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Do You Bebo?

October 6, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Bebo is a social network that is very popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand and is said to be the 3^rd social network in the US.

In existence since 2005, Bebo enables users to create profiles, watch videos, listen to music and connect with their friends. In 2008 Bebo had over 34 million users and 7 billion page views per month.

The company was bought by AOL in 2008 for $850 million and was sold to Criterion Capital Partners in 2010 for a fraction of that amount.

Bebo aims to be the next generation High School and College social network. Users can blog, listen to music, share information, photos and videos. Their unique feature is called Bebo Bands and it enables bands and artists to upload their music or videos on the site and reach their fans immediately. A band profile, for example, includes the names of the band members, list of fans, and has an area for announcements such as tour dates, special appearances on TV etc. A blog for the band to write their comments and a list of songs they have uploaded for free. When fans want to have other tracks, Bebo will connect them directly to the iTune store.

Members can see the updates their friends made to this site or to other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Flicker when those friends linked their accounts to Bebo.

Bebo can create groups as well, people that graduated from a certain school for example, and the group is accessible only to the group members, similar to what Yahoo has.

In 2008 Bebo added a mobile application that can be accessed from any mobile phone on any network. Up until then, it could have been reached only by O2 Ireland and Orange UK.(Hence the popularity of the site in those countries)

This year, Bebo was ranked at number 11 out of the most popular social networking websites by eBizmba.com, with 7 million unique monthly visitors. A big decline from 34 million they had in 2008. It seems their purchase by AOL did not work out as well as most thought, but now, it might rise again.

AOL Lifestream Aims to Stream your Social Life

October 5, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

These days of information overload, a new class of ideas and companies have come into being. Those are the information aggregators, those who want to save you time by doing what they think you want to be doing.

Take AOL Lifestream for example; there are many social networks and sometime we have different friends in different networks. The more isolated we become, the more connected we want to be. It takes time to check and update them all. AOL Lifestream enables you to put all your social networks in one place for a quick check and update. It provides full visibility to your Social Brand!!!

AOL Lifestream was first introduced as part of the IM (Instant Message) system, but was re-launched later as a standalone application. It is available through a website, an AIR application, iPhones and Android phones.

This is how it works: – Let’s say you have friends on Facebook, you follow people on Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flicker etc. Lifestream will put all those connections in one place and you can see alerts from different friends and posts about your various interests without going to the individual site, logging in and waiting for the page to load. It allows you, of course, to publish back on those social sites as well.

Another advantage of the Lifestream is that it can be accessed through smartphones, making you continuously connected to your friends. You can take pictures with your phone and upload them immediately to all your social networks.

Another application allows you to follow your friends and see where they are at the moment. Using GPS and the status updates, you can see, on one screen, where your friends physically are at the moment. Are you around the corner from each other? Near by? Have time for coffee?

Their new feature and what makes Lifestream unique is the ability to follow places not just people. Let’s say you have a place you like to visit frequently like a corner bar or ice cream parlor. You can see, at any time which of your friends is currently there, if he chooses to post it.

Lifestream is simple to use, mobile, intuitive and useful. It’s a social network all on its own and an integrating system that lets you have all your friends in one place.

Stroome me? Redefining video opportunity…

October 4, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

It used to be that making videos was the territory of the few. You needed a high quality and expensive camera, you needed editing capabilities and you needed the knowhow in editing. Of course you needed a platform to display your videos.

With the advances in electronics and miniaturizing, cameras have become better, lighter and cheaper. Not the property of the rich and professionals anymore. First problem solved, sort of, because what you are left with is raw footage.

Editing software appeared on the market as well. What used to be programs for professionals only which were rented out, not sold like Avid and Final Cut became affordable the Adobe premiere, Final cut or Avid for home use. Those still are expensive and need a learning period to make them work properly.

With experience comes improvement. Editing the videos you have shot still takes a long time, even after you’ve learned the programs. Here art comes into the equation.

The platform became available with YouTube. Millions all over the world shot what they thought was funny, interesting or smart and hurried to share it with the world. Careers have been made out of home postings, rarely but it did happen (Justin Beiber is a very good example).

But sharing those videos with specific people was still a problem. The video files are heavy and can’t be sent via e mail. They had to be uploaded on a server and could be accessed by people who had the password to that account.

The new trend in marketing is videos. It appears people would rather hear and see instead of read. We have all become film-makers.

Enter Stroome, a site that facilitates making interesting videos and sharing them with friends. Unlike Youtube where you just post the video to the world and let your friends know that you have posted it there, Stroome enables you to post your videos on the site, edit it and share it with others.

Stroome allows uploading of raw footage and mixing it with pictures, other videos and music. The editing program (based on the same principals as iMovie) is simple and easy to learn. The result can be shared with you partners and have them write up notes on what needs to change or they can go into the file and make changes you can view immediately. After the work is finished, you can share that video with a larger group of people via a form of social network.

Stroome, coming from USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, was launched in a public beta in April 2010 and is based on the Kaltura video editing suite but goes further by adding to the editing suite community tools. It facilitates journalism, they say, by letting a few people collaborate on a story immediately without relying on other sources to move the video file around. In Stroome the file does not leave the site, so there are no problems of loading time, downloading time and things lost in the transfer.

Using their site, a group can work on a school project together, friends can share their latest videos, journalist can communicate and work cheaply and efficiently and every small business owner can become a film-maker.

Their ambition is to turn Stroome into a verb; in the same way Google has evolved to become part of the American language. They want people to say “Stroome me and see…”

But please bear in mind – the content is still the king.

New Startups to Watch For

October 1, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

The TechCrunch Disrupt tech show just wrapped a 3 day event in San Francisco. This show looks at the latest and most interesting innovations in the tech world, and gives a prize to one of them. But the point of the show is not the prize ($50,000) but the buzz some of them will get as a result.

Why is this important? Because it might so happen that in one of these companies lies the next advertising platform.

Here are some of the most interesting;

– Tweetbeat – Almost 90 million tweets are posted every single day. How can you get those that are most relevant to you? Enter Tweetbeat that sorts out the Tweets with what is called “Contextual Data Mining Technology” and sorts the top stories, trends and the time they peaked. The company was just sold to AOL.

– Voxy – A company that aims to simplify learning a language. The idea behind it is that text books are boring, people would rather learn from life. The company offers games, news stories, magazines etc. on smartphones and on the web, that have translation tools built in. For the time being they are concentrating on the Spanish speakers who want to improve their English.

– GameCrush – it’s a site where people can go to play games and meet the opposite sex. A combination of social media and paid gaming or a virtual bar where you can meet people who like the games you do. The company tested the site in March and it crushed because of enormous traffic. The site has been rewritten since and is up since Monday.

– Gild – Offers a way for programmers looking for work to show off their skills through games and puzzles. This site can replace a resume, says the founder. You show your skills by completing tasks and being creative.

– Qwiki – The people behind Qwiki believe we are too busy these to stop and read everything we are interested in. That’s where Qwiki comes in. Search for a topic and what will come up is a multimedia, narrated presentation of the subject. It can be used as an alarm clock; it can read aloud your incoming e mails, the weather report and the appointments of the day.

The last one –Qwiki – won the grand prize.

Those are but a few startups that were presented at the show. There are many shows like this one and many startups looking for attention.

Beyond Google: The truth about growing a business online

September 30, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

In the Internet marketing arms race, companies are coming up short on google… here is why.

Google Only (100% effective) = 71% Market Opportunity
Mixed Search Engines Practices (80% effective) = 76% Market Opportunity

Google, Bing and Yahoo are the largest search engines in the United States, after that no one really comes close. In fact, small and inexperienced advertising and marketing companies would have you believe that google has such an advantage it is the only way to go. In fact, SEO companies promise you first page listings on google as the way to grow and build your Internet exposure, however, the math doesn’t add up.
Case Study:

Google is responsible for *71.79% of search traffic.
Yahoo & Bing are responsible for *23.93% of search traffic.

*Source: http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10133.html
Traditional SEO and Internet Marketing Companies push just google, and on occasion some have started to push Facebook ads. Now let’s review the two major flaws in their logic.

First page on Google is a clear way to success – False, Just because you’re the first place they stop doesn’t convert it into a lead or sale, what are you selling? How does the website sell it? Where is the call to action, user friendly environment?
Google is the best way to generate leads from Search Engines – False, Yahoo & AOL communities are the oldest form of Social Media. As such, they have an amazing and loyal following. In fact, a Yahoo user is far more likely to make a purchase from findings on Yahoo then they are on google.
Google, Yahoo & Bing are the three major search engines – False, Google may own You Tube, but it doesn’t mean that Google and You Tube are in sync with search results. In fact, You Tube is the second largest search engine in the United States. So if you’re not leveraging Video content, you just missed an entire market. If your product has overseas opportunities, then you better learn about other search engines like Yandex (a Russian search engine).
Statistically Google is a better source for SEO or SEPR success – False, Compare two strategies – Google vs. Mixed approach. Others say tailoring to anyone but google results in a lower google score or rank, so why do it?

A look at the real statistics:
If you are 100% effective with Google then you can capture about 71% of the market, but if you are conservative and only 80% effective across the three search engines then you can capture 76% of the market. If you did well and can become 90% effective across all three Search Engines, then you walk away with the opportunity to capture up to 87% of the market.
If you go one step further to realize that Yahoo attracts higher conversion rates, then the scales really start to tip. Now add some video content distributed throughout the web (i.e. You Tube) and now you starting to achieve real market visibility.
Google is an amazing company and an even better visibility tool, providing resources, information and solutions to the largest population searching the internet. That said, you know not to put all your investments in one place in any aspect of life, why would you do the same with your Internet visibility?

Have you Stumbled upon StumbleUpon?

September 28, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

You haven’t? Not yet, you mean.

As the amount of information on the World Wide Web grew to huge proportions, things were starting to get lost in the shuffle. There are not enough hours in a day to search everything new uploaded. How do you know you are not missing something?

Enter the social media where people are talking to each other socially and can spread the word about things they like and things they don’t.

One of the latest tools is a site called StumbleUpon, where people, after registering and downloading a toolbar, can go and see what others on the network stumbled upon on the web and recommended. It is what is now called a “discovery engine”.

You are asked to put in your interests, invite your friends to join in and see what similar users have recommended. All that is being analyzed with the company’s recommendation Engine.

StumbleUpon is a mixture of social media and rating system. With these two tools they have become trend setters and a goldmine for advertisers.

The company behind it, 3 guys from Canada, founded StumbleUpon in 2001, sold it to EBay in 2007 for $75 million and in 2009 bought it back for an undisclosed amount. As of now they have over 11 million users.

StumbleVideo is another service of the company. This site allowed users without the toolbar to view videos from site like ColledgeHumor, DailyMothion, Funnyordie, Google, MetaCafe, MySpace Vimeo and YouTube.

StumbleThru is a service allowing users to stumble in youTube, The Onion, PBS and Wikipedia. Since June 2010 they extended their partnership with many more.

Since the users enter their preferences, StumbleUpon directs relevant traffic to them. Small portions are sponsored pages matching their interests. Such content in vetted by humans for quality before it is delivered. Paid accounts (called ‘sponsors’) have many more options:

Target the audience you want.
Traffic directly to your site, no click through.
The more users like it, the more traffic you get.

Is your SEO or Visibility Company Wearing a Black Hat?

September 23, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Since the time when people first figured out that good placement on the search engines is crucial for internet traffic, they have been thinking of a way how to game the system.

Not really game. More, how to use the system for profit. You don’t really have to sell anything, they thought, you can provide information and link to sites that do.

Hence, a game of cat and mouse begun between Google and those thinkers. But to understand that we need a little bit of theory.

Almost everything uploaded on the web is being looked at. Not necessarily by people, although that happens from time to time, but mainly by machines.

One of Google’s systems scans the uploaded pages. “Crawlers” or “Spiders” scan the page to look for repeated words that will help it categorize the site. It looks at headlines, Meta tags, hyperlinks etc. After that, another system Google uses involves indexing the pages according to the crawler’s find.

That much is known. Once the ‘thinkers’ manage to figure out what works best to get their site high on the search engine page, they took advantage of it. They stuffed keywords and tags and manipulated the system in what is called Spamdex.

Google adjusted. They added a few measures, like the amount of back links and their importance to the ranking on the search engine result page. Once the ‘thinkers’ figured that out, a way was found around the measure. By 2007 Google mounted a campaign against what is called ‘link farms’ which, in some cases, included thousands of sites created for the sole purpose of creating back links.

This game is still going on. Google announced that it has more than 200 criteria for page rank and in 2005 started personalizing the search results for each user.

That is called White Hat seo. It is a technic used to comply with Google’s guidelines and is not meant to deceive.

White Hat seo is not just about following the rules; it is about providing the costumer with the correct information. It is about creating content for searchers, not for search engines. Making the content easily accessible to the spiders and the easy to index is what White Hat seo is all about. It is in many ways connected to the web development that enables customer’s accessibility.

White hat seo means using all the tools to have an effective marketing campaign.

Black Hat seo is developing a site for the search engine, not for the user. It is an attempt to learn the system and outsmart it. With technics like hidden text (when the text and the background are the same color thus the customer can’t see it, but the crawlers can) or another method, called cloaking, when the site gives a different page depending if it is a live searcher or a machine.

Search engines might remove a site or lower it’s ranking if they are suspicious that the site is using Black Hat seo. In 2006, two big German companies BMW and Ricoh were removed by the search engines for deceptive practices. The companies apologized, changed their sites and were beck on Google. But if you are a small company, this process might take a lot of time.

In order to avoid problems down the line, you should rely on a reputable consulting firm to do the seo for your site. A company like Puglisi Consulting Group which is able to help you in all your website needs and through their visibility arm, Visibility Acceleration http://www.visibilityacceleration.com/#/seo-visibility/4541420003 advise you on the right ways to approach your world wide web visibility.

Commercials and Internet Visibility

September 22, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

What can we learn from the big boys? The big firms with millions and billions of dollars behind them, and how they approach internet visibility.

The case in point is a product called “Old Spice”. You must have heard the name. Old Spice cologne and aftershave has been around since the 1930. It was the scent of America, since it started in the United States.

Through the years, when transport and import became simpler, the market was flooded by European products. Old Spice market share went down drastically.

In 1990 the company was sold to Procter and Gamble. 20 years later, in the middle of 2010, new commercials for “Old Spice” body wash started showing on TV. Many experts were behind it; P&G, an advertising company and a digital media specialist.

They opened a twitter account and a Reddit account for the lead character.
They opened a Facebook page
They opened YouTube channel and started putting out the 15 second spots, one after the other.

The ads went viral on the internet. Google search went up 2000%, Facebook interactions up 800% and 1.5 billion impressions (The count of a delivered basic advertising unit from an ad distribution point, according to “Basic Advertisement Measures”) since February.

The campaign was a combination of the success of social media and viral success. And it didn’t happen overnight. It took them 6 months of adjusting and changing to get to the point that the reaction was getting to where they hope it would be.

The reaction was immediate; sales went up 107% the first month and are still going up in the rate of 55% in the past 3 months.

Lately the company recorded 183 video answers to question posed by Twitter users. They are staying in touch with their followers.

What can we learn from that success story?

– The campaign should be all inclusive. All the possible channels.

– It might take time to develop the correct approach. Some corrections are needed in the middle of the way.

– If the ‘big boys’ do it, and it works for them, why not do it on a smaller scale?

To see what can be done for you and your business in this new era of advertising, you might be best serve if you approach someone that has expertise and knowledge in the area. Companies like Puglisi Consulting Group at http://puglisiconsulting.com/#, that can design a campaign to your budget. Through their internet visibility arm Visibility Acceleration http://www.visibilityacceleration.com, they can advise you how to be visible on the internet and all over the world.