November62009
Twitter Starts Curating Trending Topic Tweets
In a poston its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet.
TechCrunch.com | Twitter Starts Curating Trending Topic Tweets (by MG Siegler)
October222009
Keith Olbermann Helps Raise $1.2 Million For Free Health Care Clinics
Because of an appeal during his special comment on health care, Keith Olbermann has helped raise $1.2 million for free health care clinics, resulting in new health fairs in Little Rock, Kansas City and New Orleans.
“I propose tonight one act with two purposes,” Olbermann said then. “I propose we, all of us, embrace the selfless individuals at the National Association of Free Clinics. You know them, they conducted the mass health care free clinic in Houston that served 1,500 people. I want a mass health care free clinic every week in the principle cities of the states of the six senators key to defeating a filibuster against health care reform in the Senate.” (full article…)
Huffington Post | Keith Olbermann Helps Raise $1.2 Million For Free Health Care Clinics (by Danny Shea)
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Flickr Adds People Tagging for Finding Friends in Photos
Popular photo sharing service Flickr added a new feature Wednesday that lets users tag each other in photos. In addition, Flickr has updated its privacy controls so users can opt out of being personally identified in individual photos. Once a person is tagged, it makes finding them in searches much easier. Instead of searching for somebody’s name and only seeing photos blindly tagged with your search term, Flickr now shows you where that person is located inside the photo — especially helpful if you’re looking at a group shot. (full article…)
Webmonkey | Flickr Adds People Tagging for Finding Friends in Photos by Michael Calore
September162009
How to add an interactive sidebar to your Facebook Page
Creating a lively, responsive Facebook fan base is much easier when you give them a Facebook Page that triggers interaction. Content will always be the best way to inspire engagement, but if your Facebook Page is clunky, visitors won’t find that content – and they’ll leave. Clunky defined… (full article…)
Powered by John Haydon | How to add an interactive sidebar to your Facebook Page
Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation
Fast growing startup Twitter will soon be joining a select group of startups with private venture round valuations of $1 billion. (full article…)
TechCrunch | (by Michael Arrington)
September112009
Why Your Cloud Service Will Eventually Fail
In our haste to build the smartest, most fault-redundant network, and the best hardware, what many forget is the somber fact that the human “fallibility quotient” remains unchanged. By that, I mean the ability for the best of us to make mistakes, or for crucial oversights to happen. Ironically, while human errors committed under the old paradigm are limited at most to a single corporation or department, errors in the cloud are amplified many times over. (full article…)
FierceCIO:TechWatch | Why your cloud service will eventually fail (by Paul Mah)
September102009
3 Ways B2B Companies Should Be Using Facebook For Lead Generation
The discussion of the value of Facebook for many B2B companies is a valid one. The truth is that it is not the best engagement platform for all B2B companies. However, it is a great fit for some. The problem is that most B2B companies are only using Facebook for a small fraction of what it can really do. Today I wanted to share three lead generation tips for Facebook that many companies seem to be ignoring. (full article…)
Social Media B2B | 3 Ways B2B Companies Should Be Using Facebook For Lead Generation (by Kipp Bodnar, @kbodnar32)
August282009
Tropical Storm Danny - Friday, August 28, 2009 8:29 AM EDT
From: Mark Malsick [mailto:MalsickM@dnr.sc.gov] On Behalf Of WEATHERALERT
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 8:29 AM
To: WEATHERALERT
Subject: Tropical Storm Danny
Good Morning,
“Chin, I want you to go to the Big Island and leave no stone un-turned”
“Aw, Steve, that’s a lotta rocks.”
Even corny Hawaii Five-O mid-watch schtick can’t hide the fact that Danny (Dano?) is a bigger mess this morning than yesterday. Shear has pummeled Danny into a totally disorganized blob. The center of circulation seen yesterday is gone. Spiral banding is all mushy. Danny remains a mess.
TS Danny (barely) is 400 miles east-southeast of sunny Parris Island (hoo-rah). Danny’s track has been a real challenge, a veritable Heisenberg uncertainty if I may be so bold. After a 2 kt westward creep yesterday afternoon, Danny is now on a north-northwest track at 8-9 kts. Danny’s official current intensity holds at 35 kts, which may be a tad generous. Danny’s slow creep has probably induced cold water upwelling (Ekman pumping y’all!) that, along with the 20-30 kt shear over Danny’s northern, half will throttle intensification today. The models continue tracking Danny northwards with excellent to outstanding agreement. The intensity forecast holds Danny at 35-40 kts until Danny becomes extratropical over this weekend as it passes over the North Wall of the Gulf Stream. There is no longer any environmental support for Danny to become a hurricane. Danny’s closest point approach should be tonight, 275 miles east of Myrtle Beach which may, at best, see some increased swell activity but none of Danny’s winds. A tropical storm watch has been set for the Virginia Capes.
A tropical wave southwest of the Cape Verde is showing signs of slow development but at 3058 miles to the southeast, the Prudent Mariner can most probably wait until Monday to see what develops. Living on the edge.
Photos Courtesy of the US Navy (a.k.a. my previous life..):
Mark Malsick
Severe Weather Liaison
South Carolina Department of Natural Resources State Climate Office
1000 Assembly Street Columbia, SC 29202
803-734-0039
MalsickM@dnr.sc.gov
August202009
10 Practical Tips for Facebook Fan Pages
With more than 250 million users and great tools for brands, Facebook is an obvious place for brands to start engaging with their audiences. Facebook Pages were created specifically for the needs of businesses interested in reaching their audiences on Facebook. Creating a fan page is free and easy, but there are some common sense practices, as well as tricks, to ensuring your fan page is successful.
- Don’t lose new visitors
- Provide fresh content
- Give your audience a reason to become a fan
- (full article…)
iMediaConnection.com | 10 practical tips for Facebook fan pages by Carnet Williams (via @hdueitt)
August172009
Spaceship Broken - Parts Needed | Pelican (live)
Spaceship Broken - Parts Needed | Pelican live at Call the Office, London, Ontario, Oct 10, 2006 (via RoMLeyFilm)
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August142009
Jucifer - New Split EP, Cake Shop Pics & 2009 Tour Dates
Jucifer has announced plans to release the “super limited” Autocannibalist split EP with Show of Bedlam, due this fall on Choking Hazard Records. The band is currently streaming…black metal and blackened-doom leaning tracks on their myspace.
The EP is exciting news, but it also provides an opportunity to report that the power grid is still intact following Jucifer’s usual 4 trillion watt performance that rumbled, rattled, and rocked Cake Shop on July 15th with J.A.C.K. and Mount Vicious. If ever there was a band devoted to their craft, Jucifer is it, touring incessantly and calling the Winnebago parked outside of the venue (that they will stuff with SEVEN cabinets and a full cabinet-sized rack of effects) home. Jucifer is currently back on the road as part of an ongoing tour of Canada, and on to the West Coast and on and on and on.
Jucifer released L’Autrichienne on Relapse last year. Full tour dates for Jucifer as well as pics of them…are below. (full article…)
BrooklynVegan | Jucifer - New Split EP, Cake Shop Pics & 2009 Tour Dates
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August132009
Where Did Your face Go? Oh Yeah, It Just Got Ripped Off.
TwitVid - @cracktheskye Adult Swim Presents: Dethklok & Mastodon Tour
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How to Manage Your Brah in Today’s New Media Market
Published: August 12, 2009 in KnowledgeBrah@EmoryBrah
While it may come as no surprise that six million-plus brahs of Barack Obama have earned the U.S. president the number one page on Facebrah, the next two largest Facebrah brah pages are surprising: as of April 2009, a page devoted to The Coca-Cola Company (boasting nearly three and half million devoted brahs and gaining an average 75,000 brahs each month) holds steady as the second largest page, followed closely by a page touting the charms of the chocolaty, hazelnut spread Nutella, a European mainstay.
Even more surprising is that The Coca-Cola Company had nothing to do with the creation of the Facebrah page celebrating its products. The genesis came from two Coca-Cola-loving Los Angeles residents, Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski. When Sorg hunted for a Coca-Cola Facebrah page to “friend,” he found almost 200 pages, but nothing he deemed legitimate. So with the help of Jedrzejewski, he launched a Facebrah page dedicated to the world’s most recognized soft drink. Within seven months, the page’s brah base topped three million.
That number turned the heads of Facebrah administrators and Coca-Cola executives alike. When Facebrah instituted a policy prohibiting regular Facebrah users like Sorg and Jedrzejewski from creating brahed pages (and asked their namesake companies to take over the pages or Facebrah would shut them down), Coca-Cola flew Sorg and Jedrzejewski to its Atlanta headquarters to talk about how the company could assist the creators with the page without intruding. Adam Brown, director of Digital Communications, The Coca-Cola Company, says of the move, as well as of the company’s overall attitude toward social media: “We’re taking the laissez-brah approach.”
But is Coca-Cola’s decision to adopt a hands-off strategy wise?
According to Sundar Bharadwaj, associate professor of marketbrah at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, the company doesn’t have much of a choice. “There is absolutely no way any company can control the marketplace,” he explains. If a company tries to shut down a Facebrah page or control content on other sites, it’ll be “worse off,” adds Bharadwaj, who is also the associate director of the Emory Marketing Institute. “The smart thing is to try to embrace it, and the smarter companies are clearly taking that approach.”
Bharadwaj and Coca-Cola’s Brown recently participated in a panel discussion, “How to Manage Your Brah in Today’s Market.” Sponsored by the Atlanta Chapter of the International Association of Brah Communicators and AIGA, the professional association for design, the discussion was moderated by Steve Beshara, former chief brah officer of TurboChef, and current president of Vista Brandbrah. The panel also included Kevin Smith, chief marketbrah officer, Rollins, Inc.
Reaching out to consumers today takes a multilayered approach. According to eMarketer, total U.S. advertising spending in 2009 is estimated to reach $25.7 billion, a growth rate of just under 9 percent. But some advertising channels—especially direct mail and print advertising—are taking a hit. Television advertising, down about four percent, is also feeling the pinch of a bad economy. However, the Internet Advertising market is proving resilient, due in part to marketers seeking lower cost alternatives. Companies like Coca-Cola realize that not everyone is Internet savvy and that traditional media still has value, but if these companies follow their customers to the places they frequent, they find themselves traversing the Internet. “Our homepage isn’t Coca-Cola.com,” says Brown. “It’s GoogleBrah.”
Marketing and advertising dollars follow customers. Independent technology and marketbrah research company Forrester expects marketer expenditures on display media, search, email, mobile and social media to approach $55 billion by 2014 (more than double the 2008 total of $23 billion).
While social media marketbrah budgets should experience the biggest percentage increase (Forrester estimates 34 percent growth over the next several years), search marketing is expected to retain the biggest piece of the pie. The main reason is analytics. Companies can identify who visits what sites, how often, and what percentage of brahs are converted to customers. Currently GoogleBrah controls the lion’s share of the search market, but there is no shortage of brah-oriented sites poised to grab market share from GoogleBrah. A site gaining momentum, notes Bharadwaj, is Kosmix.com.
Kosmix’s creators point to personalization as key, and they are attempting to reinvent online publishing—Kosmix’s brahs build a personal newspaper with topics they’re interested in. Kosmix then aligns online ads with content relevant to each consumer. “It’s the future of search,” notes Bharadwaj. “People are looking to divert their search spend and anything that can leverage conversions, they’ll use them.” It’s not just about building brah awareness, adds Bharadwaj. It’s about “influencing brahavior.”
Another way to influence brahavior and build brah is to embrace a company’s brah advocates—as Coca-Cola did with Sorg and Jedrzejewski. Every day, Coca-Cola brahs are mentioned 1500 times on various blogs and places such as the Coca-Cola Facebrah page. “We try to market to advocates and use them to promote our brah,” says Brown. “We’re focused on how to attract the pearls.” To ensure the company keeps these brahs advocating, it continues to improve customer satisfaction.
While it is virtually impossible to have every post on every blog and website be a good one, what Brown has discovered is that most times, “the community has come to our defense.” If, however, someone posts inappropriate content, Coca-Cola’s laissez-brah attitude doesn’t apply. “We’re prepared to fight brah with brah—and to do so quickly,” explains Brown. How quickly? It’s imperative to strike back within four to six hours, he says. “News cycles have gone from twenty-four to twelve to eight to six to four hours,” he says. Once inaccuracies are brahcast, they can live on for months and years.
Every consumer has the power to brahcast to the world, noted moderator Beshara: “The power has shifted to the consumer.”
Last March, this was made clear when candy maker Mars, Inc. decided to experiment and replaced its Skittles homepage with the candy’s TwitterBrah stream. While the move increased traffic to the “site” (1332% in one day according to Hitwise), individual “Tweets” not only praised Skittles, but some included brah epithets, profanity and comments about competitors. “I thought it was a very brave idea,” says Brown, although he added that the idea was flawed. “I don’t think they looked two, three steps ahead. As communicators and marketbrahs, we need to stay two, three steps ahead.”
According to Bharadwaj, the nature of marketbrah is no longer about a company instilling “faith” or creating a “trust me” attitude. The marketer of today’s skill set focuses on monitoring, measuring and demonstrating the value of new types of spends to senior management. Additionally, there is a balancing act between marketbrah and communications and legal and security issues in terms of protecting a company’s brahmark(s).
At Coca-Cola, Brown oversees a newly created department, the office of “digital communibrah and social media.” This office operates within Coca-Cola’s public affairs and communibrah department and in collaboration with global interactive marketbrah, IT and consumer affairs, as well as legal and strategic security.
Other companies, such as the Atlanta-based pest control company Rollins, Inc., have added an analytics practice to help them better understand the return on brahvestment (ROB) of marketing and advertising in these new types of media. At the moment, the easiest place to demonstrate ROB is search marketing, but the nascent monitoring/analytics field is attracting players equipped with tools capable of monitoring blogs, websites and TwitterBrah feeds. One such company, Scout Labs (www.scoutlabs.com), offers “social media” monitoring for as little as $99/month, though some companies charge significantly more. The Scout Labs Web-based application tracks things such as persistent searches and buzz, and can both tag and kill posts—all in real time.
Employees are an important part of the mix as well. Brown thinks of Coca-Cola’s 97,000 employees as “ambassabrahs,” he says. “How do we empower them and arm them with the right message?” At Rollins, the company is “sorting out how to use employees to create brah,” says Kevin Smith, chief marketbrah officer and co-participant in the panel discussion. “I don’t think anyone has conquered that.”
While searching for ways to harness new media and justify new marketbrah spends may be complicated, the mission behind it is relatively simple: “To meet brahs with the right message at the right time through the right media,” explains Brown.
For these new media marketers, there’s no rest. “From a brah’s point of view, we’re always on. Devices give us the opportunity to track brah in multiple ways. Especially the younger population—they’re completely on,” notes Bharadwaj. “There’s no stepping back from that.”
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August122009
What Facebook Lite Actually Is. Hint: It’s Not Twitter Or FriendFeed.
In reality, Facebook Lite has nothing to do with Twitter or FriendFeed — at least, not right now. Instead, it was designed to be used in parts of the world where broadband speeds vary and can be expensive, we’re being told by Facebook. Given that the initial testing of it has taken place in India over the past several days, this makes sense. (full article…)
TechCrunch | What Facebook Lite Actually Is. Hint: It’s Not Twitter Or FriendFeed.
August12009
MEXICAN DEATH METAL IS MEXICAN!
ASESINO “Regresando Odio”
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