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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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. (more…)
Sphere: Related ContentBy 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? (more…)
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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.
Sphere: Related ContentBy 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. (more…)
Sphere: Related ContentBy 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. (more…)
Sphere: Related ContentBy 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.
Sphere: Related ContentBy 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.”
On thesixtyone.com, musicians upload music and listeners decide which songs go on the home page. Both musicians and listeners can create profiles to share the music they are interested in and gain influence points, which can be used to help promote the music they like. If you like a song, just click the “bump” button to increase its bump count. Each “bump” increases the artists points in the system.
There is a real-time updated leader board of both the top performing artists and the listeners with the most points. Points record progress, reflect community status and can be spent to bump more songs and influence the community.
Community Lyrics Search
If it’s lyrics you are looking for, a solid place to start is www.Lyricsmode.com. This new site has combined social networking and lyrics sharing by allowing members to upload lyrics into the site. LyricsMode is a comprehensive online music resource that provides a huge selection of lyrics for music compositions. They boast more than 550,000 lyrics for more than 20,000 artists and are adding new material daily.
In addition to the lyrics on each song, Lyricsmode offers a YouTube widget that you can embed into web pages showing the video and the lyrics to the song. You can also request and share lyrics or get the ringtone to the song.
Social Playlists and Streaming Music
MeeMix wants to provide the new generation of media consumers with an Internet radio that will give them what they want, when they want it and without having to work to get it. The service is based on an advanced analysis of personal taste in music. With MeeMix, choose a song or artist, and a playlist based on this input will be automatically built. The music will start playing immediately as MeeMix creates a personalized radio station.
The founders spent eight months developing a technology that uniquely identifies individual musical taste by using content and behavioral-based methodologies. The MeeMix algorithm is a taste-prediction tool, which not only points out songs similar to the ones selected by the user, but also takes geographical, behavioral and psychological characteristics into account in order to deliver songs that will match the user’s unique personal taste.
For example: If a 16-year-old girl from Japan and a 22-year-old guy from New York request the same song, then parameters beyond song selection will be considered to personalize the playlist. When songs are rated, the Internet radio station becomes more in tune with the listener’s music preferences. For instance, if you rate a song, they understand how you liked it and adjust the station accordingly. The more songs the listeners rate, the better the station will become a reflection of their unique music tastes.
Every member can set up his or her personal profile, and interact with other members in a variety of ways and throughout the site, including similar musical tastes or shared passions.
Sphere: Related ContentCEO of MaxxoMedia
Lately, my inbox has been inundated with invitations to join new online social networking sites. Unlike early entrants to the social networking market like MySpace and Friendster, these new services are more focused on helping people do business. The largest and seemingly most popular business network is named Linkedin. A little over four years old, it boasts over 17 million members.
New social nets seem to be popping up daily.Many just duplicate features and functions of the leaders. They simply offer a network of people from many different walks of life the opportunity to connect with each other. However, one recent entrant is making waves by focusing the power of social networking software into a marketplace that has always been insulated and inefficient - the entertainment industry.
Nextcat.com aims to be THE business social networking hub of the entertainment industry. Based outside of Boston, the company was founded by two serial entrepreneurs, Jeff Pucci and Richard Viard. Though they both attended the Berklee College of Music, they didn’t meet up until 1988.
Since then, armed with a love of music and the entrepreneurial spirit, the two have collaborated on a number of projects, including the development of computer-generated music software, CD-roms that teach the history of music and Smarterkids.com, a website that evaluated educational toys and matched them with children based on their educational needs. They took Smarterkids.com public in 1999, riding the dotcom wave, and sold the company in 2001.
The vision for Nextcat.com would come in 2004 when Pucci first encountered Linkedin. Viewing the service from the eyes of a musician, he quickly saw how the online social network could help transform the highly fragmented world of the music industry. He was also looking for a more professional experience than on other networking sites like MySpace.
The tag line for Nextcat is so true when it comes to this industry - “It’s all about who you know.” But until these online networks came into play. “who you know” was limited by “who you knew,” if you know what I mean. Let’s say you need to find an engineer for an upcoming session. You probably have a list of three to five people you know who you can call. With a service like Nextcat, you now have potentially hundreds of engineers you can connect with. You can also see how those people are connected to you or other people you know, and listen to samples of their work. That can give you more comfort in reaching out to someone you don’t know.
Currently the service caters to five broad sections of the entertainment industry: Music, Film/TV/Stage, Modeling, Arts & Literature and Gaming. Each section focuses on the talent — actors, producers, screenwriters, DJs, engineers, composers, models, game developers — and the supporting service providers. The site also features job boards and forums where members can find work and discuss industry specific issues.
Signing up to Nexcat is easy. The first step is to get a free account and set up your personal profile page. On it, depending on your discipline or talent, you can fill in information about your career experience. Then add people you have worked with and your interests. You can even add samples of your work, complete with photos, music files, slide shows or video demo reels. You can put as much or as little information on your profile as you wish. However you should think of your profile as a database. Meaning, you never know what keywords someone may search on, so more information is better. Connecting to someone is easy. Click on the Request Connection button, add a personal message and hit “Send.”
It’s also really easy to find other people you know who are already members and to invite people you think would benefit from the service. You can have the service scan your e-mail address book from many of the top e-mail services and Linkedin. You can then choose which people to invite, draft an invitation message and Nextcat does the rest. The site is free to sign up for the basic service.
New members have been signing up in droves, prompted by word-of-mouth only … and they like the service so much that they are inviting their friends. Lately they have been attracting bigger names to the service who are willing to help others aspiring to achieve their career dreams. Much like the vision for their previous successful company, Smarterkids.com, Pucci and Viard plan to add specialty subscription services specific to each market which, will keep members coming back again and again.
Check it out at http://www.nextcat.com
By ANGEL JENNINGS NYTIMES
Cellphone plans that encourage subscribers to talk mainly to people in the same network are having unintentional social effects.
A month ago, Brandy McDowell sat down with her longtime friend, Kezia Chandler, and told her she had switched cellphone carriers. Their relationship has not been the same since.
Now, they barely speak. Ms. Chandler rushes Ms. McDowell off the phone when she calls during her lunch break. And long conversations about schoolwork and relationship woes have been reduced to sound bites.
Maybe they should blame the cellphone carriers. The carriers, after all, set up plans that encourage subscribers to talk mainly to people in the same network. The companies say they are simply trying to recruit and retain customers.
But what was set up as a purely business strategy is having an unintentional social effect. It is dividing the people who share informal bonds and bringing together those who have formal networks of cellphone “friends.”
That is most true for people younger than 25 because they are the ones who see the cellphone as an extension of themselves. They are constantly sending text messages, making calls, checking the time, scheduling appointments, calculating math, taking photos, playing games or looking up something on the Internet.
Those who talk the most on the phone are ages 18 to 24, according to a study of cellphone use by Telephia Inc., a San Francisco research firm that follows cellphone trends. In the first quarter of 2007, this group sent and received on average 290 calls a month, the study found. Text messaging was highest, Telephia said, among 13- to 17-year-olds, who averaged 435 messages a month.
By contrast, cellphone users 45 to 54 years old spoke on the phone 194 times, on average, a month and sent only 57 text messages.
Read the rest of the article.
Sphere: Related ContentSocial Network Marketing, the Sky is the Limit
Led by MySpace, social networking is a cultural phenomenon that is still developing a stable revenue model. Even so, it is estimated that in 2007 marketers will spend $900 million on advertising and marketing on social network sites in the US, mostly to create profile pages and sponsored promotions. Online social networking have become a cultural phenomenon over the past several year, sparking thousands of media stories, blog postings and television exposes. The basic concept is simple enough: Online social networks enable people to create profiles, describe their interests, share their thoughts in blogs or postings, and connect with other people. But the variations on the theme are endless. MySpace, still the largest player by far, is estimated to generate $525 million in the US this year. Facebook is expected to generate $125 million and both should continue to see healthy revenue increases. Combined, the two account for 72% of US social network ad spending in 2007 and 75% in 2008.
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