Archive for the ‘Social’ Category

In a video interview with Bloomberg News, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner reiterated the company’s growth plans, including adding hundreds of employees — in part, to cope with rapid growth in India, Brazil and China – and making acquisitions that would enable it to grow its mobile footprint.

He said the company still has $76 million it raised in 2008.

The video is here.

Marketing and advertising agency Access to Media, has published a lengthy series of video-prevalent blog posts about BP,  and the response to bad publicity. There are also tips here on how to have a social-media presence that doesn’t hurt your brand, entertaining looks at social marketing mistakes, and links to resources that help you market to specific generations.

We were slightly amused that the first point, Checking it Twice, included a typo in the written guidance. Perhaps a third time would have been the charm here.

What should be worrisome to newspaper publishers is Read the rest of this entry »

Associated Northcliffe Digital, the consumer digital arm of DMGT, has reached 100 sites in the hyperlocal LocalPeople network within its first year and aims to double that within 12 months.

LocalPeople sites feature user-generated content and community publishers as well as content from existing Northcliffe titles where they exist. The sites also serve to take the company into areas where no Northcliffe title has a base and are all run with a community focus and make their money from local ads sold by a dedicated team of 12 reps.

“Our focus is providing small businesses with a way of reaching a really local audience” said Roland Bryan, managing director of LocalPeople. “The targeted nature of our sites means that our advertisers can achieve this at reasonable cost with low wastage.”

According to the company the network has 330,000 unique users a month.

Experian Hitwise statistics show social networks attracted more traffic in May than search engines. Social networks accounted for 11.9 percent of U.K. Internet visits, compared with 11.3 percent of visits to search engines. Read the rest of this entry »

AutoTrader Classics just launched its Lost Weekend with My Car contest in conjunction with its new Lost Weekend TV spot. The contest is virally marketed primarily on Facebook.

According to AutoTrader.com’s affiliate marketing specialist Lizzy Vincent, the contest is a test run, an attempt to find out just who the audience for AutoTrader Classics contests is. So far, what they’re discovering is that the site’s target ages, 35-50ish, are participating, primarily through Facebook.  In fact, the social site is the only means users have of voting for the contest winners. Read the rest of this entry »

For media affiliated with IAC’s Match.com for their personals, the joining of the approximately4 million users of Yahoo Personals with the approximately 5 million on Match.com is a big marketing plus. Those who head to personals.Yahoo.com are now redirected to Yahoo.Match.com, and the site is branded to both. While this is a new event for the U.S., the UK and Germany versions have been live for about a year now, as we reported back in July 2009.

Yahoo Personals has actually been up for sale for about a year, according to PaidContent, who also wrote that outsourcing has been Yahoo’s strategy for many of its properties, including Yahoo Health to Healthline Networks and Yahoo Shopping to PriceGrabber. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re using Facebook to virally market your products or services, or those of your advertisers, you’ll be glad to know that the social giant has just improved your tracking capability.

You’ll be able to see much more data than you could before, including the traffic coming to an application via ad referrals. New graphs make analysis easier than ever. Developers have considerably more access to the Facebook platform, enabling their own or a third-party’s full analysis.

Here’s the whole story from Facebook.

As social takes on an increasingly important role in people’s lives, with Facebook the number one choice for most, Yahoo jumps full force into social. This might well be a very good thing for its Newspaper Consortium partners.

In accordance with its mission to be the center of people’s lives, Yahoo just announced several social integrations, the first of which is Facebook.   Anyone registered with both Yahoo and Facebook can now link her or his account, and updates will be viewable on either sites. Facebook’s news feed will be visible on the Yahoo home page and in Yahoo mail.  Anyone who creates content, or just shares it via Yahoo News or sport, or Flickr, omg, and other Yahoo places can share what they see and add via Facebook.

courtesy of TechCrunch

Read the rest of this entry »

AutoTrader.com, learning that 45 percent of car shoppers start their search with both new and used cars, and that this search includes both the heart and mind, launched its new Heart & Mind ad campaign, including broadcast, Internet and social media elements.

“A key finding in our research for this campaign is that having a large inventory by itself is less important to consumers than it was in the past,” Mark Scott, senior manager, media relations for AutoTrader.com told us by e-mail. “What consumers really want is information and choices, and this is a result of the prolonged economic downturn which has made all purchases – especially big ticket ones like cars – subject to a lot of thinking and second guessing among consumers.  So while most people now know that AutoTrader.com has millions of cars listed for sale, we want a key takeaway from this campaign to be that in addition to lots of cars, AutoTrader.com has the information, articles, special price deals and research & compare functionality so that when you do finally decide on a car, you’ll just know and feel that it’s the right one.

Broadcast spots will run on ABC, ESPN, TNT, MTV, VH1, Spike, Lifetime and HGTV. Web ads will be shown on NASCAR.com, Slate, YouTube, Yahoo Sports, Facebook and several others.

AutoTrader.com will also soon launch its “Decide My Ride” Facebook application. Consumers will be able to choose up to four cars they’re considering to buy and ask their friends to help them choose.

Prior to this launch AutoTrader.com has been hinting at the campaign on Twitter and Facebook. Here’s some of what the social world is now saying about the campaign.