Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

This week was the week of social media rumors. When the King of Pop died, Twitter's usefulness shined as links to the latest news stories were shared. So much conversation was going on that it consumed 30% of the tweets that hour. However, with the good information came the bad. All the sudden the twitter feed was filled with fake stories about the demise of other celebrities.

Other misinformation was propagated this week as journalists (despite being transparent) failed to understand the exact motivations and implications of Facebook adding public content sharing. In the end, it looks like a lot less is changing than some had feared and others had hoped. Users can choice to make certain updates available to the wide wide public, but that will not be the default choice.

More rumors... What is Twitter's plan for monetization? Is it shopping recommendations (@EV says no no no) or added services for corporate accounts? And what is the deal with this upcoming Facebook Movie? Michael Cera as Mark Zuckerberg? Let's hope that one stays a rumor.

Marta Strickland

Now the big, big news story this week was the developments surrounding the #IranElection, at its peak bringing in more than 220,000 Tweets Per Hour. But the new and profound impact of the tool Twitter is much too large for this article, which is why Bridget was kind enough to have written something specifically about it.

Old Rivals, New Rivals: What Happened This Week?
While Microsoft and Google have been battling it out for a while... who could woo Yahoo!, who would own the world of online documents (Google Docs or Office Live). But, now the battle has a new twist called Bing. While they will likely not overtake Google any time soon, Bing's traffic and buzz keeps growing. For a Microsoft launch, it is refreshingly positive, and that has Google shaking.

Next... it seems as though the Facebook saga has closed a chapter, and opened a new one. As MySpace slashes much of its staff (signaling the end?), Facebook readies a rival to Twitter Search. Facebook continues to grow, not just getting bigger, but reaching out to an older demographic. Over 1 Billion chat messages are sent per day, and over the weekend close to 6 million people registered custom usernames.

Oh yeah... and then there was something about a new phone coming out this week :)

Marta Strickland

Today is the day where many Americans across the nation will see a blue screen on their television sets. Yes, today is the day where the plug is pulled on analog television and we go all digital!! But analog TV isn't the only thing rumored to die this weekend. Apparently there is some Twitpocalypse upon us, similar to the y2k bug that will cause Twitter to crash on Saturday.

What's Been Happening This Week?

Signs of the Twitpocalypse
Whether or not Twitter actually blows up this weekend, news surrounding the site this week has been increasingly negative. Statistics have been showing that Twitter's phenomenal growth has suddenly stopped. On top of that, there is a big debate on whether or not the average Twitter user is very active at all. Meanwhile, some of the fairly active celeb users (like Trent Reznor) have been quitting... and the super fans have been claiming Twitter has "jumped the shark" as @campaign messages have been showing up just about everywhere.

Much Ado About Online Identity
Rather than go into lots of detail about the Facebook vanity URL announcement (a topic deserving of its own post), I will simply say that not everyone is happy about it. Some think this is another "Facebook becoming MySpace" symptom, while others see it as an great opportunity to side step the not so user-friendly search functionality within Facebook.

But Facebook isn't the only one who is toying with (or needs to toy with) putting some social identity and authority into their system. Twitter is looking to launch verified accounts, not yet for brands, but for artists, athletes, politicians, etc. Our own Marshall Clark wrote an excellent piece on how social ranking needs to become a huge part of how Google displays their search results.

Other Miscellaneous Items
- Digg Allows Community To Choose Advertisements
- Facebook Offers More Interactive Ads to Brands
- YouTube Just Became the TwitPic of Video

Marta Strickland

What Was Everyone Talking About This Week?
Two stories filled up my news feed this week... one deservingly and the other not so much.

First, everyone went crazy over the announcement of a reality TV celebrity-stalking Twitter enabled television show. Considering that Twitter is about to add location-based information to each tweet, some celebs became notably concerned, including super-tweeter Ashton, who threatened to stop tweeting. Whether or not that show happens, it's clear that Twitter and television are going to merge in a variety of ways in the future.

Second, and the more deserving of attention story, was the launch of Google Wave: a real-time communication platform. The platform is much too robust and amazing to do justice in a few sentences, so I suggest you read Mashable's "complete guide" and look for a more thorough post from Threeminds on this new game changer.

What Fell Below The Radar?
Did you know Microsoft launched a new search engine? Why, you might ask? Good question. Bing (yes that is the name) hopes to conquer better search in four specific verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business.

The entire Church of Scientology got banned from making edits to Wikipedia due to questionable activities... like trying to remove any semi-negative reference to the church through out the entire site. Hulu and Boxee are in verbal fisticuffs over a misleading "error message" Hulu placed in their newly launched desktop version that discourages use of Boxee.

And apparently users over 55 are exiting Facebook in droves, which either shows that recent surge in users was due to peer pressure or that Facebook has failed to make the user experience as intuitive as it could be for new, less savvy users... or probably both.

Marta Strickland

During the past week, I've been attending the Web 3.0 Conference in New York. There have been a lot of definitions of "web 3.0" used, but one of the best definition I've seen so far came in the opening keynote from Tom Tague:

"Web 3.0 is about cleaning up the mess we've made and harvesting the value we created with Web 2.0."

And how are people harvesting this value?
Answer: they aren't... at least not yet.

As Aza Raskin from Mozilla pointed out during his presentation on the Contextual Web... it's not a technology problem, it's a people problem. Nobody marks up their pages with semantic code because nobody is doing anything interesting with the code. Nobody is doing anything interesting, because nobody is marking up their pages.

People need incentives to get the movement started. This means there needs to be some mainstream implementations that make it obvious to people what value can come from this technology. This week we saw the start of a few of those mainstream applications:

1. Wolfram Alpha, a knowledge engine, launched bringing us a new way to look for information online
2. Glue, a social browsing extension, opened up it's API
3. Facebook has started allowing users to log in with OpenID

2009 won't be the year of Web 3.0. But if things continue down this path, 2009 will be the year that sets us up for the next decade of the web... when people realize they can ask for something more out of their search engines and when relevant information will break through the online noise.

Marta Strickland

image credit: Kuw Son [Flickr]

It looks like someone turned up the pressure on a little internet company known as GOOGLE this week. Almost every item in my box is about a competitor moving in on their turf and all the new launches Google has cooked up to combat them. As much as we like the story of David vs Goliath, I think this Goliath is going to continue its world domination for at least a few years to come.

What's Been Happening This Week

Google Wants To Be More Real Time, Fail Whale Included
So the first big Google news this week was the hour or so that the service was down on Thursday. Never more quickly have I realized how much of the web Google actually powers... blogs running AdSense and Google Analytics were choking, embedded YouTube videos across the social web left empty, and I actually had to start using Yahoo! search (*gasp*).

But despite the #googlefail, this week was a big week because Google launched a suite of new search tools called Google Search Options, including time-based search which attempts to in some way rival Twitter Search. People are still heated up over this Google vs Twitter battle, but Twitter didn't win ground this week, as it pissed off many of its core fans by pulling a Facebook and removing a social discovery feature that many people loved (#fixreplies).

Google Wants To Be More Semantic Driven
Besides Google's time-based search, Google Squared and the "Wonder Wheel" are two more hot items included in their new Google Search Options. Google Squared returns search results in a spreadsheet format, structuring the otherwise unstructured data on web pages. The "Wonder Wheel" is a Flash-based application that starts with your search keyword in the center, and then displays related terms around it.

While Google's new offerings are interesting, and will likely be powerful based on the sheer amount of data the Google empire indexes... there is something to be said about the more intuitive interface of the newly launched WolframAlpha. WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine that allows to query factual data (weather, history, currency, health). Simply, it's an "answers engine" giving you data rather than a search engine which gives you links.

The Challengers To Google's Extended Empire
Besides Twitter (and Facebook, who is also vying for the real-time empire) and Wolfram Alpha causing threat to Google's search service, there are also the booming video sites threatening to dethrone YouTube. Both MTV and Hulu's traffic have been growing at higher rates that YouTube. And despite Hulu's impending monetization problems, there is some really promising opportunities for it to make moves into the mobile video market.

Marta Strickland

Some intriguing developments this week, and I'm not just talking about the Facebook robot or the big-screen kindle. Watching the social media space is like an elaborate and prolonged chess game. It's fun to watch the pieces keep moving into place.

The future will be real-time, distributed and geo-targetted.

The new kid at school: Twitter
Oh Twitter, everyone wants to be your date to the prom... or be you. The rumors were hot this week as Google got denied, Apple got denied. People were talking about Microsoft, but they you came out and told everyone you weren't for sale.

You've sent Facebook into an identity crisis!! They are doing everything they can to be as real-time as you, as open as you... they added more SMS mobile integration. But they still want to protect privacy. And they still want to take over ground from MySpace and imeem in the music world. Oh Facebook, why can't you just be happy with who you are.

Other miscellaneous, but awesome news
iTunes + kiosks = movies on the go
Digg + Facebook Connect = "social news" becomes social
Google Latitude + your blog = tools for stalkers
Twitter Search + reputation rank + link crawling = watch out Google

Marta Strickland

It was all pigs and birds this week :)

This week, technology has been feeding the Swine Flu hysteria, but also hopefully keeping us safe. There is a Google Maps Mashup to track the spread of the disease. As well as an iPhone app to help you avoid it.

In non-flu-related news, Facebook has been showing some major Twitter envy this week. They opened up their "stream" API, which will hopefully lead to an assortment of useful tools including desktop widgets and personal feed management tools. But despite this new openness, the platform remains fundamentally closed, which means it will not offer any way to track emerging trends in the conversation data or search for what people are saying about your brand.

It's a little disappointing that Facebook has only met the world halfway. There could be a lot of benefit to anonymous aggregated data. But should Facebook really be feeling the heat of competition. They've all but knocked MySpace out of the ballpark. And even though Twitter users are an attractive demographic, 60% of them quit within the first month.

Is Twitter the Facebook-killer or is it just the next Second Life?

Marta Strickland

I almost a reluctant to post a digest this week, because almost all the news in my feeds has been Twitter related. Is there a "tw-" word for feeling nauseous after consuming too much twitter news... a "twangover"?

So first we have all the hub-bub over the new king and queen of Twitter, Ashton and Oprah, who supposedly caused a 43% bump in traffic, depending on who crunches those numbers. We also have Terminator launching an elaborate Twitter game. We have Twitter challenging Facebook Connect with their "Sign In To Twitter" API.

And that is just the social media marketing related stuff. Did you know that the US State Department sent one of Twitter's founders over to Iraq to see how their government could benefit from using the service? Or that someone from the University of Wisconsin figured out how to Twitter only using your mind?

But What Happened This Week Not Related To Twitter?
Just because everyone is hot and bothered over Twitter doesn't mean that there are some other trends of equal importance:

1. Mobile is still growing...
Some new statistics released this week show that while Android is growing fast, it is still not as fast as the iPhone, who is now dominating with their huge smartphone marketshare and their 1 billion app downloads. Too bad one of those in the banned app download list is Qik, which has just announced mobile video integration with Facebook.

2. Online video is still hot...
New statistics from Nielsen show that online video continues to gain momentum. YouTube is testing a new beta version of their Channels interface. And Adobe has announced they will be releasing a new version of Flash compatible with set-top boxes, internet enabled televisions, and blu-ray players.

3. Google is still in the game...
Many are speculating that attention-hungry giants like Twitter and Facebook are going to eat away at the Google Empire. Others, however, take the public launch of Google Profiles as the first signs of Google taking back some ground in the world of social media.

Marta Strickland

Rather than struggle to think too hard on my first day back from vacation :)... I think this week's activities can be best expressed in numbers and videos.

What's Been Happening This Week (Numbers)
- 1 Million followers of Ashton on Twitter
- 1 Million social networks on Ning
- 7 Million unique users of Twitter last month
- 100 Million monthly viewers on YouTube in the US alone
- 200 Million unique users on Facebook

What's Been Happening This Week (Videos)

The power of social media crushes another brand, who was not prepared to deal with this type of thing.

The power of social media brings fame to those who deserve it most, and tears to those who follow along.

The power of social media brings people together to create something new and beautiful.

Marta Strickland