I am constantly on the look out for free tools that can assist me with social media monitoring for the brands I work with, and today I was pleased to discovers Digg’s recently launched Newswire.  It is a social news discovery tool which helps you find the latest and most popular news items on Digg.  What is great about it is you can refine your results by trending and recent news items, topics (like science and sports), amount of Diggs, and media type (images, video or text), so making it easier to find what you are looking for.

Whilst it is no way near as sophisticated and comprehensive as paid for monitoring tools such as Brandwatch, Newswire (and Digg to an extent) is definitely a step in the right direction if you want to embark on the ever valuable social media monitoring.  I will most certainly start digging.

I have been researching tools that can help me along the way. North Social (see recent blog post) certainly offer a great and cost effective service, and I recently came across Socialbakers Page Analytics which appears to be a very handy tool when it comes to keeping track of what your competitors are doing on Facebook. My only issue is the cost. I don’t really see much point investing in this tool unless you go for the ‘Multi 20′ plan, but as a SME an additional $400 per month isn’t going to be possible.  I remain hopeful, however, that something a little more in our price brand will be on offer soon.

Have a look at what the key features Socialbakers Page Analytics tool offers.  Quite a nice video too

They offer apps which can be used and branded on any Facebook pages, ranging from customised landing/welcome pages, exclusive Fans’ deals and coupons, and online surveys. Whilst you still need to have some design skills to create your own banners etc, with a pay-as-you-go pricing model and a starting price of $19.oo per month, North Social apps will enable the mass to become effective Facebook marketeers!

Watch their ‘Custom Facebook Pages For All’ video to get an idea of what’s on offer.

Source: this article has been taken from new media age

Fashion brand Guess is launching a mobile app which rewards loyalty card members with offers based on their Facebook Likes.

The fashion brand will then send its loyalty card members deals and offers based on what they have Liked on Facebook, as well as their location.

Mike Relich, EVP, CIO and strategy for Guess, said, “Facebook is the best CRM database because it is self maintaining. If I can combine that with the actual purchase behaviour of customers, imagine how powerful it can be? The possibility of reaching customers via social media is so much greater than email.”

Guess will encourage loyalty programme customers to download the app by giving them points once they download and sign in with their Facebook details.

Guess also said it was looking into mobile payments and commerce via Google Wallets and near filed communication (NFC).

The Drum, a magazine reporting on the latest in creative marketing and media in the UK, did a (front page!) feature on Under the Hood.  Scanned copies of the article below, but you can see, hear and use the outputs of the event at our website: http://www.line.uk.com/underthehood

Enabling people to target content more specifically will have, I predict, greater word of mouth marketing potenital for brands than the ‘Like’ button has, especially within the tourism industry.  With people spending months researching and planning holidays online, they can now easily share content with specific friends and family through Facebook.  I’m looking forward to see what the uptake is like.

The user experience is great – all you need to do is choose the timeframe you wish to view your social activity, and in one simple click the app is “gathering your memories”. It takes a couple of minutes to do so, after which a beautifully designed 28 page book is generated.

The app analyses your basic information, such as amount of friends and you relationship status, but it also highlights activity such as your most frequently used work (mine is “just”), most popular picture and status.  If I’m being honest, I was quite touched by it, as some of the reports highlighted significant parts of my life.  As a result, I ended up purchasing the hardcopy of the book.

Everyone uses Facebook for different reasons, but for me, this app confirmed that my activity and content on Facebook really does signify my real world reality.

This article first appeared on Girl Geek Scotland Blog

Article below

Time magazine ran a thought provoking article this week titled “To Tweet or Not to Tweet”. Written by Zachary Karabell, who calls his column “The Curious Capitalist”, he puts forward an interesting thesis summed up roughly as this: the haves still have, the have-nots still don’t; and right now, the have-nots are those who aren’t reaping the myriad benefits of social media.

He breaks it down roughly as follows: Though the economy is still troubled, there is one area that is thriving, and that is social media. You can’t swing a cat these days without hitting a startup or an angel investor; money’s being made hand over fist; and industries as unique to each other as education is to home electronics are embracing social media and actively engaging their peers, their employees, and their communities. Hooray, right? Not quite. Because for all the benefits that social media can bring professionally and/or personally, there is an underclass that are being left behind. Society’s low wage earners, and the less educated.

He calls it “economic bifurcation”. Those that can afford the best, get better. Those that can’t, don’t. And he quotes a recent Pew Foundation study which found only 45% of American adults making less than $30,000 per year have access to broadband, which is an issue, he says, because broadband is an essential component to accessing content-rich social media effectively.

True, it’s difficult to physically pinpoint the return on the explosive growth of social media. Whether or not it is directly improving the economic prospects of your country/citizens or company/employees is often hotly debated. But what are we really to make of the statistic quoted above? And haven’t there always been deep divides – that were eventually bridged – when game changing advancements in technology and lifestyle occurred? Let’s take a look at a few of the biggies.

When the automobile started rolling out the factory doors, its popular adoption created an ease of mobility and spin off opportunities on a scale never known before. Yes, making cars put money into many other areas of manufacturing, and put a lot of people to work. No one would argue that once reliable, affordable transportation became the norm, people’s living habits and social customs were changed forever. But, the automobile began its life as a rare toy for the very rich. It took decades before the Ford Motor Company developed the affordable Model T. Once they did though, it sold in the millions, and the family car became as commonplace as owning a telephone is today.

Many people compare the rise of social media to that of the telephone. Twitter and Facebook are often seen by naysayers as nothing more than a vehicle for nattering with your pals about the latest gossip. Which is exactly what the telephone was once derided as being. It’s ironic that most people are Twittering away today on their smartphones! But, it took decades for the telephone to become as ubiquitous as it is now. At the turn of the 20th century only 1.4 million telephones served a population of 76 million Americans, even though the technology was introduced commercially over 20 years earlier. In fact, the telephone took nearly 60 years to become commonplace. Of course, some of that lag was due to difficulty in developing the infrastructure, but some of it was also due to simple accessibility. People in rural or outlying areas  – an entire class of people – were generally the last to benefit from an innovation that provided security, safety, and the ability to communicate in real time with others. Yet today, you would be hard pressed to find a household that didn’t have a telephone (or three!), no matter where you live or what your income.

The article’s title, “To Tweet or Not to Tweet”, is an obvious hat tip to that great English bard, William Shakespeare. And William Shakespeare’s works wouldn’t be torturing high school students today had it not been for another innovation that enhanced the world socially and economically – the invention of the printing press. While people since the beginning of time had used various archaic methods of ‘communication’, Gutenberg’s 15th century press changed how people became informed about issues. Prior to mass printing, the common man relied heavily on the church, government, or the ruling classes for news. This new way to access and share information allowed people to make up their own minds about what was going on in the world around them. It gave them knowledge, which gave them power, and ultimately, a certain freedom. But, having something printed was an expensive endeavour. When Gutenberg’s famous printed bibles were sold at a Frankfurt book fair, they cost the equivalent of three years pay for the average clerk of that day. Again, a revolutionary medium of communication and opportunity was reserved – initially – for the wealthy and well connected.

Fast forward to our day and age now. Karabell himself touches on the similarities between today’s new world of social media and the “new world” of the World Wide Web some 20 odd years ago. Back then people questioned whether Netscape and the web were enhancing the economy – and by extension society – or just providing a new way to goof off at the office. For those who had an office to go to, of course! In 1990 only 3 million’ish people worldwide had access to the internet. But, in less than 20 years, the number of worldwide internet users surpassed one billion.

So what’s the moral of all these comparisons and statistics? Time is the great equalizer. Historically, the latest and greatest advancements have always been available first to the wealthiest or best connected. It may not be fair, but it’s fact. But these days, as technological advances continue at such an astounding rate, the pace of the catch-up game has gone from turtle to breakneck. And the so called ‘have nots’, in the world of social media at least, won’t be lagging behind for long.

This article first appeared on the Radian 6 blog

Working in collaboration with the Festivals Innovation Lab, we created a data visualisation event, Under the Hood, on 16th April 2011 at Inspace which showcased and explored the innovative ways in which the arts and digital sectors can collaborate.  Taking part was two developers, two audio producers, a flash animator/designer, and a illustrator and painter.

The theme of the day was ‘Edinburgh: Festivals City’, and using the data set of the festivals events listings from 2010, the participants went about interpreting and extracting pieces of the data. The output? A combination of practical and accessible data in the form of a Google heat map of Edinburgh during specific days and times in August 2010 showing the busiest locations, a piece of music, portraits determined by specific variables, and an animation which highlighted festival activity throughout the 2010.

The Under the Hood website provides further info into the participants approach, and we will be updating the site with content from the day, so I would recommend you have a look and check back soon.  In the meantime, have a listen to the audio piece produced by Bartosz and Alex…

Paranoise & DFRNT – Under The Hood [rough master]

Whilst the design is pretty cool (see screeshot below), and rather impressive in terms of what you normally see on YouTube channels, the game and experience itself is really not very exciting.  Firstly, it takes a good while to load.  Secondly, if you are using your keyboard to control the game, your fingers get sore very, very quickly. Last but not least, does the fun really last anything more than a matter of seconds? No.

You certainly need to give Bic props for trying to push the boat out in terms of doing something interesting with their online advertising, but I don’t think they quite achieved what they could of.  However, since Tipp-Ex launched the brilliant “A hunter shoots a bear” campaign last year that enables the audience to define what the character in the YouTube video does to the bear (within reason), I think our expectations have been raised in terms of interactive YouTube adverts.  Let’s have a watch of the fantastic video again. Entertains me every time!