Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
The year 2010 may have marked the demise of social media bookmarking services. Quite a few bookmark sharing services were discontinued last year. Simpy, Gnolia, and Backflip were just some of the best-known ones.
In their heyday, some of these services may have been considered to be the next big thing in online social media plays, but something changed in the past few years, making their usage begin to decline and they became less-preferred by venture capitalists.
Probably the biggest impact to them was the growing dominance of Facebook. People are using Facebook to share links with one another, and also using the “Like” button more to collect connections to content. (more…)
Tags: bookmarking services
Posted in Helpful Tools, Social Media | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
Yesterday evening, Google announced their new service, Hotpot, a mashup that combines social media with local info and check-in services. This marks yet another surge forward in the local arena that Google has made recently, along with the deployment of Google Place Search, launch of Google Tags and Boost ads, and more.
I haven’t kicked the tires yet on Hotpot via mobile, but I can see the services it offers via web:
Hotpot encourages you to rate businesses, and connect with your friends to get recommendations for places to try out.
While the service appears fairly robust and graphically well-designed, it’s unclear to me so far just how much traction it may get. (more…)
Tags: Google Places, hotpot, local search, mobile apps, ratings sites, review sites
Posted in Google, Social Media | Comments Off on Google Deploys Recommendation Engine With Hotpot
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Yellowbook has just this week announced the launch of Weforia, a group-buying/discount-deals service similar to Groupon. Like “Groupon”, the Weforia name is another “portmanteau word“, combining “we + euphoria”. The website for the new service sports a cheering crowd, evoking a music concert with the fans breathlessly waiting for the rock star to come out on stage:
The excitement of the rock concert certainly illustrates euphoria, and is probably channeling the hopes and feelings of the YP industry even more than reflecting what the new product will do. But, you can forgive Yellowbook for wanting to celebrate with a victory dance prior to having their eggs all hatch, because this is unquestionably a very strong concept that has a great chance of working exactly as they hope, and they were first out of the gates in the U.S. to integrate this type of service (Yellow Pages Group in Canada announced their service, RedFlagDeals.com, just a few days before). Read on and I’ll explain. (more…)
Tags: coupons, group buying, group deals, group discounts, Groupon, internet yellow pages, IYPs, online yellow pages, Yellow Pages, Yellow Pages Group, Yellowbook, Yelp, YPG
Posted in Advertising, Social Media, Yellow Pages | 7 Comments »
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
I have been experimenting with the “Add your location” setting on Twitter, and it’s not making a good impression on me.
First, it ought to allow one to set either an absolute location, or to request that it set location dynamically, based upon where your geolocation is. If you were a small business proprietor and desired to Tweet on your business account from home at night, you wouldn’t want your home address location to appear on your Tweets, nor would you want some location that’s different from your place of business.
Twitter does allow you to select alternate location on a menu from what they’ve automagically selected for you. (more…)
Tags: geolocation, location of Tweets, location services, Tweet locations, Twitter, Twitter geolocation
Posted in Twitter | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
This afternoon, I saw a link on the lower right of my Facebook page, inviting me to become a Facebook beta-tester. Interested, I clicked it, and this is what I saw:
As you can see, the application consists of having the applicant submit some writing which they’ll assumably assess for quality.
It would appear that Facebook may be planning to launch topical articles, similar to a Yahoo! Answers or Wikipedia.
If a large knowledge library on a variety of topics becomes available through Facebook, then the platform becomes even stickier, retaining their users for even longer. One hypothetical question occurs to me:
“How might Facebook take marketshare from Wikipedia, now that the service already is competing strongly against Google?”
I think we’ve found that particular answer.
Tags: Facebook
Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »
Friday, May 21st, 2010
Groupon, a portmanteau word which apparently was made from smashing together “group” with “coupon”, is the brandname of a local deals and discounts service which has been growing by huge leaps and bounds. Social Media meets Coupons, if you will. At this week’s DFW SEM meet on “Location, Location, Location – all about local search“, one attendee asked us during the Q&A how has Groupon grown so fast?
I think the answer is pretty straightforward. Groupon has done some brilliant advertising in Facebook. Here’s an example:
Notice that the ad mentions the city I have associated with my Facebook profile — Dallas. The promise of the offers mentioned are highly compelling — “Half Off Dallas”, and “…up to 90% off each day”. These offers are really attractive and hard to ignore.
But, it’s the second part of Groupon’s one-two punch that really seals the deal for their rapid growth. (more…)
Tags: closely, Groupon, internet coupons, internet deals, internet offers, social media coupons
Posted in Advertising, Social Media | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Just a few months ago, Google added a content sharing feature for the Google Toobar. The new button surprisingly promotes usage of a few services which are competitive of Google, indicated that Google is aware that they have sufficient numbers of devoted followers to merit inclusion. Content sharing activities are one hallmark of Web 2.0 characteristics, and Google’s addition of this feature which facilitates bookmarking/favoriting, voting, and sharing activities indicates that it’s important enough that marketers need to pay attention to it in their promotion strategies. (more…)
Tags: bookmarking, content sharing, favoriting, Google Toolbar, sharing services, social bookmarking, Social Media, web 2.0
Posted in Helpful Tools, Social Media | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
I was really delighted when I noticed that StumbleUpon had set up a URL shortener named Su.pr! I imagined being able to use it to submit content to StumbleUpon users simultaneously with Twitter and maybe even Facebook, perhaps with some sort of combined analytics to show clickthroughs and such after the fact.
Further, I really like the domain name, “Su.pr”, since it looks like “Super”! (Why didn’t SuperMedia and Superpages.com snap that one up?)
But, from a search marketer’s viewpoint, Su.pr has a major defect that makes it unsuitable for me or my clients to use as a URL shortener. (more…)
Tags: html frames, smm, social media marketing, StumbleUpon, Su.pr, URL shorteners
Posted in Social Media | Comments Off on StumbleUpon Offers URL Shortener, Su.pr
Sunday, March 28th, 2010
Techcrunch is saying that reputation management is so impossible to control and limit that it’s pointless to even try, much like big labels trying to fight the illegal sharing of music (see Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions).
I’ve worked on a lot of online reputation management cases, and until there’s a major paradigm shift in how our society views past behavior, (more…)
Posted in Social Media | Comments Off on Is Reputation Management Pointless? Response to Techcrunch
Oh, Facebook – Why Must You Rehost Wikipedia?!?
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010In a move perhaps inspired by Google Map’s adoption of Wikipedia content and Google’s overall preferential rankings of Wikipedia, Facebook has been testing out articles that are highly similar to Wikipedia’s. In fact, Facebook’s article pages have actually sucked in Wikipedia’s initial article content for topics in a great many cases I’ve seen thus far:
From my perspective, this sort of breaks one of the great benefits of hypertext that made the internet great: linking to source content. (more…)
Tags: Facebook, local information, Wikipedia
Posted in Facebook, General Commentary, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »