Articles about Social Media

Microsoft loves its MVPs -- most valued professionals -- and for good reasons. The company sells few products direct, relying instead on the skills of third-parties to promote and service solutions. MVPs receive special status and act, among other things, as crucial evangelists.

In case you missed it (I did being on vacation August 2), Microsoft is holding a contest for its MVPs through October 3. They submit "video tips" for which they can receive ongoing drawings for Microsoft points or grand prize, which varies by country. For example: Samsung Series 5 laptop in Canada and Dell Vostro in the United States.

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I am totally tanked about Google+ offering custom URLs, which product manager Saurabh Sharma announced a week ago. For anyone looking to establish any kind of brand via the social network, custom URLs that look like this (https://plus.google.com/+joewilcox/posts) are more desirable than ones like this (https://plus.google.com/u/0/114738075629051960079/posts). Some people with verified accounts (I have one) are custom URL already (not my account). The change intrinsically increases Google+'s value compared to, say, Facebook, which already offers vanity names.

Something else: Custom URLs may finally end the debate about Google+ popularity. There are ongoing blogs and news stories claiming the social network is a ghost town. That's not my experience. Critics claim there simply isn't enough public activity, while defenders say the amount of private Circling isn't easily measurable and makes activity seem much less than it actually is. I see the situation like this: If custom URLs are as valuable as I contend -- and they surely have proven to be elsewhere -- demand for them will show how little or how much Google+ matters across the social media landscape and whether it's a city building or ghost town making.

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A new tech startup that produces facial recognition camera systems tied to Facebook tagged photos, plans to offer the technology to more traditional physical stores so they could offer you appropriate deals as you enter their business. That’s great for stores that want to have more targeted information about you, based on a bit of your history and likes. But what about privacy, what are the implications?

For now, you are not included in this scheme unless you opt in via Facebook to a third party service. The service would then present tailored deals to your mobile device when you enter an establishment using the technology (currently being tested in Tennessee). Facedeals, the provider, says this simply bolsters and leverages check-ins so that local businesses have more personal information, and by knowing and targeting the products they offer you based on your likes and preferences they can seem more relevant, like discounted or free drinks for using the service at a bar & grill.

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Long-running photography management site Photobucket on Thursday unveiled the beta version of its redesigned user experience, which gives the service more competitive footing against the Web's dominant --some would even say default-- photo-sharing site, Facebook.

How could it possibly compete with Facebook? Well, that's the thing. Photobucket obviously understands that it would be silly to even try to compete. So if you can't compete with Facebook, you hook your service into Facebook and add bonus features.

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At 17, I hitchhiked with a friend from Maine to Boston, where was the regional Federal Communications Commission office. The agency heavily regulated radio, and I couldn't be a deejay without obtaining a Third Class license, which required a test and some math skills (yeah, just to spin vinyl). I flunked and thumbed rides a second time, passing the exam and getting a five-year license. My radio career started at college station WMEB.

Much has changed about music since the late 1970s, when punkers rebelled against their disco-loving Baby Boomer siblings. But surprisingly much is the same, too -- or so Nielsen's "Music 360" report reveals. Radio doesn't dominate music discovery like it once did (I partly blame canned broadcasts for taking the personality out of the airwaves), yet remains top source: 48 percent of people find out about new music from radio. Friend recommendations is distant second (10 percent) followed by YouTube (7 percent).

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In a highly logical collision of functionality, enterprise social media management platform HootSuite on Tuesday announced support for Microsoft's enterprise social network Yammer had been added via a new App in the HootSuite App Directory.

With the Yammer app installed, HootSuite users can view and participate in conversations, interact with groups, Like or reply to updates, and view or add attachments directly from the HootSuite dashboard.

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Social media analytics company Simply Measured released a study this week that illustrates the importance of brand presence on Facebook's photo-sharing social network Instagram. According to the survey, the nearly two- year old social network, with its 80 million users, has managed to attract the attention of 40 percent of the top 100 global brands.

Instagram’s adoption accounts for 40 percent of the Interbrand 100, which is actually the lowest in the study, but it has the most impressive adoption rate, when considering the background of the company. Instagram is currently owned by Facebook, through a $1 billion deal announced 4 months ago. The reason why a billion dollars was significant was because Instagram only had a dozen or so employees, and hadn’t generated any revenue.

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Although online gambling is essentially illegal in most US states, in the UK it’s both very popular and well-regulated. Facebook has been in discussion with a number of UK-based operators about introducing real-money games to the social network since last summer, and the first of what will likely become a deluge of gambling apps has finally arrived on the site. The new game, from UK-based Gamesys, is called Bingo and Slots Friendzy and will allow British users aged 18 and over (and in possession of a credit card) to play for real cash prizes while chatting with friends. As is the case with most online gambling games in the UK, this one comes with a big cash incentive for new players. Deposit £10 to get £30 to wager.

Commenting on the launch, Facebook’s Head of EMEA Gaming Partnerships, Julien Codorniou, said, "People love playing new types of games with their friends on Facebook and real money gaming is a popular leisure activity in the UK. We’re delighted to be working with Gamesys to enable them to offer their games on Facebook so that people can enjoy playing more games with their friends."

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If there is one thing that’s typical of Twitter, it's the long, long, long list of tweets that shows each of your Twitter friends' er…tweets. Slices for Twitter by OneLouder Apps is designed to make your Twitter experience better by adding "Twitter Content Discovery." Simply put, it provides improved functionality over the official Twitter app.

Slices for Twitter comes with five major features: Twitter Directory, Live Events, Timeline Slicer, Bookmarks and Mobile-to-Web.

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If you still have a MySpace you likely fit into one of three groups: You forgot to formally delete your account; you are trying to advertise your small-time band to a couple dozen hardcore leftover users; you log into MySpace right after you finish signing into AOL Desktop merely as a matter of old habit.

But I'm not interested in singling out those still using the service, as the droves of users who have dumped the website outright far outnumber the faithful by now. I'm outlining something I'd call the "MySpace Effect".

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Yammer, the social network and messaging platform designed to be used within companies, announced on Thursday that Kanjoya's Crane sentiment analytics dashboard now integrates with Yammer, letting managers watch their employees' morale, attitudes, and reactions to procedural changes based upon their Yammer posts.

Crane correlates emotional "profiles" with behavior on the social network, and presents employee sentiment in various ways. Instead of trending topics, Crane shows Yammer's "trending emotions," Instead of finding the most popular and influential people, Crane shows whose posts on Yammer have the biggest emotional impact. It is similar to many content analysis engines, but it is tuned specifically to isolate emotional reactions.

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Tucked away in Facebook’s company filings published this week, was an interesting snippet of information. Although the social network had 955 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as of June 30, 2012, an increase of 29 percent from this time last year, some 8.7 percent of that figure – around 83 million users - were identified by Facebook as likely to have come from fake sources.

The number of people actively using the service is calculated using internal company metrics based on the activity of user accounts, and Facebook has determined that roughly 4.8 percent of its MAUs may have originated from duplicate accounts, with a further 2.4 percent coming from user-misclassified accounts (that is personal profiles created instead of pages for businesses or "non-human entities," like pets), and 1.5 percent from undesirable accounts (those created by spammers, for example).

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Change doesn’t happen overnight at Microsoft, but when the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation simply announced the new Outlook mail service yesterday, it was a big surprise. But surprise attacks can prove advantageous, and six hours after the Outlook team announced the service via Twitter, a million people had signed up for it.

What You Get

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The controversy over the suspension of a Twitter account belonging to a journalist critical of NBC's Olympics coverage deepened Tuesday. UK daily The Telegraph reports that NBC officials say Twitter alerted the network first about The Independent correspondent's tweets, which Twitter later confirmed.

Twitter's move will likely upset those already complaining that Twitter's actions were an affront to free speech even more: the social network actually informed NBC's social media department how to use its complaint system, which resulted in the suspension.

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Today, Microsoft unveiled the latest incarnation of its popular Hotmail service, and as well as a new look it’s been given a new name, although it’s one that everyone in the business world will be intimately familiar with -- Outlook.

This rebranding is a huge step for Microsoft and signals the death of Windows Live, which never really caught on in the way the company would have liked.

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