Tag Archive for 'social-networks'

Social Network Evolution – Twitter Lists

03
Nov
09

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By luis FREITAS [FullSIX Portugal]
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In previous articles we studied the evolution of the Internet Society.  Our theory is that an internet tool, when it first appears, is like the cast of a TV show; its personality isn’t very well defined at first.  But as time goes by and viewers start watching the show, the characters’ personalities take on new proportions (have you ever compared the first episodes of Friends to the final ones? Joey undergoes a constant ‘dumbing down’ process as the series progresses.)

As more users watch what’s happening on Twitter, it’s character is taking on new proportions.  For example, Twitter has recently released a feature in which you can follow lists. Sure, this is something avid users have been wanting for a while and is indeed a valuable add-on, but what’s most revealing is how this small functionality basically defines a little better what Twitter is exactly for – Twitter as an aggregator of links related to common interests for a user (a.k.a. the Internet Yellow Pages).

Lists basically allow a user to gather their followed users into, well lists. These lists can be followed individually or you can add all the users to the regular timeline as you always had on Twitter. But the most interesting thing is that you can share your lists and a user can choose to follow the exact same list. It means you are no longer following a person – you are following a theme or a topic. Which leads us to the point – what if users stop following other users because they have relevant content and start following a list where what matters is what the list as a whole broadcasts and not the individual valor of the broadcaster himself? Twitter becoming less a “What are you doing?” and more a “What is your group doing?”. You can probably still measure the interest rating of a user by his following/followers ratio, but now you have a new metric – how many list are you part of? What are those lists about? Why are you part of the list? And are you an active member of the list or are you there for aggregation purposes?

Sure, Twitter lists are useful. But what strikes us as an interesting study is the shift from the human islands of Twitterland to Content Continents built by the content the users generate. After all, we live in a Content Society.  And in this realm, Twitter just took one more step from plain generalist micro-blogging into a fully defined Social Network that can be set completely apart from all the others by focusing not on apps, photos or moods, but by content sharing in its purest form.

Social Shopping

22
Sep
09

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By luis FREITAS [FullSIX Portugal]
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Alvenda Inc., a Minneapolis-based startup, has innovated the e-commerce scenario by creating Banner Based Stores, display advertising materials that pose as a online store for their clients — an innovative and definitely different approach towards e-commerce as it allows a store to be where the consumers are instead of trying to drag them into their website which has to be done by gaining their confidence, getting them to visit you and having a really good product.

So now they’ve decided to go one step forward by developing fully functioning retail stores in Facebook. Facebook already has a currency that is used to buy virtual gifts and is slowly evolving into a semi-Pay Pal system that allows more complex offline shopping to occur – but the fact is that in order for the e-commerce capabilities of Facebook to evolve, companies have to find a way to play with all the capabilities Facebook has to offer at the moment and build up a proper E-Commerce strategy with real added value for the Facebook-using consumer. This has to be done, of course, taking into account the nature of Social Media and the seriousness (or lack of) that it has in the eyes of the consumer.

And in comes a rather recent concept – Social Shopping. Shopping is by nature a social act. Shopping online always had a few issues – the fact that you can’t see the actual product (not solvable) and the fact that you can’t exactly take your friends or family to help you choose. So Alvenda is bringing a solution to this second fact by bringing the shop to where the consumers are and, if they properly use the tools Facebook has, they will enable users to share their shopping or wishlists with other users directly on Facebook.

The sheer potential of the Social Shopping is still far from explored. While brands can look at this with some skepticism, marketers should to be able to design a strategy that, if necessary, can look into a first dwelling in Social Shopping. A very basic and test-oriented dwelling, of course. Like in any new tool, the first approach should be cautious but not too basic.

Let’s see how Alvenda’s approach to Social Shopping works out. We do not expect massive results at first and we know that some cards might be playing against them – not many users consider Facebook as a Shopping Mall and still look at it more as a toy than a serious website. But take this into account – the nature that the Social Network is acquiring goes beyond a profile page and more into the building of an online persona where more users each day invest more time. Not only this, but more brands and companies are building microsites for promotions inside Facebook. So the odds for Alvenda’s are pretty good – let’s see what happens…

Developing Your Social Media Strategy #1: The Basics

07
Apr
09

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By olivier PEYRE [FullSIX USA]
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Creating “buzz” around your product, business or event is the demand from clients to all social media marketing strategists. The common question is, can you take or produce a piece of content and make it go viral?” Can you wave your social media marketing wand and make everyone want to read it? Can you also use the same trickery and create traffic for our website?

For many, these practices are this magical event that must be forced upon the viewer or reader so that everyone will talk about “their thing.” However, buzz isn’t an event, but a reaction to a process. That process doesn’t start with a video on YouTube, but with a marketing strategy that encompasses social media and word-of-mouth marketing both online and offline.

Social Media Explorer highlights a few tactics to get you started when you begin to consider developing your social media strategy:

  • Monitor What’s Being Said
  • Create Content That You’ll Give Away
  • Fish Where The Fish Are At
  • Engage in Conversation
  • Track and Analyze the Results

    • Read full post at Social Media Explorer

    Attack of the Parasitic Ad Network

    09
    Dec
    08

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    By zack SULTAN [FullSIX USA]
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    The Thieving Magpie

    A new German company is offering innovative ways to buy and sell public discourse.

    Cuddly sounding Magpie & Friends Ltd. will pay Twitter users to insert targeted ads among their regularly scheduled micro-blog dispatches. The ads are punched in automatically, and use text straight from the advertiser. Hence, a Twitterer’s musings on consumer technologies might be punctuated with, oh, let’s say, “I <3 Bic Coosh headphones!” Participants, naturally, get more cash based on the size of their audience and their rate of posting.

    How much are we talking about? Not a lot. An advertiser might pay as little as a few cents per sponsored tweet, to as much as around ten bucks to co-opt a highly prolific and well trafficked Twitterer.

    What is distressing and fascinating here goes beyond a conventional diatribe about treating what is supposed to be an outlet for genuine social interaction as a hyper-capitalist meat market. That’s no good, but it’s hardly unique. The singularity of Magpie is the way in which it functions as a parasite that, if it’s successful, may actually kill its host.

    The only thing Twitter really has going for it is its earnestness — it presents itself as a surrogate for real conversation. As soon as it becomes clear that surreptitious manipulations are infiltrating its discourse, it loses its one social function. As such, Magpie’s attempts to cash in on it could drive enough people away to topple both endeavors.

    As companies search for new ways to wring money from the internet, one can easily imagine a swarming of similarly short-sighted, parasitic “ad networks” attaching themselves to popular social networking applications, utterly ruining them in the process.

    I think we’d be well advised to steer clear of these manipulative and potentially destructive practices.

    Pointless, but so cute!

    27
    Oct
    08

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    By jonathan HOFFMAN [FullSIX NY]
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    Just as we had posted about the about of V2 of the Facebook App, A Mixi application has been created as well. Is it as good as Facebook’s? Well no, it’s not. It’s actually rather pointless. It basically has 3 functions:

    - See who has viewed your profile
    - Upload a photo
    - Check the postings/events that are going on in groups/communities.

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    If you click anything it automatically launches Safari, then asks you to login to your myMixi homepage. You are actually better off not using this application and just logging into the site, because you have to do that anyway to even use anything!

    Overall it’s great that Mixi made this application, but to actually be useful it needs a lot more features to be added.

    Reading: Digital vs. Print, Kids vs. Parents

    15
    Aug
    08

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    By olivier PEYRE [FullSIX USA]
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    The first in a series of articles by the NY Times that will look at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read:

    Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

    As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

    But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

    Don’t miss the graphic that details the skills required to read online:
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    #: Is your brand ready to stream itself?

    29
    Jul
    08

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    By olivier PEYRE [FullSIX USA]
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    UPDATE: On August 15, 2008 The Trendwatch received a cease and desist letter from the lawyers of a company named Fricken, which states that Fricken owns a trademark for the term ‘brandstream’ so that neither The Trendwatch nor Fullsix are allowed to use that term. I’ve edited the post accordingly.

    According to a Universal McCann report, content consumed outside of websites has increased by 153% in the last 9 months. Furthermore, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site (using widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices). A pretty good example is Ford’s Digital Snippets: YouTube videos, images from Flickr, extensive usage of tags, RSS…

    Just by looking at what’s happening in our (new gorgeous) Fullsix office in New York, we’re helping four of our biggest clients to dive into this. And most of the other ones are convinced that they should develop their own content outside of their brand site. So based on this very unscientific poll, I would say that YES, brands are ready!

    Virality 101

    10
    Apr
    08

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    By luis FREITAS [FullSIX Portugal]
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    Virality 101

    Virality is one of those big words used so much nowadays that it’s almost blaze. Clients demand it, marketers sought it, but it doesn’t have an effective study done to show how to obtain it. Of course there is some randomness to it – but it also involves some background and context.

    Virality can be obtained via the following formula: Continue reading ‘Virality 101′

    I heart “we heart it”

    09
    Apr
    08

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    By olivier PEYRE [FullSIX USA]
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    Remember my desperate cry for help to get an invite for FFFFOUND? Well, I never got one but it doesn’t really matter. Now I can play with We Heart It.

    It’s pretty much the same concept, a social bookmarking tool for images and videos, except that it’s open to everyone. Great inspiration igniter for designers.

    But can the 2 sites co-exist or will only one survive the design bookmarking war? Will the invite-only kill FFFFOUND or will it do the opposite, re-enforce the quality of the shared items while We Heart It becomes too mass-market to be considered by the design industry people?

    If it’s important, it will find me

    28
    Mar
    08

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    By olivier PEYRE [FullSIX USA]
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    That’s, in essence, how the “social media generation” deals with with political news and news in a broader sense. For the first time, social networks and blogs are playing a major role in a presidential campaign in the USA. Facebook, myspace, most of the web 2.0 sites that we use today didn’t exist 4 years ago, during the precedent elections, or with a limited audience.

    But as of February 2008, they respectively have 8.6, 17.7 millions average daily visitors.

    According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

    “There are lots of times where I’ll read an interesting story online and send the U.R.L. to 10 friends,” said Lauren Wolfe, 25, the president of College Democrats of America. “I’d rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story.”

    Go check out the New York Times article for more details.

    Sorry for the almost unrelated Easter photo.

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    The TrendWatch:


    The TrendWatch is the collective postings of some of the FullSIX Group’s designers, strategists, and consultants on new media and marketing trends. It is meant to be an impromptu think-tank, and is a way for us to share theories and beliefs about how we think communication and connectivity is evolving.

    We work for The FullSIX Group; a leading full service marketing agency with digital DNA. From our 15 international offices with over 600 employees, we constantly embrace and encourage innovation to make integrated marketing and communication campaigns that are more accountable and efficient for our clients.

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