Twitter Drops LinkedIn Partnership

 LinkedIn announced via a blog post on Friday that Twitter would no longer be partnering with the business-networking site to sync updates from one site to the other. This ends a partnership that began in 2009. LinkedIn users can still create updates on the site and click a button to share to Twitter as well, but the the reverse is no longer possible.
The LinkedIn post by Ryan Roslansky, head of content products at LinkedIn, pointed to Twitter’s own Friday blog post about “delivering a consistent experience on Twitter.”
Perhaps Twitter wants to separate itself from the business networking company after the recent password breach in which 6 million LinkedIn passwords were stolen. LinkedIn was recently slapped with a $5 million lawsuit by a user who claims LinkedIn deceived its more than 160 million members by having a security policy “in clear contradiction of accepted industry standards for database security.”
Still, the more likely reason is that Twitter and LinkedIn couldn’t come to an agreement over potential advertising revenue. In the last few months, Twitter has aggressively started pushing forward with initiatives that highlight partner content and feed its sponsored and promoted Tweet ecosystems. It’s possible Twitter wants to retain the value of its feeds on its own site, without giving that content to a potential competitor for ad dollars.
Article here : http://mashable.com/2012/06/29/twitter-drops-linkedin-partnership/

Facebook soon to allow users to follow specific app actions

Facebook has just rolled out a new Open Graph feature that will allow its users to follow specific actions from various Facebook applications. 

Now you will not have to subscribe or be friends with the user in order to get certain actions in your news feed. You can just follow what you want.

For example, you can decide to get notified when a user pins something to Pinterest and that will be the only item in your news feed from that person. It's like subscribing to someone's news feed, yet you are in control over what parts you see based on what app you are using.

This could really help businesses that use app's. What are your views on this? 

Matt Pierce

Social Media Marketing Manager

@SocialMediaF @MattAtSMF

5 Job Titles for the Marketer of the Future

By Software Advice Market Analyst Ashley Furness


Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts recently declared marketing dead, telling a group of business leaders “the further up in a company you go the stupider you become. And the further away from new things.”


While I agree with his latter sentiment, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects marketing payrolls to swell by at least 13 percent between 2010 and 2020. So where's the disconnect? What Roberts likely meant was the old days of marketing are over.


If you want to see the future of marketing, just talk to a recruiter. The dramatic shift in highly-desired skills - from direct marketing to SEO and social media, for example - says a lot about where the industry is going. 


Recently, I interviewed more than 30 marketing and recruiting specialists to find out how what new job titles they expect to appear in the next decade. Here is what they had to say:


1. Crowdsourcing Specialist: This role has two parts: listening and promoting. First, this specialist would monitor conversations happening on the Web about the brand and develop messaging that responds to customers’ voiced expectations. At the same time, they would strategize calls to action for branding purposes via social media –such as inviting customers to compete to create the best video about the brand, and perhaps tying the theme to something trending on Twitter.


2. Content Marketing Czar: This position would plan decide what content vehicles - such as websites, blogs, videos, infographics, webinars, social media and others - should be leveraged and how. At the same time, the content marketing leader would look for externally-created content about the company on the Web and find ways to leverage it for SEO and other marketing purposes.


3. Marketing Integration Planner: This position would identify ways to deliver a single marketing message, campaign or branding effort across multiple digital channels. For example, using a pay-per-click advertising campaign to promote a viral video, or using SEO keyword analysis to help craft a press release.The goal would be to find out where their customers are already interacting with the brand, and emulate their nonlinear, multi-screen purchase behavior.


4. Vice President of Marketing Data Analytics: This role would decide when, why and how marketing data should be tracked. This includes data collected through marketing automation, website analytics, social media, email campaigns, mobile, SEO, content marketing, PPC and other channels. This information would be shared with brand and campaign strategists who design promotions.


5. ROI and Marketing Budget Officer: Marketing budgets are shifting from quarterly allotments for print, direct mail and media advertising to constantly-shifting spending from one channel to another. Return on Investment (ROI) data is often instantly available–from PPC, for example–so marketing can be more nimble with resource allocation. 


It’s doubtful every marketing department will need all of these positions. The point here is to show the future of marketing through the most highly-desired skills and emerging job titles. 


“All the top-down, brand-driven marketing disciplines aren't dead, they just must be balanced now with the consumer-centric disciplines that require brands to ‘let go of the steering wheel and let the consumers drive,’" Protagonist Principal Tom Cotton.


Research for this article was provided by softwareadvice.com/crm.

Facebook allowing advertisers to use your browsing data

Everyone knows that Facebook has adverts, and more often than not these advertisements are tailored to your likes within Facebook itself. Once you like a particular product on Facebook, adverts on the side will normally be related to the products you have 'liked' on Facebook. But Facebook has now taken another step in ensuring their advertisers are getting the best possible deal when using their service.

A Bloomberg article on Wednesday reported that a new service called 'Facebook Exchange' will allow advertisers to target an audience based on their browsing history. Your computer stores your history via cookies and the Facebook Exchange program will place these cookies on third-party sites (usually when a user has shown an intent to buy). 

A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is usually a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to notify the website of the user's previous activity. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember the state of the website or activity the user had taken in the past. This can include clicking particular buttons, logging in, or a record of which pages were visited by the user even months or years ago.

Once your cookies have been stored, the Facebook ads you see may be related to them. So if you have been browsing the web for some computer parts, your computer will remember this and thanks to Facebook Exchange, this will increase the chance that you will see ads on your Facebook related to computer parts.

Up until this point in time, Facebook has targeted you based on your interests you have shared over the social network and have not been linked to your browsing history outside of the site.

The idea behind this is that the program will give advertisers a better sense of whether you really intended to buy something or not -  this allowing them to target more effectively. 

What do you this of this? Have Facebook taken their advertising plan too far? Do you think this is an invasion of privacy?

Let us know in the comments

Matt Pierce - Social Media Marketing Manager

@MattatSMF @SocialMediaf

52 Social Media Facts - Blow Your Mind

Today I came across 52 up to date social media facts. Some of these I found truly mind boggling. It just goes to show how huge social media is these days! It's so impressive how these social platforms have grown in stature. 


Facebook
1. 85% of women are annoyed by their friends (note – I don’t think this is just limited to Facebook!!).
2. Links about sex are shared 90% more than any other link.
3. More than 350 million users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome.
4. 25% of users don’t bother with any kind of privacy control.
5. The average Facebook user has 130 friends.

Statistics from Economist, Social Times, CNN.

Twitter
6. 750 tweets per second are shared on Twitter.
7. The original Twitter beta was launched on the birthday of CEO Evan Williams.
8. If Twitter was a country, it’d be the 12th largest in the world.
9. 30% of Twitter users have an income of more than $100,000.
10. Twitter handles more search queries per month than Bing and Yahoo combined (24 billion versus 4.1 billion and 9.4 billion respectively).

Statistics from Compete, Twitter Press Centre and BNN News.

LinkedIn
11. Two new members sign up to LinkedIn every second.
12. LinkedIn has 161 million members in more than 200 countries and communities.
13. Members are on track to make more than 5.3 billion searches on the platform in 2012.
14. LinkedIn’s revenue has doubled every quarter for the last two years.
15. There are more than one million LinkedIn groups.

Statistics from LinkedIn Press Centre.

YouTube
16. YouTube was founded to share dinner clips of a party due to the files being too large for email.
17. The most watched video is Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, with 470 million views.
18. The most watched non-commercial video is Charlie Bit My Finger Again, with over 458 million views.
19. The average visitor spends 15 minutes per day on YouTube.
20. It originally started life as a dating site and was influenced by the Hot Or Not website.

Statistics: Techzine and YouTube Archives.

Blogging
21. 3 million new blogs come online every month.
22. 60% of bloggers are aged between 25-44.
23. 20% of bloggers have been blogging for more than 6 years.
24. Professional bloggers upkeep an average of four blogs.
25. 35% of corporate bloggers worked in a journalism, media or professional writing role.

Statistics: Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2011.

Pinterest
26. Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.
27. Users spend an average of just under 16 minutes on the site.
28. The most popular age group is 25-34 year olds, accounting for 27.4% of the user base.
29. Pinterest receives 1.3 million visitors per day.
30. 97% of the fans of Pinterest’s Facebook page are women.

Statistics: Modea

Instagram
31. 25% of Instagram users upload more than three pictures.
32. Over 5 million images are uploaded every day.
33. President Obama is on Instagram, having joined in January 2012.
34. Earlybird is the most popular filter, with 12.5% users preferring it (zero filters is the most popular way to use Instagram, with more than 47% of users going au naturel).
35. There are 575 Likes per second.

Statistics: Instagram Press Centre, ReadWriteWeb, Social Media Delivered.

Google+
36. “Student” is the number one occupation of Google+ users.
37. More than 2/3 of its users are male.
38. The Google +1 button is used more than 5 billion times per day.
39. Google+ is adding 625,000 new users every day.
40. More than 42% of Google+ users are single.

Statistics: Google Blog, Techcrunch, Google Investor Reports.

Social Media Influence Platforms
41. Klout has 50 times more traffic than PeerIndex, its closest competitor.
42. Kred tries to measure offline influence by allowing you to add achievements away from your online activities.
43. Klout changed its privacy model to allow opt-out from its service after a negative backlash in 2011.
44. Empire Avenue has users in more than 150 countries.
45. Justin Bieber is the only person with a perfect Klout score of 100 (says it all, then).
Statistics: Social Media Today, The Next Web.
The Mobile Web
46. 42% of phones in the U.S. are smartphones, with 44% of European users on a smartphone.
47. More than 110 million smartphone users in the U.S and Europe access social networks and blogs on their phones.
48. Tablets took just two  years to reach 40 million users in the U.S. – it took smartphones 7 years to reach this figure.
49. China is the number one country in the world for smartphone use, with approximately 1 billion users.
50. In the U.K., there are twice as many smartphone users than cigarette smokers.

Statistics: ComScore and SoMobile.

Bonus Facts
51. Social gamers are expected to buy $6 billion in virtual goods in 2012.
52. One in 5 couples meet online; 3 in 5 gay couples meet online.

Statistics: eMarketer and Stanford University. 

Are there any there that you are truly surprised at? Let me know in the comments!

Matt Pierce - Social Media Marketing Manager

@Mattatsmf

Danny Brown originally posted this article here

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Yes, it is a bird. I am pleased to report that Larry the Twitter bird has flown the nest. He has been replaced by a new, yet to be named design from the Twitter team.

Twitter appears to be killing two birds with one stone in what seems to be a clever rebranding from the social networking site. Not only does the new logo bring about a fresh new look, but talk of the new bird is bringing outside attention from other sources to the site. 

The social networking site allows users to post ‘tweets’, short messages of up to 140 characters, onto their site which are shared with their followers. The site is very popular with celebrities and is said to have more than 140 million active users. 

However, feathers have been ruffled as many people complain that the new bird actually isn’t that different to Larry. The bird has been flipped to face the right hand side, it’s feathers spruced up and the feathers on its head plucked, as can be seen below:

Here’s what the Twitter blog had to say about the hatching of the new image:

“Our new bird grows out of love for ornithology, design within creative constraints, and simple geometry. This bird is crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles — similar to how your networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect with peers and friends. Whether soaring high above the earth to take in a broad view, or flocking with other birds to achieve a common purpose, a bird in flight is the ultimate representation of freedom, hope and limitless possibility.”

So the only question left to ask is: will the new twitter bird rule the roost?

Mollie Goodfellow – Client Manager

@MollieAtSMF

Hey I just met you, and this is crazy, but there is a law in place, so arrest them maybe?

Racist or Freedom of Speech?

Today I read an article on the Guardian website about ''Twacists'', AKA people being racist on Twitter. They seemed to target well known people and send them hideous tweets. After reading through the comments, I feel that my opinion is somewhat the unpopular one.

The high percent of comments that were outraged that someone would be put in jail for being racist on Twitter is worrying. Some of them stating that England is going downhill, comparing it to '1984', that someday soon we will have no freedom and can't say what we want to. Now, maybe it's just me, but I personally think that if you do something wrong - you deserve to be punished. Let's face it, if racism is suddenly classed as socially acceptable, imagine what else will be. I haven't personally been subject to any racism in my life, does that suddenly mean that I should find it ok? From the awful comments I've read on the issue - from the 'general' public - I think maybe they recon that's the case.

Terrifying. This is what is wrong with England. Those people that think bullying is acceptable, that it's just a joke, that it's just them spouting out their opinion. Don't get me wrong - everyone is entitled to their own opinion, I'm all up for listening to their opinion on music, food, politics, and hobbies. However, a hateful opinion on other human being because of where they are from/what they look like/who they're attracted to? That's just not right. Why do these people deserve to have their life thrown into disarray because some (I'm not going to swear) foolish person thinks they're better than them. I'll tell you now - that's not the case.

I think it's fantastic that the police are clamping down on them, and even more fantastic that these idiots are throwing out their racial nonsense on popular social media sites. Do they not realise it's visual proof against them? Ridiculous.

The internet can be an incredibly dark place for those who are targeted. Can you possibly imagine, getting bombarded with hatred and abuse constantly? Would you wish that on yourself? Of course you wouldn't, so for certain people out there to think it's just fine and dandy to do that, it's pathetic. In addition to this, social media is growing more and more by the day, so if nasty comments get overlooked, this will surely just get worse?

Let's look back to what our mother's would say to us as a child - If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all!

Shanice Smith – Client Manager
@shaniceatsmf

Read the full article here :http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/27/twitter-racism-taking-on-twacists