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From MediaPost (read original article)

Undeterred by the firestorm of criticism over Google Buzz, Microsoft is ramping up its social efforts through new partnerships with Facebook and MySpace.

Google BUZZ launched last week and it’s already shaking up the Social Media landscape.  Though Google has been launching a new product seemingly every week (Chrome, Wave, Droid Operating System, etc.) this one comes with more louder Thunder and more Lightning Bolts from atop Mt. Googlempus!

What is it?

If you have a Gmail account and have checked it the past week, you probably know but if not, Google Buzz is a simple tool to post, communicate and share through the Gmail service (which is free like Facebook, Twitter, Friend Feed, etc.).  Think about a cross between the ease of use and ability to follow anyone by Twitter and the deeper sharing and multimedia capabilities of Facebook.

Are People Using This?

Yep.  The first 2 days saw 160,000 Buzz posts PER HOUR and 300,000 Mobile check-ins PER DAY.

Why Would Someone Use This?

The most obvious answer is that it automatically shows up on your Gmail account (no need to sign up for it).  Think about how Internet Explorer became so famous – when you turned on a new computer, there was the IE logo begging you to click it. Also, it’s brutally simple to use. Lastly, it’s within your realm of usage every day, meaning that if you’re a Gmail user, it’s already tied in to other tools you’re using from Google like Calendar, Wave…heck if you have a Droid Phone (runs on a Google Operating System) – it’s there too because when you activate your phone it prompts you to provide your Gmail address or sign up for one!  Buzz is EVERYWHERE if you have a Gmail account.

What about its Mobile “Local” Feature?

This is really the coolest thing about BUZZ!  If you access Buzz through any GPS-enabled phone, it identifies your location and serves up the Buzz from people in a close proximity to you even if you’re following them or not.  You know what restaurant people are eating at around your location, what movie they are seeing, etc. (as long as they are Buzzing from their phone and close enough to you).

Any Stumbling Blocks?

Privacy concerns.  When Buzz first launched it auto-followed people IT thought you should and auto-suggested people to follow based on your Gmail habits.  Google responded FAST and quickly turned the auto-follow to auto-suggest and added a disable Buzz completely feature.  They probably should have taken a look at Facebook’s numerous stumbles in this area.

Will it Threaten the Big 2?

Yes, but not likely to do too much damage because Facebook users and Twitter users are loyal to their products.  It was instantly bigger than Twitter at launch based on number of users thanks to a built in Gmail user base to tap but has not come close to the total number of posts that Twitter has.  Plus Twitter has a great open API ensuring that more applications are in the pipeline at all times.  Buzz also has an open API ensuring innovative apps in the pipeline but with the Droid phone having a built-in  “marketplace” like the iPhone, this creates a potential revenue stream for Buzz because they could possibly charge for Buzz apps.

We’re still playing with Buzz at Endeavour Labs and it’s still early to tell how people are going to adopt it and how competitors will respond but it looks like Google has a bonafide hit on its hands!  We’ll keep you updated on how this thing progresses!

Endeavour Marketing & Media

By Susan Davis for the Wall Street Journal (read original article)

If YouTube video views were to decide today’s Senate election in Massachusetts, Republican state Sen. Scott Brown would win in a landslide against Democrat Martha Coakley.

A study conducted by the Emerging Media Research Council out today found that Brown had a more effective strategy of using social networking tools including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to promote his campaign and connect with supporters.

Here’s a look at the numbers:

Facebook Posts since Jan. 1: Brown (128), Coakley (58)

Facebook Fans: Brown (70,800), Coakley (13,529)

Tweets since Jan. 1: Brown (142), Coakley (144)

Twitter Followers: Brown (9,679), Coakley (3,385)

YouTube Videos: Brown (57), Coakley (52)

YouTube Video Views: Brown (578,271), Coakley (51,173)

The study concludes that Brown’s use of social media helped in several ways, including boosting his name recognition both in and out of Massachusetts. They note that just 51% of Massachusetts voters had heard of Brown in a Nov. 12 poll, by Jan. 14 his name recognition was at 95%.

The study also found that Brown more openly embraced social media sites on his campaign Web site, where he “prominently” features social networking channels including a Twitter feed while Coakley “gives social networks less prominent real estate.”

In recent elections, Democrats—including President Barack Obama–have gotten the bulk of the credit for using social media networks to boost their campaigns. However, other recent studies suggest that the tech divide between the two parties is narrowing.

A report released last week on lawmaker’s use of Twitter found that Republican lawmakers are taking advantage of the Twitterverse significantly more than their Democratic counterparts. In the House, GOP lawmakers send out 529% more tweets than Democrats.

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From CNN (Click for original article)

Editor’s Note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He writes a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.

London, England (CNN) — Social media aren’t always perceived as an effective way to coordinate fundraising efforts or bring change: In some circles, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest are seen as the domain of armchair activists.

But are times changing? Will technology prove its worth following the disastrous Haiti earthquake?

All talk and no action?

“Slacktivism” has become the popular pejorative to describe the various Internet petitions, well-intentioned Facebook groups and copious retweets intended to sow the seeds of change or bring help where it’s needed. “It’s all fed by slacktivism … the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair,” Monty Phan wrote in a 2001 Newsday article.

The term has stuck in large part because its claims are true. Even tech optimists like myself are forced to concede that while online fundraising campaigns can rack up thousands of tweets in an afternoon, persuading those same participants to open their wallets remains a challenge.

Hitting a button to blast out a message to your friends is easy, but when faced with a credit card payment form, many Web users shy away.

How can we combat such poor conversion rates online? The Twestival campaign of 2009 did so by taking proceedings into the real world: Twitter was used to spread the word of offline gatherings, at which more than $250,000 was raised to bring clean water to towns in Uganda, Ethiopia and India.

Some online campaigns, meanwhile, have simply accepted this poor conversion rate as fact. They use social media sites as marketing vehicles while corporate sponsors bring the cash. October’s “Beat Cancer” fundraiser asked brands to donate 1 cent for every tweet carrying the “#beatcancer” tag: Nearly 700,000 tweets were posted, and the campaign as a whole claims to have raised $70,000 for cancer charities.

Haiti relief: Red Cross paves the way

Haiti may be different: Here, we’re seeing well-intentioned Web users open their wallets and give generously. While the scale of the disaster and harrowing images in the media fuel a desire to help in any way we can, it’s technology that has made the process efficient and enabled tens of thousands of individuals to take action toward a common goal.

As of Thursday afternoon, the Red Cross had raised more than $4 million in donations via its text message campaign: Text “Haiti” to 90999, and a $10 donation is added to your cell phone bill. The mechanism is so wonderfully simple — removing credit cards and PayPal accounts from the equation entirely — that donations have flooded in. Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti, meanwhile, is leveraging the same technology: Text “YELE” to 501501 to make a $5 donation.

Social media spreads the word

While text messaging provides the payment solution, Twitter and Facebook have spread the word. At midday Wednesday, CNN reported, four of Twitter’s top topics were related to Haiti earthquake relief.

Celebrity Twitter users, many with millions of followers on the service, have taken to tweeting the simple message so easily expressed in Twitter’s 140 character limit.

“You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief efforts in #Haiti,” writes singer Katy Perry. Shaquille O’Neal, Chelsea Handler and Randy Jackson are among other notable names echoing the Red Cross message.

There’s no doubt that text message donations coupled with the word-of-mouth buzz provided by Twitter and Facebook are proving a powerful combination in the Haiti relief efforts, not to mention the vital role of those services in bringing us first-hand reports in real-time.

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

From the New York Times (click for original article)

KRISTIAUNA MANGUM, 22, a senior at Ohio State University in Columbus, said she always had a flair for makeup, but never considered it a professional calling. Then she heard about a pilot college program offered by Avon’s little sister brand, Mark, two years ago. “My mother was an Avon Lady, so I thought, huh, maybe becoming a Mark Girl could really be the way to go,” she said.

Now Ms. Mangum is the sales manager for Mark at Ohio State, and manages 155 other Mark Girls who roam the dormitories and sorority houses, selling Mark beauty products and fashion accessories for a commission in the range of 20 to 50 percent.

“It’s really a grass-roots kind of thing, hitting the dorms, sororities, Facebook,” said Ms. Mangum, who uses her share of the profit, about $800 a month, to help settle her student loans. “I even rented space at local high school fairs — with 16- and 17-year-olds, you can move a lot of lip gloss,” said Ms. Mangum, whose major is marketing.

She is one of more than 40,000 Mark Girls in North America, mainly 18- to 24-year-old women who are changing the nature of direct sales by using the brand’s personalized e-boutiques, iPhone app and new Facebook e-shop, one of the beauty industry’s first forays into Facebook e-commerce.

“We’ve taken the same DNA of direct selling that has always been a part of Avon’s history and applied it to the digital world for our Mark reps to reach their customers,” said Claudia Poccia, president of Mark at Avon, which introduced the brand in 2003. “Now, we’re offering our Mark reps the opportunity to sell products not just door to door, but on Facebook, wall to wall.”

The Mark brand is evolving. It has its own spokeswoman, Lauren Conrad, the former reality TV star of “The Hills,” now a fashion designer and best-selling author of “L.A. Candy.” Its Facebook fan page has over 84,000 fans. According to estimates from Stifel Nicolaus, an investment bank, Mark’s revenue last year was about $70 million.

Unlike other companies involved in direct sales — including Amway, which may dedicate a product line or two to a more youth-oriented market, or Mary Kay and Avon, whose products are geared toward middle-aged women — Mark focuses almost exclusively on teenagers and women under 30.

The younger demographic, at least concerning sales representatives, has its drawbacks. “The fact that the reps are younger can mean different rules apply as to how a direct-selling company is going to have to manage them,” said Linda Bolton Weiser, a managing director of consumer equity research at Caris & Company, an investment bank. “There could be questions about volume limits and credit — a younger rep may be cut off earlier. And, if a rep is under 18, obviously you would need parental permission.”

Still, Mark’s motto — “Make your mark” — seems to resonate with its zealous representatives.

But can Tweets and news feeds from Mark Girls compete with over a century of Avon Ladies’ experience?

Because of the difference in how the products are branded and the separation between Avon and Mark representatives (those selling Avon can also sell Mark products, but not the other way around), there is some internal competition among representatives.

On the mark.girl discussion board on Facebook, the Mark-versus-Avon topic sparked a lively debate when one Mark representative wrote: “Has anybody else noticed Avon reps not taking the Mark product seriously?” An Avon representative replied: “A lot of Avon women I know don’t push Mark because it has a lower profit as compared to the Avon core product line.”

Some experts in the beauty business are fans of Mark. “It really helps that Mark has such low price points,” said Elaine D’Farley, beauty director of Self magazine. “Visually, it’s fun. The products hit the trend.”

Indeed, products such as the magnetic refillable color palette compact ($4) and Hook Ups (about $10) — two-ended cosmetic dispensers that can be customized to connect, for example, lip gloss and lip pencil, eyeliner and mascara — are so popular, as one Mark representative said, that “they’re impossible to keep in my purse.”

But some products have been criticized online, where a bad review may resonate more negatively than an item quietly returned to a store. On the Mark Web site, one reviewer said that a cheek tint left “zero shimmer on my cheek but plenty on my hands.” And on Makeupalley, a forum for comments on beauty products, a reviewer complained about Mark’s Good Riddance: “I have under eye circles and it didn’t even come close to covering them.”  Read Rest of Article

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From Business Week (original article)

How Much Are Twitter’s Tweets Really Worth?

Google and Microsoft are paying millions for tweets, but even they can’t tell whether their deals will pay off

By Spencer E. Ante

Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) are paying Twitter $25 million to crawl the short posts, or tweets, that users send out on the micro-blogging service. It sounds like big money. Enough for Twitter to turn a small profit in 2009, say two people familiar with the company’s finances.

But do the math and the payments look less impressive. Last year, Twitter’s 50 million users posted 8 billion tweets, according to research firm Synopsos, which means Google and Microsoft are paying roughly 3¢ for every 1,000 tweets. That’s a pittance in the world of online advertising. Top media sites often get $10 or $20 per thousand page views; even remnant inventory, leftover Web pages that get sold through ad networks, goes for 50¢ to $1 per thousand. The deals put “almost no value” on Twitter’s data, says Donnovan Andrews, vice-president of strategic development for the digital marketing agency Tribal Fusion.

Truth is, no one has figured out how to make real money off of tweets yet. Google and Microsoft are paying $15 million and $10 million, respectively, as a bet on the future. By laying out what are relatively tiny sums, they get first crack at experimenting with Twitter data. Both are already including tweets in search results. Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center, predicts the company will end up profiting. “Many times in history when you amass the attention of users, that has proven to be a moneymaking endeavor,” he says.

Location Data Could Help

A few entrepreneurs are showing ways to advertise via Twitter. Sean Rad, chief executive of Beverly Hills-based ad network Ad.ly, has signed up 20,000 Twitter users who get paid for placing ads in their tweets. To determine the size of the payments, the startup has developed algorithms that measure a person’s influence. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian, with almost 3 million followers, gets $10,000 per tweet, while business blogger Guy Kawasaki fetches $900 per tweet to his 200,000 fans.

For Google and Microsoft, the real payoff may come from tying tweets to local information about products. Twitter is building software that will automatically allow users to add location data to every tweet. Armed with user locations, Microsoft and Google could sell more targeted ads and provide more relevant search results. “That is potentially very useful,” says Microsoft’s Suchter.

Google isn’t focused on making money from its Twitter deal in the near term. Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, says Twitter’s data are necessary so that people who use its search engine get more complete information. “I never think about dollars and cents,” he says. “My job is to run the best search service.”

Twitter and its venture backers, however, need to see the deals pay off. The three-year-old company has said it hopes to go public someday, but it needs a viable business model to live up to its latest $1 billion valuation. It’ll take a long time to get there at 3¢ per thousand tweets.

Endeavour Marketing and Media

Can Facebook, Capitol Hill be friends? Lawmakers learn social networking.

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Inside the headquarters of the National Republican Congressional Committee, 25-year-old Adam Conner — registered Facebook lobbyist, poster of multiple Obama attaboys and a guy whose Facebook photo is a grizzly bear wielding two chain saws — sits to teach a course. The subject: How to use Facebook better. His student: Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.).

“If we’re going to improve our presence on Facebook and really maximize it, what would you recommend as tangible steps?” Roskam asks, thumbing his BlackBerry.

“It looks like you’re very comfortable with your BlackBerry,” Conner replies earnestly. “Maybe commit to a status message a day? A photo a week? Dive deeper. You’ll be surprised at how things that seem routine to you as a congressman are so interesting and cool to constituents.”

Conner is Facebook’s evangelist in Washington, a social-networking pro summoned by elected officials and bureaucrats alike to teach them, free of charge, how to leverage Facebook — within strict government rules and security guidelines. The mere existence of Conner’s hand-holding lessons illustrates the cultural gulf between Washington and Silicon Valley, and spotlights the complex web of congressional rules that limit social networking among federal workers.

Read Rest of Article from The Washington Post

From Nathaniel Perez for Fast Company (original article)

While brands still try hard to “crack the Social Media code,” most seem to understand consumers no longer find the prospect of being friends with a brand more engaging than the single click it took to fan the brand page on Facebook. After all, what’s so novel about the thought of a friendship with my butter? Precisely, nothing.

The impact of social media at the heart of new media is shaking up how brands think of experience design and what consumers expect from brand experiences.

Let’s talk digital sociology. I’ll quote three impactful points of view from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. In his series called “The machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the politics of Authenticity,” he describes the following (which I’ve roughly transcribed):

• “Media defines us while we define media.”
• “We’ve shifted from media to mediated relationships.”
• “Connections were the constraint, we now have connections without constraint.”

How can these statements help us understand how to be better at building brand through social media and digital experiences in general? Here’s a set of guiding principles to help you get beyond tactical earned media generation and enable you to create richer and more successful “social movements” around brands.

• You can shape the outcome, but can’t prescribe it. Leave predictable outcomes behind. Successful social experiences all have one thing in common: They relinquish control. Bring your consumers closer to action and let them take over. When insights are scarce, leverage the good old reward method to get them to play, then watch them play. If your brand has risk and readiness constraints, consumer control is not a pipe dream. Make it a priority.
• From Communication to Connectivity. Your brand should no longer think of itself as an authority (even if it is one), but rather a facilitator or enabler. Its role is no longer to broadcast, but to connect. Understanding brand connectivity requires more than just digital listening and influence identification. Moving beyond single degree measures is crucial.  Examining passions and motives within dynamic behavioral contexts is essential. Digital discovery (or anthropology) can help uncover motive “in action”. Social media is an unbound source of insights, allowing limitless exploration of digital personas and their behavior. Your brand can engage and build connectivity through behavioral contexts it can associate with.
• Create mediated experiences. Focus on understanding the potential impact of various media interactions against consumer motives and apply that understanding to your experience strategy. Leverage YouTube as more than an outlet for brand video and search traffic. Instead, study how video sharing can promote the quality of the engagement and motives you seek to trigger. As you plan your experience, don’t limit yourself… Define the media while giving it the opportunity to define you. Create experiences that are engaging but unconfined. Experiences that impose less constraint (or more connection) lead to a greater ability to mine insights from engagement. Branded widgets and social network applications can surely help amplify brand messaging but are really little more than evolved direct media. UGC campaigns with very prescriptive requests cannot allow you to measure much more than response rates.
• Listen to your experiences. Leverage digital listening to clearly understand how the media has shaped you. Extend your discovery efforts against your conversation to understand patterns of behavior, motives of engagement, audiences and other measures of how your brand is or can be more connective. Measure impact beyond response and conversion by putting your data to work across all sources to truly understand consumer behavior against key business metrics, both offline and online.
• Keep Shaping & Being Shaped. Whether looking to sustain successful initiatives or creating new ones, brands need to understand how to play in a fully dynamic context. Focus too much on the media itself and your efforts won’t scale. Instead, focus on measuring and extending your “connectivity” step by step, creating a well balanced insights & experience machine.

While butter brands of the world now have their work cut out for them, I’m hoping they’ll leverage Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or their own media as mere interaction vehicles while devoting their attention to understanding the essence of consumer engagement within the media. Only then can they design experiences that shape conversation, to then understand how those conversations have shaped their brand.

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro TN Advertising Agency

From the L.A. Times:

This year was certainly significant in the world of online social media. Facebook surpassed 350 million users — more than the U.S. population — and Twitter’s short blogging service skyrocketed in popularity, led by celebs, tech lovers and top companies.

Here’s a look back at 2009’s biggest events in which social media played a major role.

10. “Word of Web.” As people spent more time chatting online and in public spaces like Twitter, buzz surrounding product and entertainment releases became instantly quantifiable. The elusive word-of-mouth promotion could now be measured, and “word of Web” became that new currency. (Marketers love to use the word “viral.”)

The movie “District 9″ played the game rather well. The low-budget sci-fi flick started the buzz train early with cryptic alien decals around major cities before its release. Despite relatively low advertising spending, the movie did extremely well. The fact that it was actually a good film certainly didn’t hurt.

9. Whopper Sacrifice. Facebook was quick to kill this marketing ploy, but Burger King had a picnic with this one. The Whopper Sacrifice game asked Facebook users to delete 10 friends in exchange for a free burger. In just a couple of weeks, 233,906 friends were dropped like a bad habit.

It proved to be a hilariously successful way to promote a brand that seemed to get only more controversial and creepy over the course of the year.

8. Google Wave. In Gmail-like fashion, the exclusive nature of Google’s newest product (people vied for a limited number of invitations from friends) made it the must-have free service of 2009. Of course, once people finally got hold of Wave, their lust died down.

The interface is still pretty confusing, and the team continues to struggle with growing pains in its mission to create a stable collaboration platform. However, it packs some intriguing technologies that could very well transform journalism in addition to a number of industries. But right now, e-mail replacement it is not.

7. Twitter and Facebook under hack attack. Just when it seemed like Twitter had finally outgrown its glitches and constant bandwidth overload at the beginning of the year, summertime rolled around and, poof!, Twitter was down. And Facebook. And LiveJournal. And YouTube. What’s going on?

It was the first major malicious attack that successfully targeted a number of massive social sites. It wouldn’t be the last. A source at Twitter tells us the denial-of-service attacks had been going on for months, and they were also aimed at Facebook, which was seeing increased downtime too.

In addition to the site-aimed missiles, users were increasingly targeted for phishing scams. They were showing up in practically everyone’s Facebook inbox and Twitter direct message list.

As Microsoft knows all too well with its Windows platform, along with majority market share comes an army of bad guys.

Read Rest of Article from the L.A. Times

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The latest Facebook breakthrough is coming not from a software developer but from an agency.

Resource Interactive, an Ohio-based digital agency with offices in Columbus and Cincinnati, this month launched “Off the Wall,” a platform that allows consumers to purchase a product directly from a retailer’s wall or their own feed on Facebook without leaving the popular social-networking site.

The product was developed by the agency’s in-house research and development lab, which keeps the company up to speed on new developments in the digital space, while also coming up with prototypes and concepts for a “digital future.”

“We needed a group of people that could take the time and have the focus to look out a little bit ahead,” said Dan Shust, director-emerging media, who heads up the 18-month-old group. “We get caught up in project work occurring right now.”

As marketers look to reign in costs in a tough economy, agencies have felt the squeeze, so ad shops are looking to new revenue streams from product development that have included everything from clothing to widgets to books.

Mr. Shust said he believes product development will become a bigger piece of what the agency does. He said Resource Interactive has determined it made more sense to begin building its own platforms and products that could be used by both clients and others, rather than building customized solutions from the ground up for each client or project.

Opening its products up to non-clients is proving beneficial for the agency, which is adding new clients as a result and has received some interest from international agencies looking to become the exclusive provider of Off the Wall in other countries.

Read Remainder of Article

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