MaxxoMedia Digital Media and Entertainment Trends

Viralheat, the affordable social media measurement product that scours social video sites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo; blogs; websites; and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on these sites, is adding additional functionality to its platform, including the ability to filter content by location. We previously wrote about Viralheat here and here.

Viralheat allows you to create profiles to track an individual’s name or a company’s name across nearly 30 video sites, the web and Twitter. The platform will give you real-time streams of Tweets and mentions and even provides powerful analytics for content. Now, users can limit their results by geographical location, which can be specified by city, zip code (for US) or IP address. It can be particularly helpful for marketers who are trying to determine what areas are creating the most content and buzz about a brand or event.

The platform also includes advanced analytics for Twitter. For each Tweet about a keyword or brand, Viralheat will rank the Twitter user in terms of influence, which is determined by the number of followers the user has. The idea behind the feature is to let brand managers and PR professionals figure out the total reach of their audience. Along with this metric, Viralheat will also determine the “top influencer” based on the number of mentions and retweets, which can let brands engage with their influencers and advocates.

Mobile social gaming community Cellufun is letting its eight million monthly visitors create discussion groups and advertisers can use this content to psychographically target their ads to members.

Each group has real-time chat and its own private forums as well as officers who get to decide membership criteria and review applications. Group affiliations also appear on users’ home pages, enhancing social ties throughout the community.

“Cellufun has become a social hub for millions of users all over the world, and they’re increasingly opting to spend time on our site rather than PC focused social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and hi5,” said Keith Katz, VP of Marketing at Cellufun. “We’ve always had informal groups popping up and posting in various forums, but one of our most frequent user requests has been to have a more formalized system for creating affinity groups, much like what’s available on various Web-based sites.

Razorfish, one of the largest digital marketing companies in the world, declared in its fifth annual Digital Outlook Report that television has morphed from a mass distribution channel to a collection of interactive and personal experiences. The report,  provides insightful industry commentary on topics such as the future of TV and Social Influence Marketing™ and examines media buying, planning and distribution trends from the past year.

Razorfish publishes the report to help marketers make smarter choices about their digital media spend and investments in digital marketing channels.

“Marketers have been talking over the past few years about the long tail of the Internet, but now we are seeing the development of a long tail of television,” said Terri Walter, vice president of emerging media at Razorfish. “TV is alive and well, but the viewing experience is moving from mass to niche in terms of both audiences and programming as consumers divide their time between computer screens, TV sets, mobile devices, gaming systems and set-top boxes. As viewership fragments, advertisers must find a way to adopt their messages to smaller, but potentially more valuable audiences.”

From KenRadio.com
In the past three years, developments in social networking and internet applications have begun providing internet users with more opportunities for sharing short updates about themselves, their lives, and their whereabouts online. Users may post messages about their status, their moods, their location and other tidbits on social networks and blogging sites, or on applications for sending out short messages to networks of friends like Twitter, Yammer and others.

Currently 15% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others. Back in December 11% and in November 9% of internet users used Twitter or updated their status online and in May of 2008, 6% of internet users responded yes to a slightly different question, where users were asked if they used “Twitter or another ‘microblogging’ service to share updates about themselves or to see updates about others.”

Leigh Fatzinger of OnMessage Ventures in Seattle, put together this great presentation about the trends in social media and how it is affecting the PR industry.  Check it out here.

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From Kenradio.com

A growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the streets. The U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking on a percentage basis — with the U.S. boasting comparable numbers. In the U.K., approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7% of all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008. That reach percentage was twice as high as it was in other major European markets?though similar to the U.S., where 1.6% of all mobile subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their phones in December 2007.

By Mark Levy, CEO MaxxoMedia

I thought I had the social network angle all covered with my Facebook profile, Linkedin profile, Plaxo, my website and a blog. But then I noticed people “Twittering” and “Zanneling” through my Facebook updates and I was intrigued. What were these new strange verbs, I thought?

So I went over to www.twitter.com and www.zannel.com and I looked around.

What I found was people of all ages, all across the globe sharing their lives in bite size bits — sharing web pages, photos, news stories and conversations being overheard. More bits sharing ideas, new product launches, videos, bookmarks and slideshows. Even more bits with moments of the mundane, the sad and the peculiar.

Then I dug a little more and found that there are many more sites with strange names, encouraging people to share their interests, loves, hates and lives. Some of the sites share information with other sites. They create a daisy chain effect where, for instance, I can Zannel a new video of the woodpecker harassing me during my conference calls, and it will feed the link to my Twitter account, which then feeds Plaxo and Facebook.

But what if you wanted to share and collect all the information on all your friends regardless of which site they are using?

Bob Bickel, founder of Ringside Networks,  has written an article digging into the behind the scenes struggles between Google and Facebook over  Google’s Friend Connect service.  Facebook has been willing to share with other network’s integrated applications but told Google to talk to the hand.  Social Networking sites have yet to achieve the revenue levels that they so desperately need to maintain their services in the long run.  Which path is correct? open sharing or isolationism?

By Bob Bickel

Facebook came out swinging yesterday to defend their users and their turf. http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=111. They have basically shut down Google’s use of their API to collect user profile and social graph information on the new Friend Connect service. Here’s my take on the background and what is going on…

Google has made a nice business out of an open Internet. Facebook carved out a nice little corner of the Internet with a social network that does not give Google the type of visibility they would like into that little corner. In addition, that little corner looks like it might be kind of valuable. Google makes a few moves like buying Orkut and amassing all the other social networking vendors and creating Open Social. Those things are OK, but not really opening up that corner that Google now has become to covet.

Well, the world of social network walled gardens kind of exploded last week. MySpace, Facebook and Google all seemed to rush announcements to market without full thought, without proper collaboration and certainly a bit hastily.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Arbitron and Edison Research recently released some very interesting research with details on the web radio listening audience. The study found a deep connection between online social networks and online radio listening.Diane Williams, Sr. Analyst/Custom Research for Arbitron said, “We found that online radio listeners are more than one-and-a-half times more likely to have a profile on a social networking site as compared to average Americans, and that they tend to be power-users, with one-third of online radio listeners logging on to their social networking site nearly every day or even multiple times per day.”

In another study last May by Radio Network, it was concluded that 77% of online radio listeners find new music through online radio more than through traditional radio. This shift is monumental for the music industry. Promoting new music through traditional radio was a pretty efficient process.

As the radio networks became more consolidated, the efficiency increased even further. At the same time, more and more stations were managed by a single network and/or syndicated across the country to save costs, leading to fewer spots for new music.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Facebook, the fastest growing online social network, is basically messaging and static pages. You get to look at friend’s page and use some utilities for sharing photos, videos, links and news feeds. One company thinks people are already tiring of seeing what their friends have done … after the fact. So they are developing ways for people to interact online in real time and do things together from any website. This is the vision of ROCKETON, a new “virtual world, social network, real-time gaming and applications platform.”

Founded by Interactive TV pioneers Steve Hoffman and Naomi Kabuko, ROCKETON aims to create the next wave in online interaction and gaming. The service, which opens in public beta in late April, will give you an avatar that represents who you are and allow you to connect with other ROCKETON members wherever they are to interact, chat, trade virtual objects and play games in real time.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Reselling tickets, once viewed as illegal and a rip-off of consumers, is now being legitimized. Over the past few months there have been a number of large acquisitions of “ticket resellers” made by leading e-commerce companies in an effort to take advantage of this lucrative secondary ticket market. eBay purchased Stubhub for $365 million; last month Ticketmaster purchased TicketsNow for $265 million. Many of the tickets that are re-sold on these secondary marketplaces are initially purchased from the Ticketmasters of the world.

The new combined business model aims to cut in the venue owners and promoters. Ticketmaster President and Chief Executive Sean Moriarty said, “Clients who five years ago were not willing to allow a ticket to be resold now want a piece of it.”

The size of the secondary ticket market is hard to judge, but estimates range from $2.5 billion to $5 billion a year in the U.S. So it’s no surprise that new companies are popping up looking to enhance the experience and take a slice of the pie.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

The web has forever changed the way people experience music. Here are a few sites I found this week that are cleverly combining elements of social networks, games and artificial intelligence, enabling people to discover and share music like never before.

Music Discovery Game

www.thesixtyone.com is a music discovery game that rewards those who help others listen to good new music. The name of the site pays homage to US Highway 61. According to the founders, “Muddy Waters rode the 61. So did Bob Dylan, Ike Turner and B.B. King. Elvis grew up in the housing projects along it. Highway 61 was the road by which people left to find better opportunities. And by leaving, they took their music to the world.”