Monthly Archives: June 2010

6 posts

HootSuite Releases HootSuite5 Social Media Dashboard

News

Today HootSuite releases a significant update to the popular social media dashboard, including a complete interface refresh and features utilizing new HTML5 technology standards. Notable changes include multiple design themes, improvements to Facebook media publishing, and language localization.

With the recent announcement of Google’s HTML5 site and many other brands including Apple on-board, HootSuite has made a substantial investment in this new technology standard. Using HTML5 allows HootSuite to release unique features for a rapidly growing customer base.

The release continues HootSuite’s mission to make social media outreach easy and efficient for a worldwide customer base which includes governments, publishers, enterprises, start-ups and power users.

HootSuite5 with HTML5

Using HTML5, HootSuite engineers added geo-specific search option, allowing users to retrieve messages posted near their physical location. This tool will be a boon for Twitter users eager to shop locally, community groups seeking volunteers, and companies reaching out to new clients in their business area, plus myriad other scenarios. Further, HTML5 enabled significant performance improvements resulting in quicker load times for columns and tabs for an even more responsive user experience.

Analytics in Dashboard

HootSuite has tightly integrated Google Analytics, adding in-dashboard views to track conversions, goals and traffic patterns. This new feature, coupled with HootSuite’s existing custom URL parameter tool, lets marketers achieve deep research without switching sites.

More Tools

Other new tools to help broadcast messages, monitor conversations, and track results include:

Interface Re-design and Themes – A new interface lets users access more information at once. Users may now select design themes, including a refreshed version of the classic blue and green design, plus two new choices: Blue Steel and Magnum

Facebook Media Preview – Add a photo thumbnail, title and description when posting links to Facebook profiles or pages — a highly requested feature from the Feedback channel

‘Twitter Native’ ReTweets – Choose between traditional manual RT-style to quote an update, or the newer “Twitter native” style of automatically rebroadcasting the message

File Drag and Drop – Attach an image or other file easily using Chrome 5, Firefox 3.6 and Safari 5 browsers Just drag from the desktop and drop into the message box to upload with a pre-shortened link

Language Localization – Already available for the iPhone version, language localization lets users view HootSuite in their preferred language, starting with Japanese; more linguistic choices to come

Keyboard Shortcuts – Clicking Shift+Enter on the keyboard now sends the update, saving mouse-clicks and time another user-requested feature

Handier Help – The refreshed interface improves access to the trove of tutorials and answers at the Help Desk, as well as the Feedback channel for feature requests

Resources

Release blog post — more info about the release and features: http://blog.hootsuite.com/hootsuite-html-5/

Media Kit company descriptions, logos, executive bios and media contact info: http://blog.hootsuite.com/media

Social bookmarks media and blog articles referencing HootSuite: http://delicious.com/hootsuite

HTML5 Info

Google: http://www.html5rocks.com/

Apple: http://www.apple.com/html5/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5

Buddy Media Introduces Enterprise Facebook Management Tool

Buddy Media, the leading Facebook Management System for the world’s largest brands and agencies, today introduced Buddy Media Platform +GLOBAL, a new add-on to the Buddy Media Platform. +GLOBAL is the first geo-targeted Facebook page management system that empowers global marketers to maintain a single, unified Facebook presence across multiple countries and languages.

Of the nearly 500 million consumers that log on to Facebook each month, only 25 percent live in the United States, making Facebook the largest and fastest-growing two-way communication platform in the world. This means that brands that don’t offer a global solution on Facebook are ignoring up to 75 percent of their customers.

According to a new study commissioned by Buddy Media, brand managers (51%) say it’s very important to manage local, customized content so it is consistent and organized and nearly all respondents said it can be challenging to reach customers in local markets (93%). Among the most prominent issues are cost (88%), tracking ROI, finding the appropriate channels and leveraging social media. (1)

“By serving everyone who ‘likes’ a brand across the globe using a single customizable platform, our +GLOBAL add-on gets everyone on the same page ? literally,” said Michael Lazerow, CEO and Founder of Buddy Media. “This solves many of the local branding dilemmas companies encounter with social marketing ? cost, scale, disjointed pages, segmented audiences, inconsistent design and incomplete analytics.”

Before Buddy Media Platform +GLOBAL, brands that maintained a Facebook presence across multiple countries had been challenged with trying to manage a loose network of fragmented and disjointed brand pages that looked different and had segmented audiences. This fragmentation made it expensive and impossible to aggregate and analyze engagement activity, all of which was pulled from multiple, ‘siloed’ sources.

Now, Buddy Media has introduced a timely, cost effective and simple management tool that offers several distinctive benefits to global brands:

Significant Cost savings: +GLOBAL streamlines the development of multiple pages and reduces the need for one-off, custom development projects. Initial Buddy Media clients report that +GLOBAL eliminates 80 percent of the costs of deploying global Facebook presences.

Geo-Targeting: +GLOBAL serves Facebook content based on user country and language settings.

Unified Branding: +GLOBAL lets global marketing lock down unified brand assets, while providing local market representatives the ability to customize content, promotions and social applets.

Reduced Time to Market: +GLOBAL licensees can launch a global Facebook presence in less than four weeks, a fraction of the time it currently takes for a global brand to launch even one page.

Improved Security: +GLOBAL empowers global brands to deploy and manage hundreds of Pages globally through a secure system without granting high-level Facebook Page admin rights to any one team or individual

Increased Control: +GLOBAL’s detailed permission provisioning allows global brands to empower local markets with the ability to customize and publish to Facebook Pages without ceding complete control to each market team

Powerful Business Insights: +GLOBAL’s unified CMO dashboard provides the marketing team with a full view into global Facebook activity – all accessible through a single comprehensive data package

More Effective Facebook Advertising: +GLOBAL provides a powerful enterprise Facebook management system that serves as the foundation for successful global Facebook advertising programs.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts is one of the first companies to implement +GLOBAL, serving customized language and content on its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Facebook page (www.facebook.com/SPG) to guests from Spain, Germany and China.

“For the first time, we’re able to deliver meaningful and targeted localized content across the globe at scale without any potential sacrifice to our global brand equity,” said David Godsman, VP, Global Web, Starwood Hotels and Resorts.

Following last year’s successful launch of Buddy Media Platform +AGENCY, which is now licensed by over 60 advertising, marketing and public relations agencies, Buddy Media has signed additional +GLOBAL licenses for client programs that will be launching in the weeks ahead. For more information about the Buddy Media Platform +GLOBAL, please visit http://pitch.pe/71656 or www.buddymedia.com.

About Buddy Media

The Buddy Media Platform is the leading Facebook management system for the world’s largest brands and agencies. With its scalable, secure architecture and straightforward administrative tools, the Buddy Media Platform revolutionizes the way brands connect with their current and future customers using the power of Facebook’s social connections. The Buddy Media Platform offers the only solution that allows brands to launch, maintain and measure their Facebook presence in any country and in any language. The Buddy Media Platform is the enterprise Facebook management system of choice for the largest brands in the world, including Anheuser Busch, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Starwood, Delta, Southwest Airlines, Samsung, L’Oreal, the National Hockey League and others. Based in New York, Buddy Media shares four investors with Facebook and was one of the first companies selected by Facebook as a preferred developer partner. The company is backed by Softbank Capital, European Founders Fund, Greycroft Partners, Facebook investor Ron Conway, Facebook board member Peter Thiel, Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Roger Ehrenberg, Howard Lindzon and others. For more information, visit www.buddymedia.com

Formspring.me Integrates MySpace and WordPress

News

Formspring, the social network that lets you connect with the people you care about through conversational Q&A, today announced integrations with MySpace and WordPress. As of today, Formspring users will be able to share their Formspring answers on both platforms. These new integrations add to already available Formspring integrations with Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and Tumblr.

Launched seven months ago, Formspring is already ranked the 63rd most visited website in the U.S. according to Quantcast. With 50 million unique visitors per month, Formspring’s users frequently share answers to their other social media and blog platforms. Currently, over 40 percent of Formspring’s 13 million registered users share answers on other sites, and with the option of MySpace and WordPress this number is expected to rise.
Formspring users with MySpace accounts will now be able to easily publish their Formspring answers to their MySpace profiles, and will also be able to find friends from MySpace on Formspring. WordPress users will now be able to automatically publish updates to their blogs and sites.

“These integrations with MySpace and WordPress will help us continue to build our rapidly growing global audience,” explained Formspring CEO and Co-founder, Ade Olonoh. “Even more importantly, bringing MySpace and WordPress into the fold lets our users have the ability to share their opinions and insights with their friends and followers through all of the top social media and blogging platforms.”

Tungle.me Named Official Scheduling Application for BlogWorld 2010

News

Tungle Corp., the company that makes scheduling meetings easy, has been named the official scheduling application of BlogWorld & New Media Expo, taking place October 14-16, 2010 in Las Vegas. The company also announced the release of its free WordPress and TypePad plug-ins for calendar publishing and integrated scheduling. WordPress and TypePad, with over 30 million blogs published on these platforms, have added Tungle.me to the widget selection, allowing users to integrate scheduling directly into their sites.

“I’ve saved a ton of time scheduling meetings since discovering Tungle.me,” said Scott Stratten, President of Un-Marketing and opening keynote speaker at BlogWorld 2010. “I’m psyched that I can add the Tungle.me plug in and publish my availability directly through my site, and accept or reject meeting requests without a time-wasting email exchange.”

WordPress and TypePad users with a Tungle.me account can now add the Tungle.me widget to their blogs. The widget embeds a mini Tungle.me page into the user’s blog or website, allowing visitors to click-to-expand and see availability, suggest times to meet, and send a meeting request—without leaving the site.

“With over 350,000 posts daily and 250 million plus blog visitors monthly; corporate and personal blogs are at the heart of business communication,” stated Marc Gingras, CEO and founder of Tungle. “The Tungle.me widget closes the asynchronous communication gap between bloggers and their audience to make meetings happen. Now bloggers can share their availability and book meetings, right alongside their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social widgets.”

As part of its initiative to support bloggers, Tungle has formed a partnership with BlogWorld. Through this partnership, conference attendees, speakers and exhibitors can select a personalized Tungle.me URL upon registration for the event. They can then customize their Tungle.me page and synchronize it with online calendars. Attendees can also choose to be added to the BlogWorld group in the Tungle.me directory, making it easier for them to schedule meetings with other attendees.

“At BlogWorld, it is as much about who you meet and the connections you make as it is about the content,” said Rick Calvert, CEO at BlogWorld & New Media Expo. “By partnering with Tungle, we are able to offer our attendees better service, enabling them to easily schedule meetings with each other onsite, as well as before and after the show.”

The free Tungle.me WordPress plug in can be found at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tungleme-official-widget/

The free Tungle.me TypePad widget can be found by logging into your Tungle account at http://www.tungle.me and clicking on Management, then Widget.

About Tungle
Tungle Corp.’s Tungle.me makes scheduling meetings easy–across organizations, calendar systems and time zones–by eliminating the multiple emails, phone calls and double bookings that typically come with finding a time to meet. Tungle.me synchronizes with leading online calendar systems including Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, and Lotus Notes, and does not require visitors to sign in or register to schedule meetings. Tungle.me supports scheduling meetings on-the-go with Tungle.me for iPhone and Tungle for Blackberry.

Founded in 2006, the Montreal-based company is venture-backed by investors Commonwealth Capital Ventures, JLA Ventures and Desjardins Venture Capital.

About BlogWorld & New Media Expo and Social Media Business Summit
BlogWorld & New Media Expo is the first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of new media including all forms of blogging, podcasting, social media, social networking, online video, music, Internet TV and radio. The BlogWorld conference features more than 120 educational sessions, panel discussions and keynote presentations, while the New Media Expo features the only industry-wide new media marketplace where thousands converge to network and find all of their online business and marketing resources. Running concurrent with the BlogWorld conference, the Social Media Business Summit is the world’s largest social media business conference where marketing executives, business owners and world-renowned companies send their teams to learn the strategies, tactics, tools and technologies they need to build their brands and grow their businesses with social media.

Additional information on BlogWorld & New Media Expo, including conference and registration details, is available at www.blogworldexpo.com

How Facebook Makes Lonely People Even Lonelier

In a compelling interview between Brian Vaszily, author and founder of the popular personal growth website IntenseExperiences.com, and Dr. John Cacioppo, Director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, Dr. Cacioppo reveals how Facebook and other social media tend to make lonely people even lonelier.

In the Loneliness Help interview, available to view in full on IntenseExperiences.com, Cacioppo notes that “what the research suggests is that lonely individuals tend to use social networking sites in a way that puts distance between themselves and others, whereas non-lonely people tend to use social networking sites in a way that reduces the distance.”

He explains that sites like Facebook are a “safe haven” for lonely people, who can tend to feel unwanted in live social situations. But, Cacioppo notes, “that’s a little bit like being hungry and eating celery, in that it feels good for a moment, but it’s not actually nutritious, it’s not satisfying the underlying need.”

In effect, social media sites like Facebook are making a bad situation worse when it comes to loneliness. In the interview with Brian Vaszily, which is available to view in full at http://www.intenseexperiences.com, Cacioppo explains how and why quality face-to-face contact with other people is so essential — and how the extreme lack of it that is so prevalent today leads to high stress, chronic disease and even early death. Making matters worse when it comes to loneliness, according to Cacioppo, is that people tend to view it — and stigmatize it — as a personal weakness, when it is really just “a cue, like hunger, thirst and pain, to change our behaviors.”

In the interview with Vaszily, Cacioppo also provides a variety of insights on what people can do if they are lonely. He says that, “Feeling lonely makes people want to … eat others as they meet them. And if you just kind of think about it, that’s not a very pleasant position for other people to be in. You are not going to build a strong reciprocal relationship where both gain something from it if you are trying to eat people alive.” Instead of trying to consume others out of this deep need for live social connection, he recommends reaching out to help others, such as by doing community service, as a powerful first step for anyone feeling trapped by loneliness.

The complete interview between Dr. John Cacioppo and Brian Vaszily, in which Cacioppo also explains why lonely people are treated like bacteria and how loneliness leads to high stress, chronic disease and premature death, can be viewed now at http://www.intenseexperiences.com/loneliness-help.html.

IntenseExperiences.com is one of the web’s most popular personal growth and wellness websites providing original articles, videos, interviews, and more. Founder Brian Vaszily is a public speaker, life coach and the author of multiple books including Beyond Stone and Steel and the forthcoming The 9 Intense Experiences That Will Inevitably Change Your Life (Wiley Publishing, 2011.) For more information and to contact Brian Vaszily, visit the Contact Us area at IntenseExperiences.com.

Google Lists the 1000 Most Visited Sites on the Web

Internet

Google released the 1000 most-visited sites list on the web on May 28th. According to the list, Facebook sits on top with 540 million unique visitors, followed by yahoo.com, live.com. The list will be updated monthly and does not include adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites. Google removes some of their own sites.

Facebook, under Social Networks category, ranks number one of the list. Wikipedia (#4) and Mozilla (#10) are the only two Websites in Google’s top 10 not to display advertising which respectively under Dictionaries & Encyclopedias and Internet Clients & Browsers category. Web portals such as Yahoo.com (#2), MSN.com (#5), Baidu (#8) are also high on the list. Search engines also occupy several top places in the list (excluding Google’s own Search) and Live.com (#3) was the unique search engine among Top 10 list. Blogging category is also high on Google’s list, with Blogspot (Blogger) situated in the 7th place with 230 million uniques. The other categories in Top 10 are Email & Messaging( qq.com #9) and Software?microsoft.Com #6).

SearchEngineland, the US Search engine technology Web site, indicated that it is big news that Google publicly released a list of the top 1,000 sites.

The expert said that it is the first time that Google officially released the 1000 Most-visited Sites and the list will update monthly, it shows google’s ambition to establish its own standard as the industry standard. The list provides the second free data for the industry after Alexa. It is more accurate than Alexa for the data comes from “aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

The following are Top5 list in 4 most popular categories

Social Networks top5
facebook.com, the Social Networks recently in distress of privacy, Facebook sits on top 1 of Social Networks list with 540 million unique visitors, followed by myspace.com

No1: facebook.com #1
No2: myspace.com #26
No3: orkut.com #46
No4: linkedin.com #56
No5: hi5.com #63

Search Engines Top5
Two sites live.com and bing.com form Microsoft occupies Search Engines Top 2 of bing.com the Search Engines Top5

No1: live.com #3
No2: bing.com #13
No3: ask.com #20
No4: yandex.ru #57
No5: naver.com #72

Software Top5
As the precursor of software industry, microsoft.com incumbently ranks No 1 in the software category.

No1: microsoft.com #6
No2: Brothersoft.com #101
No3: softpedia.com #219
No4: onlinedown.net #332
No5: informer.com #367

Web Portals Top5

As one of the creators of Miracle Internet at the end of 20 century in the US, yahoo.com ranks No.1of in the Web Portals category and No.2 of the whole list. Three in the Web Portals Top5 are from China; they are baidu.com, sina.com.cn and163.com

No1: yahoo.com #2
No2: msn.com #5
No3: baidu.com #8
No4: sina.com.cn #11
No5: 163.com #15
View The 1000 most-visited sites on the web on http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/