Last night while surfing the web I stumbled upon major news for anyone in the social media scene. Within the past week MySpace, Facebook and Google all announced plans to make social media more portable by opening it up to third parties.
You use one social network as your “main” Profile, connect this profile to other third party sites, and when you update your “main” profile, it updates the info on the third party sites.
With the new Facebook Connect initiative developers will be allowed to make applications that will allow the user to take their social network identity to any partner website. This means you can share more of your online experience with your social network.
For example, you may have submitted a cool post on StumbleUpon, uploaded what you think is going to be a viral video, blogged about the latest gossip at school or just joined a Mini Yacht club online.
I am going to be honest and say that I am a skeptic. The only way I can see this working is if the social network giants will learn to play nice. And if they do kiss and make up, do we want one universal social networking site? Or would we rather have one network for the love of animals, and another for my love of meat?
Israel F. Swanson
Community Development
When running a Stumble Upon advertising campaign, good feedback is a very important factor to consider. This is important for a number of reason. The first is the obvious reason that you should want your message to be as well received as possible. If someone likes your message they will more likely take the action you want them to take. This, however, is not the only reason that seeking feedback is important.
The way stumble upon works is that feedback ratings are taking from users, mixed with the number of new posts that user submits, and that user gets a ranking. The ranking of a user determines the weight of their thumb. A new user with a low ranking may thumbs up a post with little effect or possibility of someone new seeing it. A top stumbler can thumbs up a post which will be guaranteed to be seen by 100+ people because of their weight. If more people like your post, the more chances you have to land a top stumbler who will hopefully add a thumbs up and carry the piece even further increasing the viral effect of StumbleUpon. As a side note, it is very important to keep up with a good stumble upon account and use it regularly to increase the weigh of your own thumbs up. That is a very simple way to push the content of a campaign a little bit further. Which, as with good feedback from other users, gives you more bang for your marketing dollar. It is possible, if not common, to see StumbleUpon yield 7-8 times the visitors than were expect.
How can you get good feedback on an article? The first and obvious way is to make the content as good as possible, make it shine. Since a relatively few number of people will actually give a thumbs up, every thumbs up counts. The other major way to get good feedback is to target the right category, and do some testing between categories. If you have a funny picture, it might be tempting to categorize that picture in “Photography”. Big mistake. The photography category is one of the hardest categories to get good feedback from. This category contains some very amazing work, and is very difficult to get good feedback even for professional photographers. Often times, good but not great works will get a thumbs down since the bar for quality is set extremely high. However, the “Humor” category is probably one of the easiest. If it is mildly funny, someone might give it a thumbs up, but they are less likely to give it a thumbs down, which can limit the number of people who see the content. The best bet is to try a little bit of traffic in a couple of different categories, then pick the one that has the most positive ratings and stick with that.
Mike Palmer
Analyst
May 14, 2008
It’s midweek, time for another round-up of the buzz around the Yovia network!
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May 9, 2008
We’re ending the week on our usual eclectic mix of highlights from around the Yovia network!
It seems that the small blogger is stuck in his cubicle unable to climb the corporate digg ladder. Why?
Day to day the digg top stories come from the same blogs and websites with very large existing communities. Will there ever be a Cinderella story for the little guy and Digg? Honestly, my gut says no. Even if you reach the top, you run the risk of a ‘front page fascist’ reporting you as spam. My blogger conspiracy theorists think that the large existing community doesn’t want the small blogger to climb the digg ladder and destroy their reputation.
My advice is to find other avenues. Other social media and bookmaking sites such as “STUMBLEUPON” can drive as much if not more traffic than digg.
From one blogger to another your biggest concern always needs to be quality, regardless if your golden piece of content reaches the front page or not.
Israel F. Swanson
Community Development
Yovia.com
I read an interesting article this past week about how social marketing is making more of interest in the marketing arena with advertisers. The article by Adage.com stated that, “While marketers may not be spending huge marketing dollars on social media yet, they know they should be using it to reach consumers.” Advertising Age also said a study, “found that 78% of marketers see social media as a way to gain a competitive edge, but fewer than 8% have budgets devoted to it.”After reading this I thought why and how this form of marketing still has not caught on. I think the biggest impact of this is because of the growing internet and the fresh social networks that are still developing. We as advertisers need to catch on to this aspect of marketing, because as things are changing within technology and the internet, the people around it are also changing. As advertisers we are always looking for the edge in advertising with being creative, but we also need to look at it as just simply engaging them in social networks.The article went on to talk about how it is an important way to build your brand, but people still aren’t sure how to use it properly. They states the question that, “Where should a marketer spend to reach its consumers — and how does a marketer know if its consumers use social media?” This is really the important focus of social marketing, because if you do it wrong you may never make a connection to your consumers and you could just be talking to the wrong people. Although, it is really important to get your feet wet with this form of marketing, social marketing can be highly effective. It engages the consumer, isn’t yelling, and it reaches them on an individual level.
By: Matt Hite
Yovia.com
Community Development Intern
Source article: http://adage.com/opinion?article_id=126828
Today’s Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What I mean by ‘Web 3.0′ is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.
The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing.
Written By: Michelle Amos
