Since January this year, an independent site by the name of Swaylo, pronounced “Sway-low,” based in San Fransico, has established themselves has an application that analyzes the social influence a user has on his social circle. The application apparently measures the impact people have on their social media activities with their friends and social group. The metrics are calculated across 80 different dimensions and into four main groups:
– audience (the number of people in your network that regularly engage with you)
– trends (your interests vs. your friends’ interests and who liked it first)
– voice (how much you say and how what you say affects your network)
Swaylo’s utilizes complex algorithms to infer probability of close connections and degree of influence between users. Once users register for Swaylo, they are simply enabling Swaylo to acquire their profile information and friend information. Apparently, Swaylo is also pitching these services to brands in an effort to offer anonymous information regarding their customers.
I have personally and don’t intend on ever utilizing such an application as I do not see the benefit in this. These efforts are merely driving our heavily internet-dependent world into an unnecessary shift towards placing value on our virtual identities. All our social media accounts are more or less digital representations of ourselves. Swaylo, in turn is thus seizing this opportunity to market to us in a way that positions itself has helping us understand our social media activity. Realistically, do we us individual really need to share all our information and let alone have an organization earn revenue based off the information we offer them?
However, from a brand and company’s perspective, this is highly intriguing! With this application companies can evaluate and understand how effective their social media strategies are! The question is, how reliable are these algorithms and are there not existing software applications such as Google Analytics or Smart Media that companies that do similar analysis?
Feel free to take a peek at this new application and decide for yourself >>> http://swaylo.com/?static=true <<<
Or hear what marketers have to say about it through this link >>> http://www.marketingmag.ca/news/media-news/new-app-shares-facebook-friend-lists-with-marketers-48981 <<<
An application with potential and yet questionable at the same time!
Following on the Youtube phenomenon, companies are beginning to see the benefit in creating a youtube channel for their brand. Many companies are still mind-boggled by all the various social media platforms and do not know how and where to effectively invest in their online marketing communications. At the moment, brands have seen the importance and success in creating their company’s online presence through their Youtube channels. There are many companies that have succeeded in the past and continue to do so today. However, the most recent company to have succeeded through Youtube, has done so in a highly creative manner and this award goes to the UK based newspaper organization, The Guardian.
The Guardian has launched a series of video advertisements aired on youtube to illustrate the creativity and shares aspects of the hard hitting journalism that takes place within the organization. Have a click on the video above and get a taste of my favorite video ad of the few. In this video, The Guardian utilizes the fairy tale story of the three little pigs as a vessel to convey all the peculiar aspects of open journalism. The short clip takes the audience through the processes of how The Guardian would have covered a story of the three little pigs over the existing mediums now, in print or online. The video has received many positive remarks and has become highly acclaimed. Some viewers even mistaken the video ad to be a trailer for a epic movie regarding 21st century open journalism!
Personally, I find The Guardian’s work to be very educational and forward-thinking. Who would have imagined creating a commercial of a newspaper company can be this thrilling, suspenseful and innovative. The positive reaction from the public has no doubt generated additional buzz and e-marketing recognition to this media company. I’m sure, in the future, more journalist and newspaper companies will begin to create commercials that highlight and flaunt the organizations capabilities in an effort to promote more readership!
For more details, visit: >>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2012/feb/29/open-journalism-three-little-pigs-advert <<<
The beginning of future newspaper promotional commercials that fool audiences in having viewed a movie trailer!
Social media these days are beginning to consume our internet time and are constantly tempting us to create our virtual identities through various platforms. Facebook’s new timeline interface has now enabled users to create an online scrapbook of their lives with images and wall post activities, Instagram has provided the artistic tools to make any picture a piece of art, Twitter has given us the channel to voice our and listen to other’s thoughts, and the list goes on! Essentially, you could say social media has virtually turned the internet into an arts and crafts club where we’re given the tools to beautify our lives! Recently, there has been another new and emerging social media platform that is storming through our internet cyber space by the ever so pretty name, Pinterest ~
In continuation of our arts and crafts club-theme, Pinterest offers users the ability to make social catalogs, share and collect images! It has been dubbed the social media sweetheart of 2012 and has grown by 400% from September to December 2011. Though the highly vertical growth rate and rapidly increasing membership of over 11 million is not uncommon with growing social media sites, Pinterest does have a point of differentiation. According to a data compiled by Modea, a digital advertising agency, they have investigated the average time users spend on their social media websites: Pinterest (15.8 minutes), Twitter (3.3 minutes) and Facebook (12.1 minutes). Surprisingly, the newest competitor on the social media scheme is now the leader and holds the strongest rivalry in time average time spent on website! This is highly intriguing as clearly the shift towards a more visually-oriented social platform has resulted in the interest of more users! At this rate, it almost seems as if Twitter does not make an effort to adapt to this visual-trend, the tweeting social media will soon begin to tweet declines in Twitter activity and membership!
On the note of more visual social media platforms, there is thus no need to justify the flock of women that are beginning to visit the sites more and pinning images on their Pinterest boards! Back to the arts of crafts theme, Pinterest is creating emotional spaces with imagery that connects users together! In addition, Pinterest is built to easily work with Facebook users and this has been a genius strategy of the Pinterest management team in continuing the social media crusade of world membership domination! Evidently, the success of Pinterest has led users to click the millions of pinned images that redirect them to the original online image source. The source then translates to conversion rates of users visiting different websites. Consequently, Pinterest is now viewed as the social media site that directs the most traffic to differnet websites, and in particular corporate websites as well!
Read more of the Pinterest social media trend and/or their future opportunities here >>> http://www.marketingmag.ca/news/media-news/what-you-need-to-know-about-pinterest-49176 <<< , >>> http://www.clickz.asia/6479/the_pinterest_opportunity_in_japan <<<
Pinterest, virtual public space with visual imagery to color your online pin board ~
We are all familiar with the usefulness of Google Adwords and its profound impact on the online advertising network by creating a search-based advertising platform. Luckily, Google has recently announced further improvements to be made with the display ad system! These changes will be aimed to simplify the process of selecting ads to buy and running the ads in a more effective manner! The changes will start from an entire new interface just for display ads and the purpose of running online display campaigns. In the new interface, Adword users will be able to bid, target and optimize their campaigns in one location. I’m presuming this means no more hassle of clicking through different tabs and drop down menus on different pages. All of these efforts are made to assist and ease the process of understanding Google Adwords and ultimately help advertisers be more exact in targeting the target consumers!
Google has dubbed the new and improved system as: Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. The new system will enable users to have more control and be able to optimize their contextual ad campaigns to the individual keyword level! If some of you are still confused as to what type of change and capability this enables users, hear it straight from the Google’s staff’s example:
“Let’s say you’re running display campaigns for a travel agency who offers a vacation packages in several Caribbean islands. In the past, you would have created themed ad groups targeting vacations to Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean. Now, with this new keyword level transparency, you might realize that the keyword ‘Turks and Caicos vacations’ is four times more profitable than the keyword ‘caribbean vacations’. You can optimize your campaigns to aggressively target these high-performing keywords, and be more conservative on ‘caribbean vacations’.”
During the beta-test, an advertiser saw a 40% increase in conversion rates and 14% increase in click-through rates! Additionally, there are also more minor changes to the options enabled to users with the new interface, such as a dedicated tab and ad refinement capabilities etc.
For more information have a read of this article from Marketing Magazine >>> http://www.marketingmag.ca/news/media-news/google-to-upgrade-display-ad-system-49057 <<<
New & improved Google Adwords system interface that incorporates more accurate and control in marketing means of the display advertisements!
We have all heard the stories of employees getting fired due to inappropriate images or activity on their Facebook accounts. It’s no biggie. People know and are beginning to be more mindful of their Facebook content and Facebook has also improved their privacy options. Nonetheless, other social media platforms may have yet to fully establish the similar boundaries to protect users from scrutiny.
Twitter has recently been plastered on the news regarding a negative articles about users with nasty tweets that have landed them in jail! According to an BBC article, lawyers in the UK have stated that there are parts of the UK legislation that can virtually be used to prosecute internet users with unlawful online activity. Unfortunately, a local student has faced the wrath of these lawyers and the UK legislation after posting racially abusive content about a football player on his twitter account. He has then been charged under the Crime and Disorder Act of posting abusive comments such as racially aggravating remarks. Consequently, the student has now been sentenced to 56 days of jail!
Sadly, this is only the most recent case of internet users posting content that have landed them in prison! Earlier this year, there have been other convictions of similar cases. Last month, another die-hard football fan posted racist comments at a rival football club which has deemed a violation of the Malicious Communications Act. The poor or unfortunate lad has now received a four month suspended jail sentence. Last week, a Law student was also charged under the section 127 of the Communications Act after sending racist tweets to a former football player in hopes of provoking an reaction.
Yes, social media is indeed fun and word spreads fast. However, just like Facebook, Twitter users need to be if not more mindful of their tweets given the lack of privacy settings Twitter offers compared to Facebook! The existing issue now are user’s lack of knowledge that virtually anything posted on the virtual space of social media platforms can be used as evidence to create a robust police case to prosecute individuals!
For more detailed readings of the different prosecutions and cases visit >>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17530450 <<<
Fellow internet users, please refrain from any abusive comments, encouraging unlawful acts such as riots, menacing communications or any unlawful comments that can result in jail time for you! The world of social media is not a virtual playground for individuals to voice their heated and controversial comments! It is a platform of fast information sharing, sharing that IS monitored by the government or police!
Here we have a giant CPG (consumer-packaged-goods) company, P&G making the E-Marketing efforts to investigate the effectiveness of their digital ads on different online sites such as search engines (Yahoo) and social media (Facebook). Known as the worlds biggest advertiser, P&G has invested heavily into their optimization of digital marketing advertisements! Rather than alter the shape and size of their traditional advertisements from other medians such as over the Television or print ads, companies such as P&G are creating specific digital ads based on their research findings from their digital optimization system.
This digital optimization system is also known as Smart Media where it analyzes not only click-through rates but also flash surveys on actual purchase intent over various ads and their placements. The program also takes into consideration of the headline, hair visual and background color of the digital ads. Depending on the performance of these elements and actual click-through plus purchase intentions, the program reveals data that can greatly assist in future digital ad placements! For instance, white background ads have not worked as well on Yahoo Ads, the ads with orange backgrounds received the highest click-through rates and blonde hair tends to receive better response than brunettes on some websites.
I believe this to be an incredibly smart method of online optimization as P&G has successfully developed a method to measure the success of their online ads without the need of Google Ad-words for instance. Additionally, all the data generated from this Smart Media program is also shared with the company’s agency of record (an advertising agency that works closely with a company). Whether or not the program is exclusive to P&G only may still be debatable as other competitors may wish to also invest in such a helpful tool in calculating the effectiveness of their digital ads!
Here is a link to the actual article >>> http://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-finds-orange-ads-work-facebook/232931/ <<<
The move towards measuring the success of their digital advertisements has now become a trend as companies such as P&G invest for a more promising online marketing strategy!
Yep, that is the title of this post. Some of us may be more familiar with this term, fiber optic, perhaps from gaming or just being a science whiz! The term more or less is a highly flexible and transparent fiber made of glass close to the size of a strand of hair. This fiber functions as a means of connecting two ends together like a wave length. Without getting into all this scientific and technical jargon, in relation to communication, fiber optic cables enables the transmission of data over longer distances at a faster rate than any other means of communication. In other words, you get super fast connection speeds!
Here in this BBC article, Google has selected Kansas City in the United States of America for their Fiber Optic Initiative. This business opportunity consists of installing fiber optic internet service throughout the entire city! This will enable internet speeds of one gigabit-per-second! In case some of you aren’t able to grasp the magnitude of such an installment, think of internet speed 100 times faster than what most of us have! Yeah, I know, WOW! Here’s the BBC short video on this matter.
Just think about it! Download and upload speeds will be lightning fast! At this point, I don’t believe citizens of Kansas City are able to comprehend how fast fiber optic fast is! Simply because they and we or I have yet to experience this type of luxury internet service! When watching videos online such as the short clip I posted, you wouldn’t even have to WAIT for it to buffer like what you are most likely doing at this point! Streaming speeds will be instantaneous! Skype sessions will be so smooth users will be bewildered! Webpage loading will literally be a mouse click away!
From a business standpoint, video conferencing will be in high definition non-stop streaming! Database management will be operating at phenomenal rates! The transfer of large data files will be take less time! This will ultimately change the digitally-reliant industries such as MRI/Hologram scans used in the Medical industry or even photograph in the photographic industries!
This initiative is no doubt the first step in the advancement of America’s telecommunication infrastructure! However, though every individual’s lives will be significantly impacted by such a drastic change, Kansas City is essentially the guinea pig of the future of fiber optic communication! On a slightly negative note, the global trend has been a shift from internet browsing from a desktop computer to more mobile devices such as a laptop or smartphone. The new infrastructure could work and continue to generate hype over internet browsing with a cable connected to a computer thereby, establishing a market leader position in Kansas City. On the other hand, it could fail terribly as consumers continue to resort to mobile devices that utilize wifi for data and consequently, be the face of a futile attempt in internet history!
Regardless, Google’s planning on launching the residential service in 2012 as they have begun hanging fiber optic wires in selected neighbors in Kansas City. The success of such a breakthrough initiative is still in its infancy stages and yet to be determined!
Thanks to the prevalence of social media, we all know how fast word of mouth spreads with progressively popular trends. From hashtags or following on twitter to Facebook shares, likes and status updates there really is no limit in how quickly the world can catch on with what the new hype is all about. Recently, what epitomized this was Jeremy Lin!
Once upon a time, in the midst of a cold stormy winter, a Canadian born sports coach and innovator invented the sport where two teams were competing to toss a ball into a 10 foot tall basket, in other words it is what we now know as basketball! The sport grew to become increasingly popular and after decades of changes and improvements, it is now one of the most watched sport globally. Arguably the most watched basketball league worldwide is the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the United States. Racially, the league is generally dominated by African-Americans and Caucasians, until perhaps the entrance of a Chinese player, Yao Ming! Sadly, he is retired now.
Regardless, it has not been over a month since Jeremy Lin’s opening career high game on February 5th where this New York Knicks (a NBA basketball team) bench player finally demonstrated his valuable basketball skills and wow-ed not just the entire league but the entire world. From nowhere to now everywhere, in just two victorious games, Jeremy Lin has become the top 10 most searched names on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter known as Sina Weibo, overnight his Twitter account has increased by 300,000 followers, t-shirt and jersey sales are off the charts, he has appeared on covers of Sports Illustrated for the past two weeks (only the 2nd athlete to achieve this distinction) and many more record-breaking stories.
Within three weeks of his opening game, Jeremy Lin has become a global basketball sensation! Internet domains under his name have all been bought, reputable magazines and newspapers are writing about him such as Times and Forbes, seven e-books have been published on him, the Global Language Monitor (GLM, a company that tracks trends of new English words) has even declared Linsanity as a official English world. There are countless fan sites created to honor his highlights and achievements. All of this success of Jeremy Lin comes to illustrate the incredible speed at which our world can adapt to emerging trends that can virtually dominate the world. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg (creator of Facebook) and other creators of social media services, the world now knows how viral marketing and word of mouth can spread across the internet. With Jeremy Lin’s Social Media Rise, the entire world can now relate to the epitome of successful E-Marketing!
Regardless of whether you follow basketball or not, Jeremy Lin (Linsanity) is a worthwhile story of how fast word can spread over today’s social media and E-Marketing methods in what some dub as the Linternet!
Yes it is true. This is yet another post about the social networking service and website launched by a Harvard student. HOWEVER, unlike typical Facebook blog post that offers information you can essentially learn from watching The Social Network, I wish to shed light on how a company has effectively utilized the capabilities of Facebook in augmenting the company’s brand image!
This brings me to Adidas! For those whom aren’t into basketball, the hip-hop culture, dancing, Porsche cars, sportswear, football (soccer in N. America), tennis, hockey or essentially aware of sports brands; Adidas is a German-based sports apparel manufacturing company!
Now that is out of the way, I’m sure everyone is aware of the new Facebook layout with a more heavily visual-oriented page consisting of not just a profile picture but also a humongous background cover picture! In case, somebody still doesn’t know what I’m talking about please look below ~
Your Facebook profiles might look something similar to this and now with the help of Adidas Originals, there is link to a alternate Adidas Originals landing page here >>> http://www.adidas.com/campaigns/originalscover/content/default.asp <<< that enables users to personalize an Adidas themed cover picture! Some sample cover pictures can be seen below ~
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This release of Adidas Originals Cover Tool is a incredibly smart way to generate more buzz and awareness of the brand as avid Adidas consumers can flaunt off their personalized cover pictures over the #1 social media website that can be viewed by virtually all friends and Facebook users. Available free of charge, this tool is believed to be updated on a seasonal basis to reflect the new styling trends and points of interest. A variety of items will be added to each update such as illustrations, icons, backgrounds, fonts, colors and more.
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An extremely worthwhile investment of Adidas Originals in an effort to establish simple yet effective social media presence. Don’t forget to visit the tool if you haven’t done so!
Here I go, plunging myself into a world of online journalism, a world of HTML, word press, tumblr, a world of everything-related to posting on a virtual intangible network that I now dub as a blog new world! Some may refer to it as the blogosphere but here in E-Frankie land, this platform of user-generated information in the form of a online personal journal that consists of entries (or posts, such as this) is the progressive emergence of A BLOG NEW WORLD!
Ever since the explosion of internet blogging beginning in the late 1990s, this has not only completely altered the way users interact with their online presence but also ultimately opening new doors to the way businesses are run! The need to shift marketing needs online have resulted in the coinage of terms such as viral marketing or in other words online word of mouth!
What used to be (and still is at times) individual blog posts of users spending the time voicing their concerns and thoughts on the world wide web has now turned into companies and brands posting on their blogs in an effort to reach out to their customers!
Now it’s not only Uncle Jimmy blogging about his life at a barn or Little Johnny blogging about his drama with girls at school, it’s corporate companies blogging about their company and consumer experiences to generate hype and buzz in an marketing technique to produce brand awareness and inevitably prompt purchase through what we all know as viral marketing!
Check out the maker of the voice – over – internet service Skype’s big blog efforts to boost user membership >>> http://blogs.skype.com/en/ <<<
Take a look at how the American retailer of home improvement and construction products and services, Home Depot educate consumers on gardening and product usage advice through their community blog >>> http://ext.homedepot.com/community/blog/ <<< 
Peruse through giant German sports apparel manufacturer, Adidas Group’s blog about employees career experiences at Adidas offices around the world >>> http://blog.adidas-group.com/ <<<
Of course there are many more companies that do similar things but the Frankie Fact remains that companies are beginning to jump on this blogging wagon into the midst of a blog new world in efforts to establish viral marketing goals among consumers!
