional support, companionship, and instrumental aid adults receive. On a scale of 100, the average American scored 75/100 on a scale of total support, 75/100 on emotional support (such as receiving advice), 76/100 in companionship (such as having people to spend time with), and 75/100 in instrumental aid (such as having someone to help if they are sick in bed).
Internet users in general score 3 points higher in total support, 6 points higher in companionship, and 4 points higher in instrumental support. A Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day tends to score an additional 5 points higher in total support, 5 points higher in emotional support, and 5 points higher in companionship, than internet users of similar demographic characteristics. For Facebook users, the additional boost is equivalent to about half the total support that the average American receives as a result of being married or cohabitating with a partner.
Facebook users are much more politically engaged than most people.
Our survey was conducted over the November 2010 elections. At that time, 10% of Americans reported that they had attended a political rally, 23% reported that they had tried to convince someone to vote for a specific candidate, and 66% reported that they had or intended to vote. Internet users in general were over twice as likely to attend a political meeting, 78% more likely to try and influence someone’s vote, and 53% more likely to have voted or intended to vote. Compared with other internet users, and users of other SNS platforms, a Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day was an additional two and half times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57% more likely to persuade someone on their vote, and an additional 43% more likely to have said they would vote.
Facebook revives “dormant” relationships.
In our sample, the average Facebook user has 229 Facebook friends. They reported that their friends list contains:
22% people from high school
12% extended family
10% coworkers
9% college friends
8% immediate family
7% people from voluntary groups
2% neighbors
Over 31% of Facebook friends cannot be classified into these categories. However, only 3% of Facebook friends are people users have never met in person, and only 7% are people who have met only one time. The remainder is friends-of-friends and social ties that are not currently active relationships, but “dormant” ties that may, at some point in time, become an important source of information.
Social networking sites are increasingly used to keep up with close social ties.
Looking only at those people that SNS users report as their core discussion confidants, 40% of users have friended all of their closest confidants. This is a substantial increase from the 29% of users who reported in our 2008 survey that they had friended all of their core confidants.
MySpace users are more likely to be open to opposing points of view.
We measured “perspective taking,” or the ability of people to consider multiple points of view. There is no evidence that SNS users, including those who use Facebook, are any more likely than others to cocoon themselves in social networks of like-minded and similar people, as some have feared.
Moreover, regression analysis found that those who use MySpace have significantly higher levels of perspective taking. The average adult scored 64/100 on a scale of perspective taking, using regression analysis to control for demographic factors, a MySpace user who uses the site a half dozen times per month tends to score about 8 points higher on the scale.
There is a surprising finding in the Performics 
LinkedIn has introduced new company status updates so users can see breaking news about the company, employee moves, relevant job opportunities or the latest on their products and services including multimedia content — directly from the companies they follow.
A majority – 63 percent – of data loss incidents with Google Apps is due to user error such as accidental deletion, 8 percent due to hacking, and 3 percent due to third party app corrupting data. But all were beyond help from Google, meaning the data was gone, according to cloud-based social media backup service 
Responsys, Inc.
Vocus Inc. (NASDAQ: VOCS), a provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, says it has seen 11,500 users sign up for its new 
The U.S. Federal Communications System says it won’t permit LIghtSquared’s proposed middle broadband service to interfere with GPS signals.
In the last 60 days, fully 59 percent of online Americans posted something to their own Facebook page, as compared to 10 percent who posted onto their own LinkedIn page, according to a study by Atlanta’s Polaris Marketing Research Inc.
Three of the top five marketing tactics being used by more than 125 marketing pros relate to online marketing (website development, email marketing, and Social Media Marketing) according to the sixth annual Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketing Mix Survey that monitors and reports marketing mix plans, activities and performance.
By Martha Ciske
Issue: Social Media Silence. Several high profile celebrities have gone social media silent in support of various charitable causes, but for the average business or professional seeking to maintain and build their network, silence can spell disaster. Many new social media users go from gung-ho when they begin their online presence to burned-out.
CHICAGO – Is there a tech boom or are we in another tech bubble? That’s the question that pops up in the face of extremely high valuations for digital media companies, particularly on the West Coast, and whenever a no-profits company such as Linkedin or Pandora launches an IPO. Sean Harper, CEO of Chicago-based 
ALEXANDRIA, VA – Whether for personal use, professional use or a combination of the two, 83 percent of business travel manager respondents in
Pandora, (NYSE:P) the online radio service, saw its share prices tumble below its offering price of $16 in its second day of trading. The company’s shares were trading at $13.26 Thursday as the markets close.
Contrary to some published reports, social media sites – particularly Facebook, do not seem to be isolating people or cutting them off from real world relationships. Facebook users, a new report says, actually have more close relationships than the average American and get more social support than other people. And those are just a few of the study’s surprising findings.
