Archive of ‘social networking’ category
I had a twitter conversation with TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden about the launch of WebProNews’ new Twitter directory/indexing service Twellow.com.
Great things about Twellow:
- Categorizes twitter streams by vertical/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news
- Groups related twitterers together
It’s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter’s current state of development – analytics don’t mean much more than a brute force “followers” number.
The higher the number of followers, the higher you’ll rank in the results, with the net effect that Robert Scoble is ranked first with 28,000 followers, followed by Jake Marsh with 12,000, in the blogging category.
The results are limited by the enrollment of your twitter feed into the system for benchmarking and indexing.
But I’m having serious doubts about using followers as the determining criteria.
Could social networks be (more…)
There’s a little brouhaha brewing on the blogosphere with bloggers Duncan Riley and the folks over at Mashable calling out John Reese for advocating Twitter as a branding/promotion mechanism to aid their marketing efforts.
And John has posted a response at his income.com blog.
So what do the bloggers think about Jason Calancanis’ twitter posts that he has 9,000 twitter followers?
Is he “gaming” twitter?
I would think that since Jason’s post is appearing in their “related posts” widget, it’s an implicit show of support for the post.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re following thousands of your followers, I’m pretty sure you’re not reading EVERY update.
And if you’re not reading EVERY update, isn’t that insincere to follow them in the first place?
But back to John Reese “breaking” twitter.
Blaming John for the abuse of twitter is like saying handguns are responsible for killing people.
Last time I checked, people were responsible for killing people. Twitter is just a tool.
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On another point, I think John is wrong when he calls the 2 bloggers “journalists”.
Journalists reporting news create content based on facts and attempt to present a balanced perspective.
At best, the reply pieces are opinion/editorial pieces, which give you license to go outside editorial objectively and present a wholly subjective view.
I’m not the greatest fan of John’s other project, BlogRush, as you might tell from my previous posts. It’s just a tool, a piece of technology, not any kind of miracle cure by any stretch of the imagination.
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I don’t think John’s tactics are going to break twitter, but there’s certainly a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being sowed on the blogosphere.
Social marketing has quite an organic flavor to it and the garden analogy applies well.
If tended well, your social marketing efforts can take off virally and yield a bountiful harvest with social goodwill being generated, credibility being established and the positive buzz grows at a quantum rate – everything having to do with having provided value to the community and becoming a key member of the community.
But like an good gardener, if you don’t watch over your garden – whether it’s a blog, forum or content website, it can be overgrown with undesirable weeds – spam, massively out-of-topic discussions and trolls.
The Chinese/Japanese art of bonsai culminates in miniature trees cultivated to aesthetic perfection – these same principles apply to (more…)
Just thinking aloud…
I was looking at MyBlogLog product manager Ian Kennedy’s post on the recently launched MyBlogLog API.
[also contains video and links to the tech specs of the API].
One feature of the API is that it is “the only API that I know of that allows you to look-up a person’s identifier across social networks”
Does that mean a spam marketer using the MBL API can scrape all your social network IDs and populate your twitter streams, MyBlogLog message feed, and spam comment on your Flickr photos and blogs?
If the process can be automated, or the captchas can be overcome fairly easily (I’ve heard of a number of programmers who’ve been able to optimize OCR algorithmns on even massively distorted captchas…)
So if the spam barrage hits you on your web 2.0 accounts,
That would be pretty terrible, unless there’s a verification process involved in authenticating the ID of the person initiating the search…
So let’s keep our fingers crossed that enough safeguard are put into place, so that email “mass marketing” doesn’t become “web 2.0 mass marketing”….
For more on permission marketing, check out the Friday Podcast featuring Aweber education marketing manager Justin Premick.
If you’ve been following the MyBlogLog blog and read the entry on the latest changes, you’d notice that the interface has undergone a number of changes:
With the change, MyBlogLog has moved from being a blog aggregator to being a Web 2.0 content aggregator of sorts. It’s supposed to be able to pull in updates from twitter, myspace, jaiku, flikr, linkedin, etc (a total of 43 services) and present them in a “New With Me” tab.
Oh yeah…where all the information used to (more…)
Social marketing can be used to not only market and promote your own products, but you can use it to effectively convert traffic (human visitors) into cash.
Following the post on the launch of Jason “Chickenhole” Bailey’s $uperRewards Facebook monetization service, I have been hearing that a lack of programming skills (PHP especially) seems to be the biggest stumbling block.
It’s actually the least of the issues you will face, because you can easily outsource the programming and API work to a developer in an Eastern European country or to India.
The biggest challenges you will face are:
- Create something that is useful for your visitors AND profitable for yourself
- How to stand out from the crowd
I’m finding that social network applications tend to fall into 2 categories:
- Monetization isn’t planned into the application and tends to be loosely added on
Take a look at this Facebook application – Defense of the Ancients –
There are banners for the AceBucks monetization application at the top and the bottom of the page.
In these instances, it’s very much “interruptive” monetization – like having ads in a TV program.
If you have a Tivo, you can wipe them out.
Similarly, with prolonged exposure to (more…)
