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Link Post for March 29th

March 30, 2010 By 1 Comment

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 29th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed

  • How Facebook May Save Elevation Partners – Things are not going great at Elevation Partners. Its initial $1.8 billion fund – that was met with great fanfare when it was raised by rockstar investor Roger McNamee, rockstar gaming executive John Riccitiello and actual rockstar Bono – is about 70% invested and the two biggest deals are duds. Elevation invested some $300 million in Forbes and a whopping $460 million in Palm—a company with a stock hovering around $4 per share, down some 75% since October.
  • Google Buzz Getting Smoked In The Sharing Race By A Dead Man – I’m reminded of this while looking over the traffic logs for TechCrunch, because it appears that someone else is losing to a dead rival: Google Buzz. According to our data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town.
  • Hulu Versus TV Everywhere: What Happens After The Comcast-NBC Merger Is Complete? – The pending $30 billion merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal is going to complicate things for Hulu, the second most popular online video site after YouTube. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, News Corp/Fox, and (since last year) Disney/ABC. It was created by the TV networks as a counterweight to YouTube, a safe place where they could run their full-length TV shows online with their own ads.
  • Don’t share anything important or of value via Linkedin … they will own it! « scalability.org –
  • The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators – I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.
  • 10 Must-See Google Street View Sightings – While we brought you 15 amusing Google Street View sightings when the service launched back in 2007, in the last few years Google has expanded its coverage around the globe, which also means expanding the chances of humorous photo captures.
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Link Post for March 26th through March 28th

March 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 26th through March 28th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Turtles: So Hot Right Now [Randomly Viral] – Watch out cats and kittehs everywhere — your spot atop the heap of most viral animals is about to be usurped by a whole legion of heroes on a half-shell. That’s right — for some reason that I have yet to ascertain (aside from the obvious, “I like turtles” sentiment), turtles have become a seriously hot Internet meme.
  • Violent Flash Mobs Becoming a Problem in Philly – Flash mobs are usually associated with randomized fun (or pantlessness), but in Philly, they’re basically akin to randomized violence. Last night, Mayor Michael Nutter and District Attorney Seth Williams took to the streets to spread a message to the city’s young, social media-savvy inhabitants: Flash mobs will not be tolerated.
  • Why Chatroulette Is More Than Just Penises – Five months ago, right around the time that Andrey Ternovskiy was building Chatroulette, no one could have predicted that being “nexted” would become the modern day equivalent to a rite of passage.
  • See Yahoo’s Sketch-a-Search in Action [VIDEO] – Earlier this week, Yahoo launched a new iPhone app called Sketch-a-Search that allows you to trace an area with your finger to get restaurant results in a specifically defined region.
  • Browsing the iPad App Store [VIDEO] – Feverishly awaiting the release of the Apple iPad and all the goodies that go along with it? Well, now you can take a virtual tour of the iPad App Store, via a video that purports to depict the storied place.
  • 5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page – If you’ve already searched for some Fan Page inspiration and undertaken the task of building a custom landing page for your business’s Facebook presence, you may now be in the market for some features that will further engage your fans.
  • Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp – Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do. That’s what some startups say is the key to success in the freemium business. But the biggest reason the five presenters this morning at the Freemium Summit in San Francisco — Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic (see disclosure at the bottom) and MailChimp — are doing well is because they have great products that people want. They’ve been able to get those products to a broad audience by using the freemium model — that is, offering a free service with the option to upgrade. It’s an increasingly important business model, but one that’s hard to navigate, so their anecdotes, open sharing of data, and lessons learned were really valuable.
  • Free email archiving and backup software – MailStore Home – MailStore Home enables you to backup all your email messages from multiple applications and accounts into one secure and persistent archive. Lightning-fast search, one-click backup, powerful export – all information from your email is at your fingertips anytime. Never lose important email again!
  • The Magic Formula For Blog Retweets | Bit Rebels – You’ve worked hard on a post that you think many people will like. You tweet it to all your followers and wait to see all the RTs come in on your stream. They aren’t there. It’s like a ghost town. What happened?
  • CITY OF PHILADELPHIA TO COMPETE TO BECOME A GOOGLE INTERNET TEST SITE « City of Philadelphia’s News & Alerts – Today Mayor Michael A. Nutter declared that tomorrow Philadelphia will be known as the “The City of Google-ly Love and Gigabit Affection” in support of the City’s application to become a Google internet test site.
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Link Post for March 19th through March 21st

March 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 19th through March 21st. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Sprint Makes Your iPhone 4G [VIDEO] – The iPhone 4G (next generation iPhone) is yet to be released, but Sprint is cleverly advertising “4G speeds” on your iPhone thanks to its Sierra Wireless Overdrive 4G WiFi hotspot.
  • Yelp for Business: 4 Steps for Success – For local small businesses, Yelp (Yelp) isn’t just an option — it’s a necessity. People in urban centers use it to choose where to go to dinner, where to buy clothes, and where to be entertained. Users decide where and how to spend their money using Yelp, so if your business is local, you need to curate your Yelp page.
  • 4 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Google Buzz – When a green field lies before you, so does opportunity. Some non-profits stand to gain from being part of the early Buzz adopter community. Whether a cause needs to further the dialogue with a tech-savvy crowd, or is attracted to the functionality of Gmail (Gmail) integration, Buzz does bring some new capabilities to bear.
  • Ben Folds Plays Chatroulette Live in Concert [VIDEO] – Singer-songwriter Ben Folds visited the random video chat site Chatroulette during a recent live concert in Charlotte, North Carolina, playing improv piano tunes about the people he was connected with.
  • New Twitter Phishing Attack: “You’re On Here?” [WARNING] – Twitter users are reporting a new attempt to extract their usernames and passwords — a Direct Message attack that asks “You’re on here?” with a link. Others report DMs linking to a site called “mhansenhome” with the message “’someone posted on their blog about you”.
  • Happy Birthday Twitter! – Sunday, March 21st (a few hours from now on the West Coast) marks Twitter’s 4th birthday — exactly four years since Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent his first Tweet and, along with Evan Williams and Biz Stone, started a phenomenon.
  • In choosing its battle names, the military must know its target audience – washingtonpost.com – Names are important, especially in war. Like a good advertising jingle, war names must be catchy and concise. But above all else, they have to sell — all sorts of things, to all sorts of people: inspiration to the troops, righteousness to Americans at home, partnership to allied countries, peace and promise to non-combatant civilians.
  • Social Media & Scott Monty @ Ford Motor Company – Online Marketing Blog – When you think of successful consumer brands in the social media space, names like Dell, Zappos and Pepsi come to mind. Another is Ford. Last year the Ford Fiesta movement generated a tremendous amount of awareness (and pre-orders) for a vehicle that wasn’t available to the public yet. (Great summary on Jeff Bullas’s blog) At the same time, it inspired a community to engage, create content and continue discussions about the Fiesta with over 7 million video views.
  • Social Media Optimization Tools – Online Marketing Blog – Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Heck, we’ve been blogging about SMO since 2006! Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.
  • Responsibilities of Community Managers » Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg – Every time I tell someone I’m a Community Manager, I get a varied response. But the response doesn’t vary enough. The response is usually something along the lines of “Wow! So you tweet and facebook for a living! Kewlz!” or “So do you blog on the interwebs all day, or sumthin?” Another favorite is “What’s that?” That last one might be the most honest of the three, since asking a Community Manager whether they tweet for a living is like asking a construction worker if they cat-call for a living, or a doctor if he asks people to say “ah!” for a living.
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Link Post for March 7th through March 9th

March 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 7th through March 9th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • The Lines Continue To Blur (At Breakneck Speed) | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image – It's easy to say the shift is subtle (especially when you look at the amount of people who own a BlackBerry, iPhone or Nexus One compared to those who are simply "online"), but it's happening fast, and it's not just about having a mobile version of your website (more on that here: The End Of Big Website Builds). What's happening is that consumers aren't thinking about your online website and your mobile website, they're simply looking to access content and platforms wherever they are and however they want to.
  • Local Press Release Distribution Made Easy With readMedia – In a nutshell, a readMedia customer signs up for a low subscription price (more in a moment), selects the geographic region they are targeting, calls out the media offered from a readMedia-curated database, adds any they see fit to add, enters the press release in the system and the distribution is done. Releases are emailed (or faxed based on the media outlet’s preference … yes, some people apparently still fax) posted to the online news aggregation services and placed in an online newsroom. From there, media can embed the releases using an iFrame mechanism (see below for an example) and grab multimedia or other assets the customer makes available.
  • Why Is Privacy So Unsexy? | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image – People seem to get all excited about the GPS capabilities of the mobile device. We were told that the ability for your mobile phone to know exactly where you are would become a bastion for marketers to deliver relevant and targeted information to you based on your specific location. Like the fast food example above, to some this is the exact type of marketing they're looking for: something relevant and targeted. For others, this is their worst nightmare: more inane messaging through yet another channel.
  • KeeFox Integrates KeePass and Firefox (At Long Last) – KeePass – Lifehacker – Firefox: KeeFox brings tight integration between the cross-platform, open-source password manager KeePass and Firefox, providing automatic logins, form filling, and more.
  • What Every Company Should Know About Social Media Policy – A social media policy is a company’s first line of defense against risk in social media marketing. Shockingly, only one in three companies has a social media policy in place. While I’m sure that the majority of marketing managers and decision-makers who read Social Media Explorer are ahead of the curve, there’s a good chance your company doesn’t have a written policy.
  • Is a Blog the Hub of Social Media Marketing? | Debbie Weil on Corporate Blogging and Social Media – As part of launching the updated Kindle edition of The Corporate Blogging Book I'm putting together a free e-book that answers the question: Is Your Blog the Hub of Social Media Marketing? I'm asking a dozen or so high-profile blogging and social media experts, including corporate, nonprofit and governmental blog editors, to weigh in but I am eager to hear from anyone who has an answer.
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Link Post for March 4th through March 5th

March 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 4th through March 5th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Social Media Today | Chaos is not a strategy – To be strategic ultimately means that you know what keeps your CEO and the members of her team awake at night so you can tailor communications that will help them all sleep better. That is, you know the business goals the company’s leaders are expected to achieve and you’re able to implement communications that move the needle in the right direction.
  • LEAKED: More Juicy Microsoft Courier Details and Pics – The Courier is a hinged device that combines elements of a tablet, an e-reader, and a netbook (sans physical keyboard). It’s reported to be less an inch thick, slightly heavier than a pound and slightly larger than a 5×7 print when folded. Instead of running Windows 7, the Courier will run the mobile OS Windows Mobile 7 Series, with an NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip under the hood.
  • Conan Pledges to Change One Woman’s Life… on Twitter – Conan, who up until minutes ago wasn’t following a single person, decided to change Sarah Killin’s life by following her and her alone. Conan announced the news via Twitter — likely with the help of his Twitter army.
  • The Top 10 Most Watched Web Series, February 2010 – Each month Visible Measures compiles a list of the top ten most popular web video series, and we share those results with you and provide analysis. Visible Measures tracks views, comments and other data on web video, and has just made available a free public beta of a tool to benchmark online video ad campaign and content performance.
  • Apple iPad Coming to U.S. on April 3 – Apple finally announced the exact date of iPad availability in the U.S.: It’s Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models, while models with both Wi-Fi and 3G will be available in late April
  • Using Twitter Search for Business – [T]here are lots of ways to use it. Do you need to find more case studies? Here’s a simple search for case studies: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”case+study”+filter:links
  • Clicker – What’s On Online – Clicker is… the TV Guide of Internet Television
  • Can We Kick Our Keyboard Addiction by 2013? – This morning, everyone is looking agog at the words of Google Europe boss John Herlihy, who's quoted in the Silicon Republic predicting the demise of the desktop computer.
  • Google Index to Go Real Time – Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google.
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Link Post for February 25th through February 26th

February 26, 2010 By 1 Comment

This is the A2SM Link Post for February 25th through February 26th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • New U.S. Military Policy Opens Up Social Media to the Troops – A new policy released today by the Pentagon has reversed multiple bans on social media websites and tools, effective immediately. This policy includes YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google Apps, and other social tools.
  • Facebook to Say Goodbye to App Notifications on March 1st – Last month, we reported that Facebook was transitioning from application notifications to e-mail notices. Today, the Facebook Developer blog has added further information about this new method and announced that as of March 1, 2010, app notifications will be discontinued.
  • HTML5 Knocks Out Adobe Flash in Reader Vote – A few weeks ago, tensions between Adobe and Apple rose to all-time highs after Apple prominently left Flash off of the iPad. A lashing by Steve Jobs, calling Adobe lazy and Flash buggy didn’t help matters at all.
  • Facebook Formally Announces Payment Terms for Its Universal Virtual Currency, Credits – We’ve been covering Facebook’s experiments with its Credits virtual currency closely here on Inside Facebook over the last year. Today, Facebook has officially released some details about the payments terms of the program for the first time. Although Facebook isn’t giving developers a roadmap for what to expect in the future, it’s another step in Facebook’s gradual process of becoming the currency merchant of record for virtual goods transactions on the Facebook Platform.
  • Pants And Pickles Are The Surefire Way To Get Millions Of Fans – Want to get millions of fans on your Facebook Page? You have a pretty good shot if your page involves pants or pickles. The latest Facebook Page phenomenon is one set up for the pants of the Norwegian olympic curling team. While the page probably wouldn’t have put Facebook in a pickle (I know, I know, corny pun!), the company decided to take it down for terms of service violations before being restored hours later following a protest.
  • Facebook Patents The Feed – On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue other social networks which are infringing on their patent. Included in the patent are additional claims including feed filters, feed advertising, searching the feed, and more.
  • Webtrends Launches Analytics for Facebook Marketers – Webtrends, a company that offers marketers detailed web analytics, has rolled out new measurement capabilities for Facebook, including the ability to view Facebook data alongside data for other channels.
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Google Buzz? a Dumbed Down Version Of Wave

February 10, 2010 By 1 Comment

Google Buzz

Yesterday Google rolled out another attempt to infiltrate the social media atmosphere with their new product Google Buzz. The new product basically acts as an add-on to your Gmail account and lets you post status updates that can be seen publicly or just to those whom you select.

The layout looks very similar to Twitter feed but does keep conversations “together” e.g. replies are posted directly underneath the original post instead of in a chronological order as Twitter does.

Upon logging into Gmail you are greeted with a welcome screen introducing you to Buzz. You have the option to continue on to Gmail or get introduced to Buzz. If you select to get introduced to buss you are taking to the following screen.

As you can see from the screen shot I was automatically following anyone in my address book that has a Buzz account. This was a little annoying because there were quite a few people who I was not interested in following. Underneath the screen shot above was the “Buzz” feed. A chronologically ordered list of “buzzes?” (Almost wrote Tweets) from people who were auto followed.

You also have the ability to link other social media account to your Buzz Account. You can connect your Flickr, Twitter, Picassa, blogger and other account to show in your Buzz feed.

Initial Reaction:

My first reaction to Google Buzz is it is Google latest attempt to rip off Twitter, this time it is even more similar then some of the functions that Google Wave had. The look and the feel are very similar to Twitter and seems to include some very basic features from Wave. Encouraging you to connect with the people you are currently in your contact list, not reach out to new followers and people like Twitter does.

Many of the Buzzes in my feed were related to not understanding what the product was. For example a good friend of mine wrote “I’m confused”. This set off a chain reactions of @replies all commenting that they did not understand “Buzz” and asking the questions “Isn’t this Twitter?” and “Did Google buy Twitter?”

Also, Joe Salome, an advertising consultant out of Atlanta, sums up his thoughts perfectly with the following:

“[T]houghts? not sure if this is going to be a social thing like [T]witter where you can explore the world. This seems more like exploring your current contacts and working together and sharing together. Dumbed down version of [W]ave”

Why it may work:

GChat is addicting. It has provided me a great way to stay connected to my friends from undergrad. Some of my friends sit on GChat all day so I am able to chat with them when I find time to break away from a project I am working on. (All college educated ages, 22-25) Google may be able to grad a hold of this market plus some of the younger Gmail users that Twitter has been unable to hold onto.

Is Google Wave Waving The White Flag?

The launch of Google Buzz almost sheds some light onto how Google views Google Wave. A product with so much hype a few months ago seems to have died off completely. Does the launch of Google Buzz signify Google giving up Google Wave?

Do you have thoughts on Google Buzz? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Justin Freid is an internet marketing entrepreneur who currently heads up SEO and Social Media marketing efforts for Peterson’s College Search. Justin also runs an Internet Marketing Forum on MarketingScoop.com. You can find Justin’s thoughts on the world of social media and SEO on his blog,Justin Freid | Search Engine and Social Media Marketing and follow him on Twitter under the handle @Justin_Freid

<Image: ComputerWorld.com>
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Link Post for February 8th

February 8, 2010 By 2 Comments

This is the A2SM Link Post for February 8th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed

  • StopTweet: A Customizable Spam Blocker for Twitter – We've just found a new, completely free app that will zap those bots and bad users in just one click. It's fully customizable, so you can tell the blocker what you personally consider to be a spam account. And you can choose to simply unfollow those users, block them or report the accounts to Twitter, as well – again all with just one click. StopTweet is definitely one of the more useful apps we've seen lately, and it also helps us all do our part to clean up the Twitter universe.
  • 5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media – As social media has become a game changer for industries across the board, you can bet the experts at this year’s TED conference will have their sights set on peeling back the hype and getting at the core of what social technology has in store for this year and beyond.
  • Multitouch Update Coming to the Droid Soon – There’s some good news and some bad news. First, the good news: sources tell Engadget that multitouch browsing will be added to the Motorola Droid in its next software update.
    Multitouch was one of the most requested features on Android (Android), at least until the Nexus One gained multitouch browsing last week.
  • 5 Levels of Effective Communication in the Social Media Age – In the era of social media, our networks are much larger than they have ever been, and we have more ways to communicate with those in them. Even if you are not very active on Facebook or Twitter, my guess is that your sphere of communication has expanded significantly in recent years. Who you communicate with and how you communicate has changed radically. This new connected era brings both opportunities and challenges.
  • HUGE: Google Set to Make Gmail Social With Status Update Features – Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends.
  • Super Bowl Ads 2010 [VIDEOS] – YouTube delivered on its promise to upload all the Super Bowl Ads as soon as they aired today, with users voting to choose which one will adorn the YouTube front page on Thursday.
  • Don’t Have Money for a Real iPad? Cut One Out of Paper –
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Link Post for January 29th through January 31st

January 31, 2010 By 1 Comment

This is the A2SM Link Post for January 29th through January 31st. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

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Link Post for January 24th through January 25th

January 25, 2010 By 1 Comment

This is the A2SM Link Post for January 24th through January 25th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

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