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Wall St Unable To Engage Social Media

We baffle them. There are so many of us, networking, twittering, blogging. It’s a way of life for us. With disposable income in the billions, Wall Street advertisers are willing to knock down the walls clamoring for our attention and wallets.

What is it that they want?

The last couple of years Web 2.0 has been invaded with advertising. Major corporate players began showing up on MySpace. Movie trailers are now commonplace for the over 100 million registered users of the social networking group.

Corporate America is so fascinated with all our disposable income so that they’ve increased online spending.

$920 million was spent in 2007 just to get products in front of bloggers, social networkers and other Web 2.0 participants. This according to btobonline.com. The magazine even reports that 2008 will see an even bigger increase in advertising spending of 12% over 2007.

All of this just on social media advertising.

Look around you; big business wants to be more engaging, they just haven’t figured out the most direct route yet.

Can you imagine Verizon Wireless ads on Twitter?

Right now, I love Twitter. It’s as addictive as blogging and it’s cool. A Wall Street invasion would make it uncool, like MySpace is now.

On the other hand, a corporate invasion may be welcomed by the owners of these social mega-networks. Their sites are businesses too, and businesses are sold everyday.

So what does this mean for the Web 2.0’ers?

Do we seek out the next latest and greatest thing, and keep it a secret for as long as we can? Or do we just roll with the flow and watch social networks become ad laden and junk filled?

Corporate giants are aware that growth means money, that’s why there is more talk daily about the potential sale of other social media upstarts (Facebook included).

Advertisers come bearing chests of gold for the chance to get in front of gadget equipped-educated-flexible to change social media audiences like ours. A lot of people will stand to make a lot of money when advertisers figure out how to market to social media.

When they do, it will be like selling your subscriber lists back in the golden days of internet marketing. Only now, those lists may be worth millions.

Posted by Teasa’s Tips

Creating Content For Social Media Good Or Bad?

There is a rumbling in the blogosphere on whether you should blog for Social Media or for your readers.

With all the choices to submit to Digg, Mixx, Reddit and others, writers and bloggers are confused. Do you compromise your reader by writing for front page listing and most popular story on social bookmarking sites? Or do you continue to give your readers what they love–the content you have always written?

It’s a dilemma, and there may not be a right or wrong answer. For me, I do what my audience expects, and I fore go the fame and potential increase in fleeting traffic for loyal readers. I once had a very popular post on Digg, yet none of those people who voted for my article had a clue what I wrote about, nor did they stick around for more. They visited that one time, cast their vote and moved on to the next story.

Here are some pros and cons:

Cons:

Blogging for Social Media is difficult. It’s hard to know what the next great thing is.

If you are not the first one with the information you won’t get much love.

In fact, you may be penalized for it.

Your readership may not be targeted. You could end up writing for a flaky audience.

You have to find the right Social Media audience for the content you provide. Otherwise, your posts will fall on deaf ears.

You must continually test and trial until the right Social Medium is located.

Pros:

Once you find the right audience for your content, you could find an endless source of targeted traffic.

The traffic is free, its only cost is time.

You will find great sources of networking.

Valuable blogging friendships formed.

If you decide to write for Social Media make sure you choose the appropriate device to get your posts in front of the right readers.

Facebook Study Group Not Allowed By University

The following is a reprint because it is newsworthy and a sign of our changing times.
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Facebook Study Group Could Get Student Expelled

By Mike Sachoff

Charged with academic misconduct

A freshman at Ryerson University in Toronto has been charged with cheating for running a Facebook study group and could be expelled pending a faculty hearing on Tuesday.

Chris Avenir, an 18-year-old computer engineering student denies the cheating allegation and said he joined the online chemistry study group Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions last fall. He later became administrator of the group.

He described the group as a place on the Internet where students could ask questions about chemistry assignments. “This isn’t any different from any library study groups or peer tutoring that has been happening,” he told the CBC News.

A total of 146 students used the group to help each other with chemistry assignments. Avenir is charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping to organize the group, and 146 counts for every student who were members of the group.

Ryerson spokesman James Norrie would not comment specifically on the case but did say it’s the university’s responsibility to make sure students are doing their own work. “We want them to achieve. But that also means that they sometimes have to do the hard work of learning and not take the easy way out,” he said.

Norrie said the university understands Facebook and its groups. “This is not a bunch of old academics sitting around a table saying, ‘Oh, this scares us.’ That’s not what’s happening,” he said.

Students are surprised by the university’s reaction to the Facebook study group. “They’re just trying to cut him down, and I don’t even know why this prof is doing this,” said Evan Boudreau, a second-year journalism student. “It’s just completely ridiculous.”

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MySpace Social Media King In Jeopardy

Just yesterday Website Magazine reported that MySpace is the king of Social Media. However, today Wired has just released a report on the bug that will allow voyeurs a backdoor entrance into ‘private’ teen photos. How to gain access has been circulating on message boards since last fall.

This bug opens the door to questions about the security of MySpace and accounts that are set to private.

According to Wired, anyone without a MySpace account can input an account holders’ public account number (MySpace Friend ID) into a specially constructed URL which will grant access to all those private photos.

Only MySpace users who has specifically configured their photo galleries to private are safe from the bug. Another bug that is also circulating on the ‘net is the ability of third parties to see your friends’ list even if it is associated to a private profile.

It looks like the king of social media is in jeopardy.

For more info, read the article here.

MySpace Still Social Media King

According to an article by Mike Phillips of Website Magazine, MySpace is still the king of social media.

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Wondering where to spend your time optimizing for social media? MySpace is still the outright leader of all things social media, accounting for 76% of all social networking visits among a category of 53 of the top social sites in 2007, according to new Hitwise data. Facebook followed with 12.57%, then Bebo with 1.24%. BlackPlanet.com and Club Penguin rounded out the top five. As far as growth, Facebook saw a jump of 51% in December 2007 from a year ago, while MySpace dropped 8%.

A couple of other interesting points:

* In December 2007, MySpace received 95% of its traffic from return visitors (defined as a repeat visit within 30 days). Facebook saw 93% of its traffic from return visitors.
* New visitors accounted for 5% of MySpace traffic and 7% of Facebook traffic. Bebo saw 16% of its traffic from new visitors.
* U.S. visitors spent an average of 29:36 on MySpace in December 2007, a change of -0.2% from last year. Facebook visitors spend an average of 19:51 on the site, an increase of 100% from last year. That’s telling, and no doubt influenced by Facebook’s decision to open the site to third-party developers.

Finally, the report makes quick mention of an interesting statistic: U.S. traffic to all the social networking websites increased four percent year-over-year. With all the buzz over social networking and media and how it’s changing the Internet and changing the rules of marketing, business and SEO … four percent just doesn’t sound like much.

Would You Be Subvert And Profit From It?

I received an interesting email invitation a couple of hours ago from a marketer who was involved in making money from Digg and StumbleUpon votes.

The email baited me by asking me the deadly question, “how do you think some stories achieve popularity and others are automatically buried?”

Being human and naturally curious, I followed the link to this website:

Subvert And Profit.

First off, I am not involved with this site and it is surely not my intention to profit from it. My curiosity goes deeper than just becoming a member. My initial questions began to form rapidly.

Of all the rumbling lately I’ve been hearing from other bloggers about Digg and the so-called auto-bury system, is this also another form of corruption that is prevalent?

Here is a quote from their site:

“Subvert and Profit runs an ever-expanding black market for votes on social media sites. We are simultaneously the easiest way to make money online and the cheapest form of advertising in the web 2.0 sphere. We are the crowdhackers, and we are very good at what we do.”

So, is this what Digg has become?

I’m not a Digger, I use Mixx, DropJack and Laakit.

So, as a blogger, what do you think? Let me know. I have a feeling this website is not going to go away.

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12 Simple Steps to Explode Your Site Traffic Using Online Social Media

By Dave Foster (c) 2007

Last year saw the arrival of online social media. If you operate a website or blog, you would be well advised to realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interaction on more and more sites and they will have an expectation of the same from your site too.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus for the next few months should be on the social aspects of your site.Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing amongst other users. The social aspects of these sites allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.

You don’t have to change your site immediately to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally and you will be well on your way to measure up to your visitors’ new expectations.

Step 1. Declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don’t like to deal with people they don’t know. Create an About Me page to líst your achievements, skills and aspirations.

Step 2. Create a MySpace page and link your biography in the Profile of your MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of your new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Step 3. Install a free blog and start publishing at least one article in your blog every week. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. This is done by providing an action button for each article in your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Step 4. Provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to you.

Step 5. Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don’t delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.

Step 6. If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Step 7. Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your content. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers interest them.

Step 8. Publish all your feeds at Feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Step 9. Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site URL. Post these videos using catchy titles, teaser descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them easy to discover.

Step 10. Provide embedded links to your remotely hosted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites rather than on your site’s server.

Step 11. As well as videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr and SmugMug to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Step 12. Provide a “Send to Fríend” feature for all the products and services you provide. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and brings a profound change to web surfers’ experiences. Now is the right time to implement features that will make your site Social-Media-Friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will see a massive íncrease in traffíc to your site.

About The AuthorDave Foster owns and operates the “Solo Profíts” blog and podcast, guiding individual entrepreneurs and home-based business owners to online success using audio, video and multimedia techniques. Dave also explores the virgin territory of multimedia psychology and how to present your message effectively through these new communications channels. Want to discover more? Go To ==> SoloProfits.com

Pwned: The StumbleUpon Digg Experiment Initial Results

First, a disclaimer about this experiment and the analysis.

In retrospect, this experiment was flawed. The subject matter and style of delivery was very clearly geared in favor of one of the combatants. When it was initially conceived, it was decided that the experiment would best be delivered through a post that announced itself. By checking traffic statistics on a post titled: “The StumbleUpon Digg Experiment”, there would be equal billing, equal exposure, and most importantly, equal chances through the delivery methods to give both sides a chance.

We were wrong.

In retrospect, it is clear that the title and subject were more geared towards a social experience. While Digg offers ways to share stories with friends, it isn’t nearly as suited for this as StumbleUpon is. The very nature of SU is designed to where members passively share stories they like by stumbling and reviewing them. Digg requires active participation by people to see the story. Stumble requires nothing other than clicking and waiting for websites to be served to them.

The Digg traffic of lore says that websites will get tens of thousands of visits in a short period of time. The problem is, not all stories get this kind of traffic when they hit the front page. Because they have to be actively clicked on, people have to have an interest to click. This story, while more popular than past stories that have hit the front page of Digg from this blog, still didn’t have the universal appeal to get a ton of traffic.

Stumblers are, by their nature, more interested in stories about SU than Digg users are interested in stories about Digg. This and other factors make this experiment somewhat flawed. Thus, the results were tremendously in favor of StumbleUpon.

Detailed statistics are being compiled. We are breaking it down hour by hour, noting traffic spikes and comparing them to specific times of reviews on SU. The data so far is interesting, but for those interested in the general results, here they are:

Story posted early in the morning, PST, December 14th. It was Dugg shortly after being posted by ThinkingSerious. Then, it was Stumbled by hockeyguru around 7:00 am PST.

December 14th, 2007:

* Traffic from StumbleUpon: 15,694
* Traffic from Digg: 8,463

Surprised? So was I. Traditional thought is that Digg wins the short race and SU catches up over time. Again, the subject matter/headline were geared to get Diggs, but not actual visits. Another thing to note as that this story made it to the “Top in All Categories” box on the front page. Less than a minute later, it was buried off that page after getting 24 hits. Stories that do can get a huge bump in traffic for that day. Some stories whose statistics I have seen have gotten twice as much traffic or more from being there than they did when they were initially on the front page.

December 15th, 2007:

* Traffic from StumbleUpon: 4,761
* Traffic from Digg: 2,357

This is actually a very encouraging number from Digg. Considering most of the traffic came from people when the story had to be found on deep inner pages, this is a huge number relative to the original day’s response. Stumble traffic, if anything, was a little disappointing, as some stories get 80% of their initial day traffic on day two. Despite the positive reviews still rolling in on day two, the percentage compared to the first day was low.

December 16th, 2007:

* Traffic from StumbleUpon: 3,689
* Traffic from Digg: 349

There is the drop that happens with Digg. There is also the famed residual traffic from Stumble.

Again, let me be clear. This story was unintentionally geared to for SU. The results are not a real representation, as stories that aren’t about Social Media will still have the normal results of Digg wins the first day and SU may or may not catch up over time. The subject matter appealed to SU’s manner of delivery. One digg is one digg and helps very little. One stumble and especially a positive review by the right person can generate a chain reaction, a viral effect that can snowball into more and more stumbles.

Thank you to all who participated by reading, sharing, stumbling, and digging this story. We want more data. If you have statistics from posts other than social media themed ones, please contact us. We want to explore, analyze, and share the data.

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