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Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Social Media Digest: Google update, Twitter stories, Klout Criticism

Friday, November 4th, 2011

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1. Google has just announced that it has updated its search algorithm to promote the latest relevant results where it makes sense to do so. The company explains “Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.” 35% of searches should be affected, Google says. These include, recent events or hot topics; regularly recurring events, and topics that are frequently updated.

2. Twitter has announced Twitter Stories, which is an online portfolio that Twitter will use to display stories about how single Tweets have affected its users. You can submit stories by mentioning mentioning @twitterstories or by using the hashtag #twitterstories, Twitter says to feel free to link to a photo or video and they will include those in the story. Twitter will then feature a selection of profiles every month. The site is already live with a nice selection of stories to check out:

3. Search engine Google is now indexing public comments made on websites that use Facebook, Disqus and other add-ons. The move means that all comments on any publicly visible website could show up in Google search results. Previously, search engines were unable to read comments because Facebook, Disqus and Intense Debate used programming that was not easy to read automatically. This meant that comments could play any part in a website’s search ranking. Now, however, the web tools that Google uses to trawl the web and index content are able to read comments that have been made using Facebook’s Connect add-in for other websites, as well as other equivalent services.

4. Just five companies control 64% of all online spending, with Google controls 46% in total. The others are Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL. Here are the full results:

5. Following last week’s news that Klout had changed its algorithm for calculating social capital, there has been a groundswell of criticism against the site. CEO Fernandez responds to his critics here.

Tags: Facebook, Google, Klout, social media, Twitter
Posted in Uncategorized, social media | No Comments »

Social Media Digest: Klout Changes, Facebook Farm & YouTube Takedown

Friday, October 28th, 2011

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top six:

1. Millions lost sleep this week with news that Klout (the social capital calculator) was changing its algorithm. The company insisted that many scores would go up, but that didn’t stop a small amount of negative reaction hitting social media channels. You can read more about the changes here. Suffice to say, at Umpf Towers we’re not quaking in our boots, but we’ll be working extra hard to break the magic 70 over the next few weeks.

2. This week saw the launch of the world’s first Facebook inspired cooker – or the ‘Facecook’ – as manufacturer Belling are calling it. Put simply, Facebook users have the unique chance for their profile pictures to appear on a specially designed cooker. By liking Belling UK’s Facebook page and liking the Belling Cooker app your profile picture will appear on the cooker’s photo montage. After the closing date for entries has passed, all images will be printed on to a specially created, unique Belling Classic Range Cooker. The cooker will be exhibited at the BBC Good Food show, so head down if you want to have a look.

3. In a small corner of the Baltic Sea, a mere 100km from the Arctic Circle, Facebook has announced it will build a new server farm. The small town of Lulea has been chosen as the location, creating about 70 – 90 jobs in the local area. Sweden’s network of high speed broadband, plus the general cold weather (used to keep the servers below critical temperature) has been cited as two of the reasons why the town was chosen.

4. Traditional English words such as ‘balderdash’ and ‘cripes’ are dying out thanks to the texting generation, linguists have claimed. Some 73% of people believe texts and website Twitter have dramatically changed the use of English, with long words falling out of use. The trends were revealed in a poll of 2,000 adults for the launch of JP Davidson’s book Planet Word. The book is a tie-in to Stephen Fry’s BBC2 series of the same name, charting the history of language from early grunts to tweets. The author said: “Language is always evolving and great descriptive words are being lost – but others emerge.”

5. The UK government asked Google to take down 135 YouTube videos for reasons of national security in the first half of this year, states Google’s biannual Transparency Report, released yesterday. The report also shows that the German government asked for videos that included Nazi memorabilia to be removed, and that US police wanted videos taken down because they showed their officers in acts of brutality. UK content removal requests went up 71 per cent compared to the previous six month period, when the government made no requests at all for content to be taken down on grounds of national security.

6. This week’s video is how to post a company status update on Linkedin, following recent changes to the professional online network:

Tags: Facebook, Google, Klout, social media, Twitter, YouTube
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Social Media: The Greatest Development In The History Of Television Since Colour

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

It’s the greatest development in the history of the television since the introduction of colour.

It’s not high definition TV. Nor is it 3D. It’s social media.

In the coming years social media will enhance our TV experience more than any single technological advancement since the development of colour. Well, colour and the development of remote controls from the ones connected to TVs by wire to the infrared type.

Social media is revolutionising TV dragging it, remote control and all, from a largely passive medium into an increasingly interactive user experience. But more than this, social media is making TV more engaging and, actually, making television better.

Dual-screening is where it’s at: watching live TV and engaging online using a phone, tablet, laptop, etc.

Research by Thinkbox shows that

* 60% concurrently watch TV and go online at least 2-3 times a week

* 37% concurrently watch TV and go online every day

Heineken’s Star Player app, which we reviewed back in April, is, despite its early flaws, a brilliant idea.

In fact, Heineken announced last week that it was going to increase social media investment following Star Player’s success.

Social TV is now mainstream.

By way of example, take these two contrasting quotes on social media:

“Twitter is a lightweight list of strangers’ lunch plans.”

And

“Social media is making live TV feel even livelier.”

It’s not the actual quotes so much as who they came from. Both are from Simon Cowell. Or ‘TV and music Impresario Simon Cowell’ to give him his full name.

In an article published yesterday in the New York Times, he’s made a pretty big U-turn on his social media thinking.

The nub of this piece is that XFactor USA will, from 2 November, start to use social media voting. In this case, the user must follow – and be followed – by the relevant XFactor Twitter account and then DM their vote to the show.

The question of how this will affect phone vote revenues is yet to be explained. But for social TV, dual-screening and Twitter this is a major step towards mass market adoption.

And a final word on social media by Simon Cowell: “The only powerful people now on TV, are the people on Twitter and Facebook.”

Tags: dual screen, dual-screening, heineken star player, simon cowell, social media, social TV, television, TV, xfactor
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Social Media Digest: Facebook Fines, Bitly Brandwatch, Twitter Debt

Friday, October 21st, 2011

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top six:

1. Bitly, the New York City startup best known for its URL shortening service, has released a real-time, reputation-monitoring tool to help brands track trending news about them and sentiment around social-media mentions. The company is also releasing a search product into private beta. Matt LeMay, platform manager at Bitly, first hinted at the new products with a short demo at the monthly NY Tech Meetup in New York City earlier this week. In the demo, Mr. LeMay showed a dashboard that included a chart tracking the sentiment of “Abercrombie” over a period of time.

2. Facebook could face a fine of up to €100,000 (£87,000) after an Austrian law student discovered the social networking site held 1,200 pages of personal data about him, much of which he had deleted. Max Schrems, 24, decided to ask Facebook for a copy of his data in June after attending a lecture by a Facebook executive while on an exchange programme at Santa Clara University in California. Schrems was shocked when he eventually received a CD from California containing messages and information he says he had deleted from his profile in the three years since he joined the site.

3. Google+ now counts 40million users, it has been confirmed today. The site, which featured in one of our blog posts this week, is moving foward with its plans for logged-in search to rival its web-nemesis Facebook. We’re sure that as the war between the internet’s biggest players hots up, there’ll be an increasing number of stats thrown around, but for the time being we think 40 million users in just a few months is pretty good going!

4. LINKEDIN has launched its online professional networking service in Japanese, the first Asian language platform for the rapidly growing company as it pushes to expand in the region. Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn also established a small Tokyo office, following the opening of its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore in May. Arvind Rajan, head of LinkedIn’s Asia operations, described Japan as a key market for the company because of its technologically sophisticated workforce. LinkedIn hopes that the lessons learned in Japan will ultimately translate into new offerings for the rest of the world.

5. Debt collectors are to be banned from hounding people through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, a consumer watchdog said on Wednesday. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has updated its Debt Collection Guidance to reflect new methods of communication, to prevent people suffering the ’stress and embarrassment’ of having their money troubles made public. A spokesman for the OFT said that contacting debtors through social networking sites was a new take on the old method of placing a postcard through the door.

6. Lastly, here’s our ‘infographic’ for this week – the history of the iPhone (below):

CNET UK Presents: History of the iPhone, dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs from Drew Stearne on Vimeo.

Tags: Bitly, Facebook, Google, linkedin, social media, Twitter
Posted in social media | No Comments »

Social Media Digest:Kred launch, Heinz Facebook and Hacking

Friday, October 7th, 2011

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1. The BBC is planning a news gatherer app that will let ‘citizen journalists’ file stories directly from their phones, which can be on the air within minutes. Theoretically, the ”news gatherer app” will be able to feed user-generated content into the BBC’s content-management system, which is then edited by editorial staff and aired within minutes of submission. The app is scheduled to launch using the HTML5-based web language to minimise reliance on specific handset operating systems, such as Apple iOS or Google’s Android, although a roadmap for the product is unclear.

2. Heinz has launched a new Facebook app that enables fans of the Heinz page to send personalized messages, such as ‘Get Well Soon’ to friends and family, all printed within the iconic branding of a Heinz soup tin. Of course, the added bonus is that the recipient gets to eat the contents of the tin, which, if chicken soup, is bound to make them feel better instantly!

3. Peoplebrowser have launched a new indexing service called Kred, which it hopes will challenge the supremacy of Klout and Peerindex. Peoplebrowsr says that brands aren’t as interested in influence as they’re interested in reach. Kred creates a collective reach for a range of different topics, sorted by communities. For example, your Twitter Bio data is used to define communities and then Peoplebrowsr calculates a combined influence and outreach level score for that community.

4. News this week that technological pioneer and figurehead/founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, had died was the leading story for many of the world’s media. That many people read of his death using their iPhone, iPad or Macbook is testament to his influence and how much Apple has shaped the way we interact with one another and the world around us.

5. A survey has revealed that three out of every 10 teenagers have had their Facebook,Twitter or MySpace accounts hacked into – and almost half are left upset by the experience. Hackers have impersonated the people who own the profiles, or spy on them, by sifting through messages – and most of the time the victims know who has logged on as them. Interestingly, however, of those who have been impersonated and attacked a high number are not concerned by the breach of privacy, according to the research.

Tags: Facebook, Klout, kred, MySpace, PeerIndex, social media, steve jobs, Twitter
Posted in social media | 1 Comment »

Social Media Digest: Tumblr valued, Instagram grows, Flickr Android

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1. Rumours abound that the Google Drive is getting nearer. The Google Drive, which will use native syncing software, will be able to sync files across a range of devices including computers and mobile devices. With the Google Drive sync app, users will be able to drag and drop a file and immediately access that file on other devices. The Google Drive is expected to be located at drive.google.com, which is not currently live. Google currently provides users with an always increasing amount of free storage for Gmail, Google Docs, Picassa, and the other Google services. It is expected that the Google Drive will also provide users with a set amount of storage for free and allow the purchase of additional storage if needed.

2. Tumblr has announced $85m in new funding, which indicates a valuation of about $800m for the fast-growing multimedia blogging site. The investment adds Tumblr to the list of high-growth social media companies that are generating high levels of investor interest before they have generated proven revenues, and in spite of the recent stock market volatility that has forced companies such as Zynga and Groupon to delay their initial offerings.

3. Instagram has announced that it is signing up 78 users every minute. Co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom says Instagram hit a new peak upload record on Monday with 26 photos uploaded every second. In less than a year since launching, Instagram has amassed more than 10 million users, including celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Justin Bieber; comparatively, Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, all hot start-ups at one point, each took over two years to reach the same 10 million user mark.

4.Flickr has unveiled its official Android app, as well as a new feature known as Photo Session that will allows users to share photostreams in real-time. The Android app, available now, lets users take photos, enhance them with one of 10 optional filters, and then post them on social-networking sites like Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. Before you take a photo, you can adjust camera settings with options like flash, ratio selection, and shutter focus. Once photos are uploaded, you can view them by swiping through a set or tapping to view in full screen or slideshow mode.

5. Our latest infographic (right) shows the incresing importance of loyalty schemes in the social media sphere.

Tags: flickr, Google Drive, Instagram, social media, Tumblr
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Social Media Digest: Facebook changes, Julpan sale and White House Linkedin

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1. Facebook unveiled big changes yesterday in California, including a music service that lets you listen to your friends’ music ‘live’ – but so far, this seems to have largely succeeded in goading its 750 million users into a fury. Users have been infuriated by this week’s overhaul of the site – with some likening it to the disastrous update to news site Digg that led to a wave of protest and a spate of resignations. Dozens of Facebook groups have been set up to protest the changes – some with thousands of members.

2. Internet start-up company Julpan, which specializes in sifting important data from blogs and tweets, has been bought by Twitter. Julpan was founded last year by Ori Allon, the Israel-born computer scientist who created a highly-praised “Orion” search engine. Google bought the rights to Orion in 2006 and incorporated it into its technology. Allon worked at Google until leaving to start Julpan. Allon’s latest venture, based in New York, was devoted to insightfully determining in real time what people are sharing with social networking services and tools.

3. President Barack Obama is again turning to a social networking website to host a town hall meeting. The White House says Obama will be in the San Francisco Bay area city of Mountain View on Monday to answer questions. The White House announced the meeting on Tuesday. It did not disclose an exact time for the event but said it will be broadcast live on LinkedIn and the White House’s website.

4. According to a recent blog post from 1000Memories, the company estimates that Facebook currently houses over 140 billion photos uploaded by users, a figure that’s 10,000 times larger than all the photos housed by the Library of Congress. Based off a figure from a Facebook engineer earlier this year, the social network oversees more than 200 million photos uploaded per day, approximately 6 billion per month. Techcrunch also reported that Facebook users uploaded an estimated 750 million photos over the New Year’s holiday earlier this year.

5. We’ve released our Social Media Hall of Fame, which documents what we feel are 50 of the best social media campaigns from around the world. You can read more about them here, but if you think we’ve missed any out, please let us know by emailing social@umpf.co.uk.

Tags: Facebook, hall of fame, linkedin, social media, Twitter
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