My colleague and cube buddy at Ogilvy PR, @radhaus, posted yesterday on the Digital Influence blog about this thoughts on being a responsible “fan.”
I think this post raises some questions. At which point are fans responsible for some of the decisions that record labels make?
I’m really interested to explore how brands are partnering with Gogo Inflight Internet to give passengers complete integration and connectivity. See this article from Mashable about the recent partnership with Facebook, Ford, and Gogo.
Moral of the story: Free Facebook February. Everything else, you have to pay for.
Stay tuned for a new post.
As first seen on Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Influence Blog.
Yesterday, HTC announced that they will be debuting two Facebook-branded smart phones, complete with the official Facebook colors (of, obviously, blue and blue). The company is reportedly planning to unveil the Facebook phones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.
Of course, Facebook denied the rumor that they will be working with HTC – just like they’ve denounced every other rumor about a Facebook-branded phone. According to the Mashable piece, Facebook’s head of business development, Dan Rose, said the device is “just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs and integrated them into their device in an interesting way.”
Even without the Facebook seal of approval, the device could be quite appealing. What can users expect? Word is that Facebook phones will integrate with your personal Facebook address book, making it easier to call and email your Facebook friends via the information that they make public. With the site’s growth stronger than ever, it ought to appeal to a wide variety of users who use it as their main connectivity hub.
So why the hesitation for Facebook to give its official nod to a smart phone? It seems like a no brainer for them to invest in a mobile phone platform — after all, many people are increasingly using Facebook as their browser homepage, so why not make it their go-to on the road as well? From a business side, a Facebook-branded phone would allow a larger margin of revenue and more creative advertising opportunities. And, for those of us who are simply Facebook addicts, it could help take the social connectivity of the site to the next level. In fact, we’re so excited to see the phones, it just might be the thing to get us off our Verizon-iPhone fixation.
Stay tuned… We’ll keep you posted.
Contributors: Brian Smith and Betsy Lowther
The Snowpacolypse hit Atlanta at about 8:45 p.m. EST on Sunday, January 9 and continues to daunt the state of Georgia, which has been declared as in a State of Emergency. Lack of winter-weather equipment forced many metro-Atlantans to remain indoors and avoid the icy driving conditions. But what they did not avoid was social media.
Since Sunday night, most all metro-Atlanta schools have been closed. Some interstates have a reported 2 inches of snow that lay atop the cement, causing closing of entire sections of all interstates in and around the city. Where did Atlanta go to talk about the epic Snopacolypse of 2011?
Facebook and Twitter.
Local news network affiliate stations and newspapers took to the web to engage in the already popular conversation. Not only did they offer breaking news, school closings and road conditions to social media users, they also integrated a place to share personal content related to the storm. Some stations included their Facebook URL in association with the number of their help desk during newscasts in an effort to answer questions in a quick and effective manner.
People trapped inside their houses tweeted the news stations to ask questions about road conditions. Not only did we see the handles of the news affiliates respond, but we also saw anchors and correspondents participate in the conversation
We also saw the city of Atlanta unafraid to share photos and video. Amateur photography flooded the Facebook pages of the local ABC, NBC, Fox, and CBS affiliates with everything from pictures of their makeshift snowmen to beautiful snowy sunsets. Atlanta advertiser, photographer and former hockey player made national headlines with a video of him ice skating down Peachtree Street, one of the busiest roads in Atlanta.
The City of Atlanta twitter handle (@City_of_Atlanta) reached over 5,000 followers with street closures and immediate information. Most impressive was @WSB_TV with at least 300 tweets so far since the first spotting of snow in the town of Columbus, GA. This was supplemented by their special storm handle, @wsbtvstorm that was dedicated to reporting information pertaining to the storm.
The report in Atlanta stays the same – roads are still impassable, the city still doesn’t have the resources to treat them, schools remain closed, but the Atlantans on Twitter and Facebook are nothing but quiet. We now see #atlsnow become less popular while the talk of “cabin fever” is a hot topic. We’re restless to get back to normality, but with below freezing temperatures forecasted until Saturday, the only promise is that the conversation about the storm will continue until citizens of the South brave the cold, break the ice, and see the falling icicles from the sides of their houses.
The questions we ask is – how would the social media conversation have turned out without the mediation of mass news channels? We know that the volume of conversation was high, but how has it been driven by the participation of these news outlets? Did they actually direct the mass chaos that exploded online and on our city’s surface streets?
From the safety of the OPR Atlanta office, the Atlanta DI team is all checking in safely. Over and out
My friend Genevieve Coates over at Radian6 just posted about the differences between topic profile configuration searches and widget-level searches. Check out her analysis.
Check out my debut on the Ogilvy PR, 360 Digital Influence blog.
I stumbled upon this new search function through Yahoo that was released yesterday. It’s similar to Google Adwords in that you can see what people are searching for when pertaining to certain topics, but it does a lot more for free. I think some of it’s features may totally raise to bar on SEO and digital media strategy.
Here are it’s capabilities:
• Search trends plotted over time
• Search by demographic (age and gender)
o through clicking on a specific demographic you can see, for example, that men ages 25-34 who searched for iPhone, also searched for “jailbreak iphone”
• Search by income brackets
• Search by locations (states)
• Search by location (cities)
• Search Flow – which shows you the most probable previous and next user searches from an analysis of aggregated search patterns
• Related searches – most popular queries
I think the coolest function may be the income search. For a client like Mercedes, for example, we much more interested in what people in the higher income brackets are searching for.
For me, this was an obvious step in the search direction. I wonder, when are these capabilities going to become paid? When will privatization and monetization occur? That debate continues in the digital space.
Check out Yahoo Clues and let me know what you think!
http://clues.yahoo.com/#q1=yahoo%20fantasy%20football&q2=&ts=2
For some reason, my crazy life has delayed me from discovering the new Influence Viewer widget on Radian6. Radian is a program that I know back and forth, inside and out, and the new Influence Viewer widget absolutely has the possibility to totally streamline the life of the social media strategist.
In theory, this widget would pull together multiple metrics to determine and weigh influence. Radian6 uses these technologies to rank blogs, comments, tweets, images, videos and mainstream news. According to the widget, it accesses influencers through the following metrics: on topic posts, comment count, inbound links, unique commenters, likes and votes, on topic inbound link count and average engagement.
I pulled an Influence Viewer widget for a client I’d been researching for the past couple of weeks. I knew the online environment surrounding the topic already and it looks like this new widget pulls all the above metrics and calculates some algorithmic influence value, ranking from 0 to 100. It then ranks the social media space by type. When you click on the link to the influential blog, for example, it pulls up the tread for every post made on that site in the past 37 days (at least) that fit your profile’s search configuration. This allows you to really understand the point of view of the blogger (or tweeter, or forum), as pertaining to your topic. Firms can now do blogger outreach and clearly see how many a specific blogger has specifically reviewed a toy, for example, or a cleaning product. This consolidates the work of a digital strategist and streamlines productivity.
For some influencers, obviously, there may not be many posts on the topic you’re searching for. A food critic may have only reviewed your client’s restaurant once. One downfall that I’ve seen so far is the inability to export this widget into Excel format, but you can always export a River of News as normal. Who knows though, Radian may be working on that as we speak. But for all intensive purposes, this new Influence Viewer widget looks like a great jumping point for an influencer audit. This is a great tool to gain a better overall understanding of the key players in an industry.
Will there be bugs? There always is. Should we always do additional research to double check the metrics Radian6 pulls? Of course. We may want a count for unique monthly visitors or average posts per week in our influencer audit, so this is by far NOT an excuse to be lazy in our work. But one thing is for sure – this can absolutely help the digital strategist save time and resources. Radian6 has totally discovered a golden nugget in our industry. They obviously understand our needs.
Integration at its finest. And that is what I love.
Up next, Radian6’s new “Search River of News” widget. Stay tuned.
I tweeted to @TMobile two weeks ago. I said that I’m a young social media professional and I was rocking the 2008 Nokia dumbphone being held together with Scotch tape, and that I needed a smart phone. Not just because I wanted to be the next cool kid on the block, but because my career is moving forward but I was stuck in the dark ages. (of course, all of this was said in 140 characters, somehow).
Granted, I’m the total social media nerd. I could tell you everything about the emerging technologies and trends, both mobile and not. I could pull a Crimson Hexagon or Radian6 search with my eyes closed. I can analyze digital trends in my sleep! I’ve always read my morning dose of Mashable religiously, and now I can do that on my brand new TMobile MyTouch and the Mashable app for android.
How did this happen? After I tweeted TMobile, @dananderson, the Social Media Manager, DMed me with his email address. We chatted about the current mobile trends and let’s face it, how TMobile is not the face of the smartphone market.
He decided to start me off the TMobile MyTouch 3G– the most user friendly android-based phone on TMobile’s market. I can run multiple apps at the same time and I am constantly connected – the social media chick’s dream! Within the first ten minutes of getting it in the mail from the wonderful @dananderson, I had the TweetDeck, Foursquare and Mashable apps downloaded. It has changed my life! But given my background, I am quick to judge this new addition to my life.
It freezes sometimes and the battery life is terrible. It’s definitely done some funny things, but all along the way I could not have been more impressed with @dananderson and TMobile’s customer service department. We’re at the point where, to advance in the field of social media, we have to become 100% mobile. @dananderson understood that and threw me a bone. I’m a very lucky woman! We understands that our life needs to travel with us wherever we go and that a lapse in connectivity may mean missing the most current trend!
Moral of the story – you NEVER KNOW what will happen unless you ask. The people of our industry are thoughtful and innovative. Embrace the new technology. You never know what can happen? My newest connection is in Oregon, at the complete opposite end of the country. This industry allowed me to find him and sent a brand new smartphone to my doorstep.
Reach as far as you can.
@devinz
Next to come – my thought on Twitter’s promoted tweets.
Could it potentially ruin personal relationships? Facebook launched the “See Relationship” function today, replacing the wall-to-wall tool that allows us to investigate the digital dynamics of social relationships through the series of wall posts. Now, instead of only seeing wall posts, you can see the entire digital relationship between people, complete with mutually attended events, photos and videos.
SUPER COOL! I’d love to look back on my college career and see how I met and interacted with my friends and roommates. However, I don’t think I have any enemies. Being a nerd enables me to appreciate the digital rapport, whether it’s between long term friends or virtual colleagues. It’s perfect and it embodies the mission of Facebook – to foster the continuation of relationships within the digital space. However, I can’t help but think of the negative effects.
What happens when the crazy, stalker ex girlfriend sees the long term ex-lover communicating with another woman? She can examine the entire digital relationship between the two, including their drunken night at the bar where his hand may have been placed in a not-so-PG-rated place. For the average Facebook user, who uses the site to connect with friends, this could be suicide (or homicide since they had no choice in its induction.) Should Facebook ask permission before initiating this invasive investigation device? Or are we entering the dimension where social transparency is standard, whether wanted or not by the consumer?
