BuzzFeed is the creation of Jonah Peretti, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab with an expertise in content that is likely to be “liked.” He took those skills to The Huffington Post, where he was the wizard in back of the curtain, brewing a bubbling cauldron of tatty celebrity news and goofy cat shots behind a front page of serious news and commentary. Using search optimization, he knew what people wanted almost before they did.
via At BuzzFeed, the Significant and the Silly – NYTimes.com.
Among the things the Huffington Post did that helped make it a social-news behemoth was to integrate Facebook’s open platform (then called Facebook Connect) into the site almost as soon as it was launched — something that immediately allowed readers to see what articles their friends had read, shared and commented on. That drove millions of readers to the site, and also boosted the number of comments by over 50 percent. And the site has also integrated virtually every other sharing tool known to man to make it easy for readers to share, and even come up with some of its own.
via How the Huffington Post became a new-media behemoth — Tech News and Analysis.
Compared to 2009–2010, the usage of blogs, online video in social media, message/bulletin boards, podcasting and Myspace were all down. There was also a 50% decrease from 2010 in Inc. 500 companies who said they used no social media marketing tools.
Social Media Tools Currently Used by Inc. 500 Companies, 2009-2011 (% of respondents)
via Correlating Social Media Success with Marketer Usage – eMarketer.
The Most Annoying Tweet Imaginable, in other words, would be overly long. It would contain stale information. It would #totally #overuse #hashtags. It would be excessively personal. It would be aggressively mundane. It would be whiny. All this, at least, according to a new study, released today, that explores what we like in our tweets — and what we find really, really off-putting. “Who Gives a Tweet: Evaluating Microblog Content Value” is the culmination of a year’s worth of analysis conducted by the researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech as they set to find out what separates value from vagary in a Twitter post. Last year, the team created a site, Who Gives a Tweet — essentially, a Hot or Not for microcontent — that asked users to designate a selection of tweets according to the emotional responses they provoked “positive,” “neutral,” “negative”. And then, intriguingly, to explain those responses in their own words. The team, with the help of Mechanical Turk, then analyzed the 43,000 crowdsourced responses they’d collected from the site, looking for patterns and takeaways that might help the rest of us to become better, more crowd-pleasing members of the Twittersphere.
via Be Better at Twitter: The Definitive, Data-Driven Guide – Megan Garber – Technology – The Atlantic.
As marketers include social media as part of their overall strategy, 97% agree that it provides benefits and value to their business.
In a survey of more than 700 marketers worldwide, 88% of respondents told Wildfire Interactive, a social media marketing software company, that social media helps grow brand awareness. Social media also benefited marketers by allowing them to engage in dialogue (85%) and increase sales and partnerships (58%). An additional 41% of marketers said it helped reduce costs.
via Marketers Value Social Media for Both Branding and Customer Acquisition – eMarketer.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Georgia Tech joined forces to get a sense of how most tweets go over. They created a website called Who Gives a Tweet? that was sort of like a Hot or Not for tweets: Users were promised feedback on their tweets if they agreed to anonymously rate tweets for people they already follow.Over 19 days in December and January, 1,443 visitors to the site rated 43,738 tweets from 2,014 accounts.The verdict? Respondents liked 36% of the tweets, disliked 25% and ranked their reaction to the remaining 39% as neutral. “A well-received tweet is not all that common,” Michael Bernstein, a doctoral student at MIT who worked on the project, wrote in a blog post. “A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons.”
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau Spain’s (IAB Spain) November 2011 report “III Estudio Sobre Redes Sociales en Internet,” social network penetration increased to 75% in Spain in October 2011, a 7-percentage-point jump over 2010.
Facebook was the first choice for most users, followed by YouTube, Tuenti and, new to the 2011 study, Twitter.
The bad news from Webtrends, however: Facebook’s GraphRank algorithm filters out content from brand pages that doesn’t engage users, and posts using language such as “percent off,” “coupon,” and “sale” result in the lowest engagement levels, leaving them in danger of being filtered out of users’ news feeds.
This prompted the company to create the Sociability Index, which examines click-through rates and cost per click to determine what type of content is “fun to talk about.”
One tip from Webtrends is:
Industries with low Sociability Index ratings need to carefully consider their ad topic in order to gain better CTR. For instance, if an insurance company sponsors a big football game, an ad for fans that highlights the game will prove better CTR than if the ad is directly selling insurance.
How To Deal With Tech Media at Mike Butcher.
A great reminder 🙂
The use of internal social media within organizations is significantly increasing as C-level executives are recognizing the power internal social media can bring to their bottom line.
To better understand the value of social media in the workplace, APCO Worldwide and Gagen MacDonald recently surveyed 1,000 U.S. employees, and built a model that quantifies the factors that characterize effective programs and the impact those programs have on the bottom line.
Some significant findings include:
58% of employees would rather work at a company that uses ISM effectively, and 86% would refer others for employment
60% of employees say use of internal social media demonstrates innovation
61% of employees say their companies’ social media tools help them collaborate
39% of employees are more likely to recommend their company’s products and services
60% of employees are more likely to support their company when in crisis, and 67% are more likely to support the company’s public policy priorities