Jason Small : Social Media and The Big W

Name: Jason, aka "Jason Small"

Web Site: http://www.socialmediaandthebigw.com

Bio: Social Media and The Big W is the place where news, talent, testing, resources, and love for the social media, and web community in general intersect to provide meaningful information for the global social media market. Jason Small is a social media strategist and digital marketer with SEO, website design and development expertise and working with Revolution Digital to service several major brands in various industries including entertainment, pharma and other industries. For more information on Revolution Digital, please visit: www.RevolutionDigital.com DISCLAIMER: This blog is maintained independently of Revolution Digital, and the views and opinions expressed by the author, or guest authors, do not necessarily state or reflect the opinion of Revolution Digital.

Posts by Jason Small:

Cash in Your Pocket for Location Check-ins: WeReward

June 9th, 2010

WeReward Logo

You need:

1. An iPhone
2. A Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare account
3. A Paypal account

Go here to here to check it out/sign up through my referral (if ya don’t mind, please!) – I have also embedded their video explanation below: WeReward

Here’s how it works:

Popularity: 29% [?]

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Facebook’s Social Plugins Video

June 9th, 2010

Facebook Video

The Open Graph API has gotten so much attention lately, that some may have forgotten about all of the various options with Facebook social plugins.

Facebook is learning how to communicate things to it’s audience, so that CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have to issue an article for the Washington Post to publish in order to help fix public perception. Zuckerberg’s Washington Post article is sort of ironic, since the Don Graham, CEO of the Washington Post, was almost a primary investor in Facebook. Read Fortune Magazine’s May 24th article on The Temptation of Facebook for more details on that.

Zuckerberg is only 25, and has even taken executive training so he can help lead better. Everyone makes mistakes, and so does every company – but Facebook obviously has a little more attention than most businesses.

Here is the video on Facebook, that explains Facebook Social Plugins:

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Twitter Bans Sponsored Tweets

May 26th, 2010

Twitter banned sponsored tweets this week. Literally, killing the business model for several profitable services currently offering tweets by celebrities and more. Twitters move appears strategic, to eliminate competition for Twitters Promoted Tweets which rolled out on April 13th, 2010. Plans include companies like Starbucks and Red Bull as advertisers in the first phase.

Promoted Tweets Starbucks

So now, Twitter may have just turned the lights out for some start-ups formed around promoting sponsored Tweets by celebrities and Twitter power-users. These companies use software that processed the transaction from the advertiser, through the actual Twitter-user. But these ‘automated’ API tweets will now get ‘caught’ in the stream and removed. Leaving only the ‘caveman’ option of copy and paste, until other possible workarounds are developed. Some of these companies include:

www.SponsoredTweets.com
www.Twitpub.com
www.Twittad.com
www.Betweeted.com
www.Ad.ly

The good news, is that Twitter plans on sharing the revenue from it’s Promoted Tweets with developers in a 50/50 split. The platform has around 105 million registered users, roughly 25% the size of Facebook, but the nature of the platform is geared towards real-time/dynamic interactions which advertisers can take advantage of.

For instance, consider how fast Twitter trends develop, and how a company could take advantage of keywords associated with a newsworthy keyword trend – like BP and the current oil spill. Dawn is currently running an ad campaign showing how their product was used to help clean animals caught in oil spills, so if the keyword trend “#BP oil spill” is occurring on Twitter – Dawn could purchase advertising via Twitters Promoted Tweets and receive top placement in Twitter results, driving significant and instant traffic to a target video or promotional information about purchasing Dawn. The main basis of the Dawn campaign is that by purchasing Dawn you contribute $1 to save wildlife
– placing this message at the top of a Twitter trend such as “#BP oil spill” would drive instant, relevant traffic to a very primed audience.

Do you believe Twitters Promoted Tweets will work? What other ways could they leverage advertising in the current platform?

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Updated Social Media Stats in Erik Qualman’s Social Media Revolution Video

May 13th, 2010

Social Media Stats

ROI in social media

Jet Blue is now launching a new ‘experience’ initiative

Jimmy Choo on Foursquare initiative

As reported back in March on the Big W, Facebook surpassed Google as the #1 online destination in the United States. Therefore social media is now that #1 online destination, surpassing search engines in the United States.

With the incredible rise of mobile in 2010, our guess is that the next release will include more statistics on mobile as well. great job on the video Erik!

Popularity: 25% [?]

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Facebook Users: Get Ready to Share Your Location With Friends

March 10th, 2010

Social Media Location

geo-location in social media

Nick Bilton of the New York Times

We speculate that the technology will not be ‘in real time’ until some additional advances are made on the platform. In other words, you will be able to share your location on the map, but it won’t update every single second and therefore enable your friends to watch you move in real time down a highway on a map. Instead, it will likely permit you to ‘update’ your location whereby it will move your ‘location’ to your exact position – but only when you physically update it on your phone or mobile device. Another possibility is that it will periodically (but not every single second) update your location by set time intervals.

Eventually, it will be in ‘real time’ whereby users could likely actually watch you move across a map in real time. This is an incredible development for the obvious reasons – how many times have friends ‘passed one another’ on a highway, in a store, or across the country at airports and never even knew it? It’s a powerful feature for users to maintain. Alerts that could notify you when you are within miles, or feet, of particular friends could develop and become extraordinarily popular. Bringing together friends more often.

Advertisers could see ‘heat maps’ indicating the major of movement for particular segments of users. Imagine the power of knowing that segmented demographics could be extracted from visitors to particular business locations. In other words, visitors to a particular restaurant (noted by latitude/longitude location on a map) could be shown to advertisers so they can gauge traveling habits – including driving routes (imagine the power of this feature to billboard advertisers on particular highways!). Real-time maps of the general population (active on Facebook) could be seen: movement, demographics, habits, connections, and much more.

Powerful? That’s the understatement of the decade. Geo-location connected to a social media goliath like Facebook will change the future of social interaction, and advertising. It may take some time for the appropriate regulations, safe guards, and analytics to develop – but they will, the value is overwhelmingly justified.

What other potential developments could you see, from the complete marriage of social media and geo-location?

Popularity: 4% [?]

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How to Workaround Facebook’s New Requirement: 10K Ad Spend Per Month For ALL Fan Page Promotions

February 25th, 2010

Facebook Promotions

Some of the most important changes that went into effect, include specific prohibitions on prizes awarded on Facebook (alcohol, prescription drugs, etc). Most importantly, Facebook now requires that any promotion ‘living on Facebook’ must have prior approval. In order to have your promotion reviewed, you must have a dedicated sales representative and, here’s the biggest change in the fine print, a minimum ad spend with Facebook that exceeds $10,000 per month. That’s correct, $10,000 per month during your promotion period.

So, how do you ‘get around’ this requirement? Microsites. Facebook will still allow you to ‘publicize’ your promotion on their platform, however, you may not ‘run’ the promotion on the platform without the afore-mentioned requirements. So the workaround is to have your Fan Page publicize the sweepstakes, or promotion, and then send your fans, via a link, to a website (microsite, or your business’ website) where the fan can participate in the promotion.

Make sure your service vendors, consultants, and staff are well-aware of these changes – failure to comply may result in Facebook shutting down your Fan Page. To view the full guidelines, visit Facebook’s official Promotions Guidelines Page.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Twitter Applications for Everyone

January 24th, 2010

Not sure what Twitter apps are good? Bad? Ugly? OneForty has got you covered. Find great Twitter applications based on user-reviews and even meet/view the developers who made them.

Twitter Resource

We found all of our favorites in the list, and discovered a lot of other super-cool applications and tools for Twitter. The lists include apps and tools for large number of platforms including: Android, iPhone, FireFox, Blackberry, Windows, MAC, Wordpress and more.

Twitter Apps

The site features tons of great information to help you make the best decisions on your Twitter applications and tools, including Press Mentions, users who rate the applications, and more.

Not sure where to start? Try the 100 Most Popular Apps section – or (our favorite) the Essentials Section where you can view Twitter apps by category, including:

If you have been unhappy with your current Twitter tools, you should definitely check out OneForty.com. Don’t see your tool on OneForty? No sweat: they even have a feature that will let you add it.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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LinkedIn: Open Platform, New iPhone App

December 31st, 2009

On November 23rd, LinkedIn opened their platform – permitting developers access to LinkedIn for the first time. TweetDeck immediately started integrating the platform into their software, and more applications are on the way using this new opportunity.

Recently, Google’s Senior VP of Product Management blogged about Google opening up platforms. They hit the nail on the head when they spoke about the traditional, closed model, whereby a company ‘locks up’ competitive advantages by maintaining trade secrets and protecting technology. The new system evolving, is one of openly sharing a platform to provide access to developers. Just as social media has forced a changed from ‘interruption marketing’ to ‘engagement marketing,’ the technological trend is going from ‘closed system’ to ‘open source.’

The advantages are hard to ignore. A single company can only hire so many developers (even Google), but by opening up access to the platform to all developers – the power of the masses means that there can be 50,000+ developers working on ways to amplify or improve access to your platform.

LinkedIn is probably making the right move, and we can’t wait to see what happens as more time passes and developers integrate better access into existing applications and new applications.

LinkedIn also just released, on December 28th, a new LinkedIn iPhone app (version 3.0) and completely “started from scratch” to make the entire application more user-friendly. For those of you that already have the previous app on your iPhone, go back to the App Store and re-download the app, if you haven’t received a notice to ‘update’ your application.

LinkedIn has maintained a clean, professional-grade networking structure. Business to business networking and professional connections that turn into business partnerships, employment, and revenue are often reported from users. The platform has a lot to offer professionals from every industry.

We are excited to see how the ‘open-platform’ for LinkedIn improves user experience in 2010.

What about you? What are your thoughts on LinkedIn?

Popularity: 3% [?]

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2010 Geo-Location: Social Media Year of “Where are you?”

December 26th, 2009

Trending 2009, location-based social media APIs have been storming the social-sphere. If you look closely at how search engines have trended towards localization, it makes sense. Over the years, technology starts at a macro level and then evolves to service users on a more personal level. Now, social media is set to rapidly evolve from a macro level to a location-based micro-level. To be more specific; instead of a general ‘virtual’ connection with your friends and family – whereby you may not know exactly where they are when you are messaging/posting one another – in 2010 more users will start to use geo-location to show exactly where they are when they interact with social media.

Geo Targeting Social Media

With location-based social media services like Foursquare, Brightkite, and even the iPhone app Loopt – social media will continue to evolve from “What are you doing?” to “What are you doing and where are you doing it?”

As advertisers seek a stronger measurement for social media in the form of ROI, which most are still trying to develop some type of formula for, mobile location-based ad tools are also gaining momentum at an exponential pace. In other words, users and advertisers are now catching up to the trend that has been mildly active for the past 18-24+ months and although ROI techniques are far from perfect, advertisers know that narrowing their demographic by location will increase ROI by fine tuning their target markets.

With Twitter releasing an ‘army of developers’ on their realtime data (previously only accessible by Google and Bing) by opening up their API to 50,000+ developers big and small – 2010 will see Twitter compete to lead the charge in location-based social media applications. To support this step, Twitter will leverage GeoAPI developer Mixer Labs, which they have acquired, to work on location data and help developers.

From an advertiser standpoint, it will evolve into creative ways to activate promotions using these applications. Consider, for instance, the power of a major brand like Coca-Cola and perhaps a challenge like organizing an image of a large Coke bottle by coordinating social media fans and their locations. A little complex, perhaps, but that’s what apps are for – making the complex easier.

Popularity: 20% [?]

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Search Engine Comparison: Google vs Bing

December 21st, 2009

In a recent landmark deal, Bing (Microsoft) struck a partnership deal in 2009 with Yahoo!, which means that the search engine results between Bing and Google could be even more unique.

Can’t decide which search engine to use? Then compare your search engine results side by side try this great tool:

Bing-vs-Google

Google has enjoyed the number one slot for quite some time now, but with increased competition from Bing (Microsoft) and social media giant, Facebook (as the number one online destination for users) – 2010 should be an interesting year.

During 2009, we attended multiple social media conferences and one thing is clear: as giants like Facebook consume users as a ‘first-destination’ online, a natural evolution would be integrating search engine solutions into the platform so users don’t have to leave the community. This would mean they first search their community ‘friends’ to find credible references relating to their topic of search, from trusted relationships.

Bing vs Google

Popularity: 20% [?]

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Twitter Beta-testing ‘Contributors’ Feature

December 15th, 2009

Twitter announced a new feature, currently in beta, that businesses can leverage to help make their business to consumer tweets more personal, when tweeting. The feature is called ‘Contributors’ and appends the contributor’s username to the byline.

For example, if Twitter invites @seniorexec to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @seniorexec in its byline so that users know more about those people behind the business (@Twitter in this example). For brands, this is a great development that can be used to ‘humanize’ further interactions with Twitter and still keep communications professional.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Facebook Announces Users Have Surpassed 350 Million: Facebook Stats

December 2nd, 2009

Last night, in Mark Zuckerberg’s open letter to Facebook users, he stated that Facebook users have surpassed 350 million.

Facebook Growth

The letter opens:

“It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.”

We thought this would be a good time to present the latest Facebook statistics, according to Facebook:

Facebook’s Company Figures

Facebook’s User Figures

International Growth

Facebook’s Platform

Facebook Mobile

Facebook, last we heard, was at 1,000+ employees and is continuing to hire. Want to work for Facebook? The Official Facebook Fan Page has a “Join Our Team” on the left hand side of the page.

Here is Mark Zuckerberg’s open letter in it’s entirety:

“It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg”

What are your thoughts on the growth of Facebook? Let us know…

Source: Facebook

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Web 3.0? Nimbus and Focus.

November 13th, 2009

After attending the “The Social Consumer B2C Case Studies & Roundtables” yesterday in New York City, it seemed that many – including major brands like McDonald’s and JetBlue were still racing to really get a comprehensive strategy in place that can keep pace with the evolving social media platforms and the legal, marketing, and interactive demands involved. Yes – they are executing campaigns with well-planned strategic moves leveraging the technology and nuances of the platforms. But things are changing fast.

web 3.0

At the current pace of the accelerating social media space – the next evolution in social media could send everyone racing, yet again, to understand and strategically gauge the best implementation of the medium…which may become completely reinvented. Relax, it won’t happen tomorrow or next week – but keep your expectations in check as it can always be right around the corner. What are we talking about? Web 3.0. Where your status will be called your “nimbus” and those things you want to follow or have interest in will be called your “focus.”

According to a recent article on Inventor Spot there are already geniuses working on the next step in social media. This will potentially eliminate the need for users to actually have to use a keyboard in order to provide status updates. The updates will instead aggregate through sensors and ’smart objects.’ In taking this one thought further: it isn’t hard to see that in our future technology we will head towards instantaneous thought-driven sharing. Explore the implications of that in your mind for a few minutes, and you should quickly realize that the ramifications are both good and bad. Collaborative thinking will be at the speed of thought – accelerating productive outcomes. Individuals and technological innovators will have to determine how to screen private thoughts versus public thoughts…but we are digressing.

The bottom line is that the space is rapidly changing – but the pace will likely quicken, and if you think you are a ’social media expert’ – wait 24 hours. Or 24 minutes. Or…

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Is Social Media a Fad?

November 12th, 2009

Questioning the staying power of Social Media? You are a brand representative, a large-sized business marketing executive, a medium-sized business marketing director, or a small business owner and you can’t yet justify the shift in marketing spend-because you have no idea if it has staying power. It does – here’s why.

Social Media Video

Since this video is primarily for new readers, we thought it would be appropriate to add three basic tips to use in your social media strategy. Here are a few “day one” guidelines that you will need to remember:

1. Give your fans, readers, and friends value in information and content. Social media users have become accustomed to free and meaningful content in exchange for their attention.

2. If and when you get the attention you are after – make sure you use it wisely. For a great example of what not to do – check out T.G.I. Fridays Facebook blunder here: Social Media One Night Stand In short, if you run a promotion – be smart about the execution. You don’t want to unite a group based on your brand and then offend all of them. (common sense)

3. Engage your fans, friends, and groups in a way that makes sense to them – proactive listening and interactive content that generates conversation around your category. Truly organic conversations with insightful conversations generate more attention than a self-serving ‘buy this’ attitude. In this new world of consumer engagement – interruption marketing is boring, annoying and borderline offensive.

Jason Small
Social Media and the Big W
Founder
www.SocialMediaandtheBigW.com

Popularity: 3% [?]

1 Comment "

Top Facebook Apps Leaderboard Statistics

November 7th, 2009

As of today and according to a tracking system developed by Inside Facebook (which permits developers to submit their applications for the list) the top application on Facebook, with a commanding 63 million users, is FarmVille. This interactive game takes advantage of every possible user-generated sharing activity in the execution of game play, and it’s paying off time and time again.

Information and Chart Data According to Inside Facebook (AppData.com)

As any Facebook marketing pro should know, posting updates that mention your application on the wall feeds of Facebook users creates activity that generates awareness of your application. That’s as basic as it gets. But FarmVille goes well beyond ’square one’ and encourages you to ‘help your friends’ farm their land by becoming a neighbor. As you start to engage the game a pop-up message appears that shows friends in your network using the application, and you can connect your game play to cooperate and farm your friends’ land, or just watch it grow next to yours. You can even create a customized sign to post next to your farm crops for your neighbors (friends using the application whom you have chosen as a neighbor in the game) to read.

Their is also a ‘bookmark’ FarmVille feature that locks the URL right into the users browser for ease of repeat visits. To encourage these repeat visits, FarmVille offers daily incentives such as free coins that help advance game play and earn rewards. The expert execution of the game includes strategic partnerships (or other agreements) with major brands to offer the user purchasing options that include Blockbuster items, and Disney items – all through a mixture of game-play rewards (in the form of coins) and actual currency purchased via online payment services. Users can even chose to send gifts to friends, in this component of the game.

Game play is fun, simple, and merits rewards quickly through various interactive notices (pop-ups on your game screen) and toolbar options at the bottom of your game screen. Another great strategically powerful feature is the ‘take pictures of your farm and share with friends’ option. This creates photos, that can then go into galleries (of your own, or in your friends’ galleries). Thanks to photo tagging, this can also generate some more ‘notices’ and consequently produce more wall content on the user accounts.

It’s important to see how this game is executed, with the feature set that marries some just plain fun game play with options that can quickly encourage users to spread the word about the application in a spirit of cooperation and even generosity (gifting).

Congratulations to Zynga on another great execution and creating another chapter in their success story.

Jason Small
Social Media and the Big W
Founder
www.SocialMediaandtheBigW.com

Popularity: 6% [?]

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