@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Social Brand Visibility

Social Brand Visibility: Brightkite

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Brightkite is a location based social network that allows its users to “check in” at places by using text messages on mobile phone that have downloaded the free app.

 

Users can see who is frequenting a certain establishments, and where their friends are at the moment. Sending a text connects the user to his group of friends and they can all join in the conversation.

Brightkite has been around since 2007. It has been founded by 3 guys Brady Becker, Martin May and Alan Seideman who founded the SMS service Loopnote. In 2009 Brightkite was bought by the mobile social network Limbo.

Once a user comments on a place or posts pictures to show where he is, other can start a conversation with him. Privacy control allows user to decide who will see their post. The service has the possibility to connect with Facebook and Twitter, and share photos on Flickr. All is unlimited and free

The Wall is a presentation of real time updates from a place, user or keyword.

One of the more recent advertising plans was with JCPenny where they offered a $10 Off coupon for checking in and sharing the location with friends (Dec 2010).

Other services similar to Brightkite are Facebook Places, Foursquare, Google Latitude, and Gowalla.

In 2009 the company employed 35 people and had 2 million active users.

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Blogger VS WordPress

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Since both of these blog services have their pros and cons, let’s just cut to the chase and investigate what those are.

Why Blogger?

  • Blogger’s dashboard doesn’t look overwhelming. Although for a shiny new internet user, it would likely still be cause for concern, even a novice can pick up on its formatting, configuration and customization options.  Things have changed since Blogger first set out, their updated custom design and template features are an incredible tool for those with little experience in this area.
  • Blogger has built in stats that will help you track your traffic. You may also add any third party tracking scripts for monitoring.
  • If you want to create a private blog with only designated access, Blogger has no restrictions on the number of allowed users per blog.
  • As far as Bloggers commenting system. It comes with captcha and spam filtering options, but no ability to edit comments.
  • For an individual that is new to online business and indeed even new to being online, Blogger is a great place to set up your first shop and learn the ropes.

Blogger Cons

  • This may be a perfect blog option for personal users more than business. As although there are tagging features to help increase traffic to your site, there is little else besides the power of your own words to drive viewers to you.
  • You may only import blogs from other Blogspot user pages.
  • Blogger has no gallery options for users who need to upload multiple photos.
  • There is no available contact form.
  • The simple fact is that although you may tweak Blogger to look like most any other available, for the business owner looking for a busy blog server to hawk their wares, it just doesn’t have those all important bells-and-whistles.
  • You will likely need to invest a bit more marketing funds into Blogger than WordPress.

WordPress

  • One of the main trade-offs that become glaringly obvious is the overwhelming number of folks that use WordPress. This could have a good effect, or an entirely negative one, depending on your writing, aesthetic and marketing strengths.
  • WordPress will import from Type·Pad, Israblog, Live·JournaI, MovabIe·Type, Vox.com, Posterous, Yahoo! 360, Blogger, Blogli, or another WordPress blog.
  • While Blogger supports one gig of image storage, WordPress supports three gigs. They also have optional paid upgrades for more image storage if needed.
  • WordPress offers comment editing and Akismet spam protection.
  • WordPress is highly functional for affiliate marketers, business owners, niche writers, online storefronts, and the many endless options in online businesses blogging. Its SEO features and options will allow a person who targets the proper keywords and information to quickly raise their blog to the top of, at least, WordPresses website relatively quickly.
  • Although WordPress does a bit of marketing for their users with their own high rankings and blog system, it may also take the more ‘novice’ user a bit of time to fully understand, and therefore fully utilize properly its many options and functions.

WordPress Flaws

  • WordPress can  be quite overwhelming. A person new to the internet will most likely be highly intimidated by some of its more technical features. Those who have a working knowledge on the World Wide Web may have a bit better luck, but if they want their blog to succeed, and in a relatively quick manner, they will need to do quite a bit of studying, and picking and choosing the right plug-ins for their sites needs.
  • WordPress is a web designers nightmare. Want a custom theme? First thing you will need to do is get your WordPress, off of WordPress. WordPress free blog accounts do not allow users to create their own custom themes, but do provide thousands of options to choose from. Even once you have your press on its own domain, the ‘average’ web designer, meaning one who is adept at managing their own site, will find WordPress to be a bit cranky when it comes to creating templates.
  • If you want to remain on WordPress’s server, you will find it pretty costly and for this reason it is not optional for a lot of small struggling businesses, or even larger ones in the struggling economy.

With WordPress most of your investment will be in the time you spend learning how to utilize its many helpful tools and features correctly. It is a good rule of thumb, however, to keep up with trends in blog services and aspects of what each has to offer. Dependant on your course of business and your plan for the path to success, there may be better options, free or paid, that can help you target your specific niche visitors.

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Social Brand Visibility: Plurk

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Plurk, launched in 2008, is a communication medium that is meant to be a connection and balance between blogs and social networks and between instant messaging and e mails. 

Plurk is a free social network that allows users to send updates, through short messages (up to 140 characters) or links. All the updates are placed in the home page in a chronological order. Users can respond and each such response opens a conversation thread.

It offers a way to share the things users do, the way they feel and what interest them at the moment. Users can post pictures and embed videos. They are asked to attach ‘qualifiers’, or tags to their posts: love, like, hate etc. to each message, which makes the post in the third person. Plurk can be used as an alternative to chat as well.

Considered a rival to Twitter and other micro blogging services, it offers the site in over 20 languages.

Signing up and using Plurk takes a very short time, and is extremely intuitive. The User Interface is very pretty, and you can’t appreciate how great it is compared to other services until start adding more than ten active friends and see how easily you can absorb all their activity. Those who complains about Twitter’s lack of threading is surely going to enjoy the threading on Plurk.

You can look at any Plurk and immediately see how many replies it has gotten. You can see all these replies and add your own (threaded chronologically) simply by clicking on the number at the end of the thread. You can also click the Plurk page link, which takes you to the full conversation page for that message and allows you to add your reply.

Compared with the overall internet population, the site’s audience tends to be Asian and Plurk is very popular in Taiwan where it ranks 26 in site traffic.

On March 20, 2010, The Chinese police investigated an Internet threat posted on plurk.com that called for the assassination of the President of Republic of China. It was found to come out of Taiwan.

Plurk.com is visited more frequently by females; their age range is 18-24 and they are mostly college educated.

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QWiki: Full Media Search Engine with Results You Actually Need

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Is it the sum of all human knowledge? Tidily gathered in one place and put in the hands of every individual on earth, the internet has brought us unparalleled research capabilities, unforeseen technologies, and untold fortunes. However, there is no doubt that there are issues with the current systems.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/15444551]

That said, Jan 24, 2011 marked the day that the term “Google It” started to fade away! On Oct 1, 2010 I mentioned qwiki as one of the major future technologies of the future and now just 24hrs after they have gone live I add to my thoughts.

Notoriously, as expansive as it is, it has for the most part remained a one way street. We bash some letters into a search engine, and patiently await a relative return. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others have had great purpose, but also been an incredible source of confusion for some users who may not be incredibly aware of its algorithms and nuances.

The Solution?

Facebook Co-Founder, Eduardo Saverin launched a new search engine known as Qwiki that provides what is referred to as a ‘rich media narrative’ format. In the spirit of Wikipedia, a user can add to the knowledge available on any topic. This engine provides a combination of photos, audio and video clips that relate to the queried topic.  Opened for public testing on Monday, January 24, 2011, the game has just begun.

Qwiki says their goal is to bring science fiction film to life by enabling computers to collect data on the behalf of their human counterparts. Not exactly mind reading, but not the passive system utilized so widely now. Qwiki wants to make the internet a two-way street.

So far, reviews say they are doing just that. Instead of providing one-shot information, it provides more help when even deciding on a better topic of interest.

Using Qwiki

This is a straight-forward interface. Users land on the home page, input their topic and Qwiki will load and begin to play automatically. No more robotic sounding readers. Qwiki’s voice-over has almost completely removed the non-human, monotone Robbie the Robot voice, and replaced it with a surprisingly pleasant female voice that includes highs and lows in the appropriate places.  If you never thought an artificial voice could sound soothing, Qwiki may change that for you.

Resources? I would have imagined loading all of this media would have caused a bit longer load time. On a 64bit dual core processor +6000, it took no longer to load the search bar than Google blank page, it took .03 seconds longer to load the rest.

After your initial search plays, Qwiki offers you more options below and the topics seem to be highly relevant after many searches.

What Now?

I don’t see how Qwiki can help but change the way that internet searches currently work. The results are entertaining and at some point someone needs to jump on a research group that can dig into the details about learning curves and get Qwiki right now to the users who may be able to better retain information because of it. It is hard not to focus when you have a calming voice reading the text as it scrolls below gripping slideshows and photo galleries.

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What is About.me All About?

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About.me was founded by Tony Conrad, Ryan Freitas and Tim Young in December 2009, after they were looking for a way to create one place where their profiles can be posted and which has the ability to guide visitors to a more comprehensive information about them. A place that will serve as their ‘splash page’ for personal and professional use.

They seem to have touched a nerve. With seed money of only $425,000, they formed About.me.

During a short beta period that began in September 2010 and ended with the launch in December 2010, about 400,000 people signed up for the service. About.me was bought 4 days  after the launch by AOL for an undisclosed amount.

So what is About.me all about?

About.me provides a place for a user to have a professional looking calling card. The site’s advanced technologies enable users to upload a picture of their choosing that becomes the background for the page. Templates allow users to write a short profile, and ink their page on the site to other social network sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and personal blogs. Users can also post links to other sites they have on the internet and with the registration an e mails service is provided through the site. One place where users can create one concise profile, and visitors can find immediately everything they want them to know. 

Unlike other social media sites like MySpace and Facebook which started with the same concept, but evolved to be something else, about.me is all about you – the user. They leave the sharing and the conversations to other sites. When clicking on the link to Facebook for example a window opens with your pictures from the site. Another click will send your visitors to the site itself.

What is also interesting about them is what is going on in the background. There, machines and logarithms are crunching numbers and come up with information that might be very interesting to you: a dashboard with stats on visitors, where they came from, social media reach and how much time the visitors have spent on the page.

Being such a young company, it saw a surge of 316% in the past 3 months. Just last week they saw an additional surge of 62%. About.me is already ranked 1,907 in the United States, and the biggest numbers of users are in Canada, USA, Azerbaijan, South Africa and Israel.

About.me prides itself for being easy to use while having a high quality design. Looking at people’s pages on the site proves how far we have evolved from having to turn to expert designers for our personal space on the internet. It is very appealing and artistic.

A similar service exists in the form of Flavors.me, which has a paid service on top of having a free, limited, version. Many of the features of Falvors.me are available only through the paid plan while about.me is completely free. Falvors.me also makes you pay for the stats.

Analysis shows that the average users are in the range of 18-24, have no children and browse the site from work. It appeals more to higher income, higher educated crowd.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/19914735]

video added 2/14/2011

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Internet Marketing: Watch out, get educated and be an informed consumer!

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University of San Francisco is offering Certificates, and Master Certificates in Internet Marketing, but beware of the rookies trying to sell you, or teach you about what they themselves barely seem to know.

If you find the advertisement on Facebook it seems to lead you to the website usanfranonline.com, however it opens up like any other early year 2000 capture website. It looks to convince you that they are the source for internet marketing, however the website and brand presentation fail on the most basic level. Once you spend a few minutes looking around and realize that nothing is interactive (with exception to the video) you start to get the feeling you landed on an infomercial (and you kinda did).

The video featuring Joe Laratro is the hardest thing I have ever had to watch, here is a individual that is mildly known for being an internet marketing source dragging through one of the worst video pitches . What’s so bad about it? Well in case you didn’t fall asleep yourself, let’s look at how it failed.

  • Video Length: 3:30 Seconds

Well if you can keep them that long, then great.  Unfortunately for most an initial pitch might want to meet the industry standard of 60 seconds.

  • Background: Blurry fake back drop, of what one can assume is San Francisco

Video Media is Social Media, how about a real shot of the San Fran Campus, perhaps a real scene which helps deliver the real feel to what’s going on. This next one really hammers home our point.

  • Message: Speech? Joe is reading off a teleprompt at best! What is worse he is doing a bad job of it, his eyes and facial expressions make me want to cry for him. Let’s try genuine, you know the most important part of Social Media and Internet Marketing back in 2009 till now!

Does Joe Laratro not know enough about what you’re talking about to have real pitch to the camera? If this doesn’t come second nature to him, then he shouldn’t be doing this!

If you are going to do this, let’s get a video shot in documentary style and have him talk to the side angle as if you where addressing someone in the room.

Summary:

While I am sure that Joe Laratro knows something about internet marketing, it’s a lot like watching a newspaper try to launch their first website, cumbersome at best. In this case, it is possible that their program could teach you something, and it better if it’s endorsed by USF. When you visit their main website, it at the very least shows signs of branding and web development that are only few years outdated (i.e. they have social bookmarks at the very bottom of the site, but nothing that allows you to see and interact with what they are doing with the most basic tools in twitter or facebook.

It’s great that someone in academia is trying to get into the digital world of internet marketing, just wish they had learned how to do it for themselves before trying to teach others.

Consumer and Business Lesson:

Do your homework, don’t take anything at face value, while the website may seem impressive even if it does show signs of Social Media and modern internet marketing, dig deeper and find out how they are using it so you are at least prequalifying them before tossing your money away.

In the end this is about protecting your brand, seeing the big picture and looking beyond the fact that the tool works. SEO doesn’t sell anything, SEO or Social Media create exposure which will lead to websites and calls. You have to make sure during execution that the brand image is consistent and shows value to meet a need.

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Sidenote: While this may seem personal, I have never met Joe Laratro or attended any of his meetings. I was drawn to this publically available media based on two concerns.

First, There are many people who have jumped out of the woodworks claiming to be SEO or Social Media experts and business owners should be aware of the most basic tools to determine if someone is credible.

Second, I spent years in student affairs and hold a Bachelors and Masters from Accredited Universities. I  have also studied online with Capella University and Walden University for Doctoral Level classes. I believe in online learning as a tool and when you toss together a program as vague and questionable as USF has here it makes all future programs and online degrees look bad.

***Note my upcoming book will look at this in detail***

Latest Trends in Branding or Rebranding of Companies

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The latest trends in branding or rebranding of companies are developed of necessity. To be successful at rebranding all elements must be consistent and the effect on all stakeholders must be taken into account. Rebranding should be done in a way that it doesn’t alienate current customers but does attract new customers and opens up new markets for the brand.

 

 

Rebrand to Counteract Negative Publicity

When tobacco became a product with many negative connotations, the tobacco giant Phillip Morris rebranded to Altria. At the time this happened, the company also owned over eighty percent of the Kraft Corporation. Changing the name gave the company a chance to show people that the company was involved in more than tobacco. This helped counteract the negative publicity that smoking tobacco was bringing to the industry.

Successful Rebranding

Rebranding requires that the various processes in the marketing campaign make sense. Everything should flow comfortably into the new brand image so that current customers will feel comfortable. When done properly rebranding will make potential customers take a second look while comforting current customers that their favorite items will still be available.

Successful rebranding should

  • Provide opportunities to communicate the brand shift in the business model
  • Allow the migration of your brand into new markets and new audiences
  • Help shed a negative image and disguise negative business events 
  • Allow the company’s mission to be updated bringing new vision to the team involved

Successful rebranding encompasses much more than changing a logo; there should be significance to the changes and this should be communicated to the stakeholders. They should be able to see the purpose behind the change so they will be receptive to it.

Branded Brands

The trend in branding today points to Branded Brands. To make this simple say you are taking a United Airways flight, while on the flight you will be offered Starbucks Coffee, cookies from Mrs. Fields and a Friendly Skies Meal complete with toy from MickeyD’s. This also affects the airlines popularity since the people receive brands they are comfortable with and enjoy.

Brands that Support a Good Cause

Cause marketing is also a growing trend in branding. This trend identifies a brand with a humanitarian cause. This approach has been very successful for many brands such as GAP. Most people feel good about their purchase if part of the cost is going for a good cause and this way of thinking doesn’t seem to be hampered by the recession.

The latest trends in branding or rebranding of companies are out of the box. A lot of creative thinking and marketing techniques are required to be successful in today’ tough economy.

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Social Brand Visibility: Klout

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Klout measures the impact a brand or a person has on the social media network. It is a social media analytics company.

Launched in 2008, they currently have more than 250,000 users and more than 300 API partners. Its founder and CEO, John Frankel, says his company is “well positioned to capitalize on the distinct need for a new layer of intelligence for the social web. Klout is a service that makes sense of what it means to be and to become influential.” It uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure true reach, amplification probability and network score.

True Reach – measures the size of your engaged audience. It does not take into account spam and inactive accounts. They answer a few questions; are your tweets interesting enough to build an audience? How far has your content been spread? Are people adding you to their lists?

How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?

Amplification Probability – The likelihood that your content will be acted upon. How diverse is the group you’re in touch with? How likely are you to be retweeted? Do a lot of people retweet you or are they the same followers? Are you tweeting too much or too little? And are the tweets effective in generating new followers?

Network influence – How influential you’ve become? How influential are the people who follow you? How influential are the people who list you? How influential are those who retweet you?

Klout identifies influencers and provides tools for influencers to monitor their influence.  According to their research the three most retweeted users in the world are: Justin Bieber, I Confess That (a Spanish language) and Raise Your Hands (another Spanish tweeter).

The company got $8.5 million in funding a few days ago, a sign that investors believe in the future of this company.

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Social Brand Visibility: Connotea (Great Academic Tool)

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Connotea has been in operation since 2004, but is not widely known because it caters mainly to scientists, researchers and clinicians’ communities. It is a free management service; it is a social network bookmarking service, similar to del.icio.us where users can save links to their favorite sites.

Although it is aimed primarily for the scientific community, it is growing among other academic disciplines; it incorporates special functions for academic resources.

Connotea is linked to a number of scientific sites and collects metadata for the page or article being bookmarked, including author and publication information. When saving a page to Connotea, users tag the articles with keywords of their choice so they can retrieve the information easily.

To make it easier on researchers the site has the capability to export the references in RIS format to a citation manager program, which means it is possible to save references without bibliographic software. It also allows easy sharing of bookmarks with colleagues.

As for the social aspect of this website, it recognizes what people have bookmarked and alerts them to related material. It also provides RSS feeds that allow users to keep track of interesting articles published by the websites they have bookmarked.

Each user can comment any number of times on any bookmark in his library, and comments from different users are combined to display a chronological, and conversational, thread about a resource.

References can be accessed from any computer, and can be saves with just one click, without leaving the page you are viewing at the moment.

Essentially you can create a library of important articles for research and study. There is nothing to download to your computer and there is no need for cutting and pasting. References can be public, private or shared with a selected group.

As of November 2010, Connotea had about 40,000 visitors a month and has 6,557 sites linking in.

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Social Brand Visibility: Multiply, Social Media for Grown Ups

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Another way to look at, and benefit from, social media aside from the ubiquitous Facebook, is a site called Multiply – a social media site that has been in existence since 2004 and is just now gathering speed, after many improvements and modifications.

While Facebook is hip, young and aimed at teenagers and young adults, Multiply’s average users range from the late 20s to the upper 30s. Facebook wants to help you increase the number of your virtual friends, while Multiply aims to help you stay in touch with your existing, real friends, colleagues and family.

This social network grew nicely throughout the years. As of September 2010 it has 20 million unique visitors. A small fraction of what Facebook has, but not to be discounted with.

Multiply allows its users an easy upload of pictures, videos and music. Each user who has a contact list on the site, gets his own page which he can customize and on which he can post text or media. It means having the capability to have your own blog among the users of the community. Another helpful feature allows users categorize their contact lists to groups like family, friends, co-workers etc. and decide, very easily, who gets to see the new post.

Since 2009, Multiply is offering a premium service. For about $10 a year, the site can be used as a digital locker. You can upload all your family photos and videos (up to 20 minutes long), in high resolution, to safeguard your family memories and other important pictures. That service allows for easy access and sharing. You can import all your photos from Google’s Picasa and Microsoft’s Photo gallery.

Of course the social side should not be forgotten. Easy access to friends, family or schoolmates. Easy sharing of videos and links.

Multiply has a Social Newsreader. This is a collection of not only the user’s posts but those of his contacts and groups. It is customizable, so users can set filters to show specific posts only.

There’s a section for reviews, recipes etc. and a marketplace to showcase items people want to trade or sell.  You can have your own business page on the site, easily upload photos of your products and connect to your website.

A social media site for adults who don’t feel their co-workers need to see all the baby’s new pictures. But grandma will surely be delighted.

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