Social Media Marketing Blog

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

We have for a long time at our agency wanted to have as many of our clients advertising on Facebook, especially if their target market is spending the majority of their time inside the social network. However, due to the complications with invoicing and so forth, especially regarding the only billing in US dollars, we decided to wait.

News came through about a month or so ago that Facebook was setting up an Australian sales office and we started to get excited. Having a dedicated team focusing on the Australian market could really work in its favour, think of Google when they started with a sales team here. (more…)

How are you sharing YouTube videos you watch at the moment? Myself, I share via email, instant chat with whoever is online, or if its something my Twitter network would be interested in, I shorten the URL and away I go. TechCrunch reports that they have tried out a new feature being rolled out, that being to share videos in real time with other friends that are using YouTube. So no need to use external services, share YouTube within itself.

So the million dollar question is, will people use it? It often amazes me how active some comment on YouTube videos. There must be a specific niche or demographic of people that use it purely to interact with people. In my real life social circle, the sole reason it is used is to watch a specific video and resume whatever it was we were doing previously, or moving to a related video.

However, I cannot argue with the facts and the stats - people love interacting on Youtube. So for those that already power users, this could possibly be their dream come true. But as for the users such as myself, it probably won’t convert me, no matter how good the UI or experience would be.

One nice feature is the clear attempt at both replicating and tweaking Facebook’s chat and real time features to hopefully encourage people to share within YouTube itself rather than another service/network.

The final question remains however is what new data can YouTube mine from this feature? Can it draw a co-relation between teenager males and how much they share videos relating to cars, as opposed to teenage girls dancing in front of their webcam? Do people start to share a video halfway through because they enjoy it that much, or wait until the end before they share? How often does a shared video get viewed by the sharee? Or is it ignored and viewed at a later date?

We all know we can choose our friends, and we have been doing it as soon as we start interacting with people at a young age. As we grow and develop our own social skills, we refine our processes so that we are able to determine who we want to spend time with and who we don’t. Our parents taught us as well that we should look at the whole person and not base our judgements or assumptions with how people look or appear.

That is well and good though in the real world and creating real world friendships. The Internet, it seems however, almost forces us to judge someone off a two sentence bio and 75×75 avatar. I am not going to delve into the social ramifications of this scenario, but rather I want to focus on how to make sure you are represented properly on your various profile pages on your social networks. The reason being is that more and more employers and clients are searching your name, and making decisions about you as a person, based on your network profile.

If people are going to pass judgements, and lets face it, it’s going to happen, lets make sure its as close to the true representation of you as much as possible. Lets go through some basic tips. (more…)

Yesterday was an interesting day for Sydney. In the late afternoon, from about (4-5pm) my Twitter account started going crazy with updates. Unbeknownst to myself at the time, on the other side of the Harbour Bridge, a massive blackout had occured across some of Sydney’s CBD. Hash tags were in every second tweet from my Sydney followers updating me in real time of the situation. Reports of people trapped in lifts, the status of the Sydney CityRail train line, and most importantly, how the situation was being handled. (more…)

Its the same old story. Every second week, someone makes a comment how Twitter needs to make money to survive. And then every blogger and online marketer chimes in and gives his two cents worth.

Its mentioned that they should Twitter should charge for commercial accounts or maybe Twitter use affliate marketing or maybe anyone of these 7 Twitter monetisation strategies.

At the end of the day, Twitter continues to receive funding from various investors and is fast becoming one of the top 5 social networks on the Internet - no small feet in itself.

I like Twitter. I like the people use Twitter. I like what Twitter has done and how it treats its users. In fact, besides the fail whale, there is very little I do not like Twitter.

So I say lets just let Twitter be, and if they do start to charge users, it will just sort the wheat from the chaff.

What’s the biggest issue when dealing with social websites and networks?

Getting them to turn a profit.

So now Youtube has done some thinking and come up with a way to generate income without turning it into a mess of advertising banners. They go down the same road as other information sources have already tried and tested: is pay-per-download.

Authors can opt in and allow their videos to be downloaded for a particular fee, allowing them to store a copy of the video on their local machine. There will possibly be several licenses available, much like the system Flickr implements.

Of course this method is open for abuse and sharing, especially since it seems that initially the files won’t be DRM signed - which is fantastic for all you seeders out there.

Wired makes a good point though as the industry that seems to benefit the most from this setup are the music labels, as we all know that music videos are often in the most viewed/popular items in YouTube statistics. But if those labels choose to go their own way (a la Hulu) - what videos would actually be worth paying for and keeping would definitely reduce - think of all the rubbish that is stored on YouTube….

All that being said though, there are a few videos and such I would love to grab that cannot be found anywhere else besides video sharing websites, so I say bring it on!

So what do you do when you have a database with 150 million users, and multi-million dollar corporations knocking at your door to access the data? Well you decide the best way to take advantage of it, would you not?

Well ReadWriteWeb and The Telegraph UK report that Facebook is planning to launch in around spring a new ad-serving platform called Engagement Ads.

So when you login - a nice pretty ad which you can choose to click or not. If you do choose to click then guess what? All your friends will probably be notified as well. Isn’t that a great benefit, because now your friends know what products you are interested in. But not only that, the ad now has recieved a few more impressions depending on how large your friend network is.

Facebook has commented that the technology has not been implemented as yet, but its clear Facebook is pulling out all stops to improve its ad serving network. Having spoken to people who have tested Facebook advertising in its current state, it is clearly lagging in some key areas.

Also consider Facebooks previous attempts at captialising on user data (*cough* Beacon *cough*), they definitely have to do something that respects their users and yet help organisations who would clearly benefit from the Facebook community.

Date: Friday January 16, 2009

Time: 8:00am - 9:30am

Location: CREAM Cafe & Bar

Address;
Corner Bunda Street and Genge Street
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601
MAP

Organiser: Steve Collins
trib@acidlabs.org
@trib

Frequency: uknown

Details from Organiser;

The Sydney social media community holds a weekly social media coffee meetup. We figured it was about time we did the same.

If you’re a blogger, a Tweeter, a marketer, and advertiser, or you use or enjoy social media in any other way, please join us for breakfast or just coffee on Friday morning at Cream in Civic.

The coffee is good, the Eggs Benedict rocks and the wifi is free!

And hey, bring a friend!

If you’re one of the unlucky few for whom Upcoming is broken (we blame Y!), please email Steve Collins - trib@acidlabs.org

Places are limited, as we need to make a booking.

RSVP: Via Email or FaceBook Event

Misc: FaceBook Page

A post on the official Flickr blog today announced the launch a new feature offering the ability to include short video clips in your sets. The blog post explains that the feature is available to pro members only currently, and that clips are to be limited to 90 seconds.

The had this to say regarding the time limit;

90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.

Much more information is available on the official announcement and further on the video help page.

This is a post I came across quite a while ago (back around the time when I was thinking I’d have plenty of time to put into this blog) and have been meaning to talk about, but held off as I myself had not followed the gems of advice for my own about page yet. As it seems I am still yet to find the time to apply these concepts I figured I would post it anyway as motivation for myself to get sorted.
(more…)