Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

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.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.

The Reynolds and Reynolds Company just announced its new MyShowroom mobile marketing feature. The Reynolds Web Solutions  product enables dealerships to easily display their new and used vehicle inventories on Facebook. The MyShowroom app automatically displays vehicles on the dealership’s Facebook fan page for consumers to browse.

To see an example of the fan page at work we visited Reynolds and Reynolds’ Facebook fan page. When we clicked on My Showroom we were directed to the landing page of Kettering Ohio’s Open Road Motors, a Toyota dealership. There we had the choice of viewing new or used inventory. We saw a Google map of the dealership location and the make, model, year, price and photos of four featured vehicles. A drill down of any vehicle gave up a zoomed photo and all the details without leaving Facebook.  

“The marketing adage of ‘be where your customers are’ has never been more important to dealerships,” said Trey Hiers, VP, Corporate Marketing, at Reynolds, in the announcement.  “As the economy begins to show signs of recovery, dealers increasingly are looking for ways to create as many touch points as possible to market their products and services and attract consumers to their dealerships. With more than 100 million people in the U.S. actively using Facebook, MyShowroom provides another easy and cost-effective way for dealerships to extend the reach of their advertising and position themselves first in the minds of consumers.”

The MyShowroom feature is part of Reynolds Web Solutions’ Mobile Pro for WebMakerX 2.0 which also enables SMS and mobile delivery of inventory.

If you visit the home page of photo-sharing site Divvyshot the first thing you’ll see is the announcement of the Facebook acquisition. Owners Sam Odio, Michael Yuan and Paul Carduner describe the acquisition of their less-than-a-year old San Francisco-based site as an offer they couldn’t refuse.

What makes Divvyshot different is that the photos and albums uploaded by individuals are categorized not by the photographers but by the events. Multiple users and their photos are gathered together under event headings.

“Facebook recently reached out to us about acquiring Divvyshot,” announced Odio, Yuan and Carduner. “The more we’ve learned about the team, their direction, and their product, the more excited we’ve become about this opportunity.  We’re thrilled to work with some of the most talented engineers in the world in a dynamic and fun environment. The choice was easy. Facebook is well known as a company where engineers are given the resources and freedom to build cool stuff and, as a result, the only place where we felt that we would fit in.”

Divvyshot will begin to wind down in two weeks, when event creation will be disabled. The acquisition will finalize in six weeks. The three-person Divvyshot team will be retained by Facebook.

David Fischer, VP of Global Online Sales & Operations for Google, who was heading up the search giant’s local efforts, is moving to Facebook. All Things Digital just broke the news that he’ll be Facebook’s VP of advertising and global operations.  

 “It’s a testament to Facebook’s expanding opportunities in advertising that we’re able to welcome an executive of David’s caliber,” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said, in an internal memo. “I have worked closely with David over the years and witnessed his passion, energy, and effectiveness at building teams on a global scale. David’s arrival deepens our operational capabilities so we can build upon our ability to serve advertisers, regardless of size or location, that are building their brands on Facebook.”

It is clear that Fischer is being brought in to strengthen leadership in advertising operations, sources with knowledge of the situation told All Things Digital, who also surmised that bringing in this advertising guru lets others at Facebook focus on its “inevitable journey to an IPO in 2011 or 2012.”

Google has lost several others to Facebook. These include Facebook VP of global communications Elliot Schrage, online and inside sales director Grady Burnett, global operations director Don Faul, and Ethan Beard, director of the company’s developer network.

Experian Hitwise just reported that Facebook climbed over Google’s back to take over the number one spot on the U.S. list of most visited Web sites for the week ending March 13. Facebook’s market share also increased by 185 percent from the same week in 2009. Google, in contrast, only jumped its visits YOY by 9 percent.

Taken together, 14 percent of all US-originating Internet visits went to one of these two massive online players.

Another interesting Hitwise report looked at how much Twitter, Facebook and Google News drove users to news and media Web sites. Twitter.com accounted for 0.14 percent , Facebook drove 3.65 percent, and Google News only delivered 1.27 percent.  The Huffington Post got the most traffic from Twitter users who were looking for news and media sites. The next nine, from the highest-trafficked on down, were CNN.com, The New York Times, People Magazine, Google News, Drudge Report, Digg, The Weather Channel, MSNBC and Yahoo News.

By Michael Kaczmarek

The Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies (DST) will focus in the near future on investments in social media. DST plans to invest in the next five years more than $1 billion in social Web companies around the world, mostly outside Russia, DST-CEO Yuri Milner said in an interview. Currently, some 50 companies are monitored for potential investment opportunities. The next investment should be announced this summer, Yuri said.

DST became globally known last year when it obtained more than 5 percent stake in the world’s largest social network, Facebook. DST owns the most-visited Russian online portal, Mail.ru, the Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru and it has a significant minority stake in the Russian social network Vkontakte.ru. Also, DST owns the leading social network in Poland, Nasza-Klasa.pl, and the social networks One.lv (Latvian) and One.lt (Lithuanian).

DST also made major investments in the online-gaming business. In December, Mail.ru acquired Astrum Online Entertainment, the largest developer and operator of MMO games in Russia. In the same period, DST invested more than $90 million in the world’s largest social-gaming company Zynga, maker of Farmville, Mafia Wars and other wildly popular games on Facebook. 

DST owns also the leading Russian e-recruitment company HeadHunter (hh.ru).

Step right up, buy a few friends or fans at the low low price of 20 cents. Or buy in bulk and get 5000 buds for only 13 cents apiece. This is the offer of uSocial.net of Brisbane, Australia.

Leon Hill, its founder, came up with the idea after getting booted out of Digg for an appalling venture. On Digg.com USocial was asking just under $100 to vote 100 times for a client’s chosen story. If a client wanted 1000 votes they paid $700. Though Hill’s claim for dropping out of Digg “site” a few months later was more clients than he could handle, the more likely scenario is as Digg claimed: They ordered him to stop.

Now USocial faces the same restraint from Facebook executives. While Hill told Associated Press that the USocial practice of manually logging in to a client’s profile or creating one,  and seeking out people who are a good fit for the client’s products or services without saying it’s not the client is not violating any Facebook terms of service, Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt disagreed.  ”Buying and selling of actions that are supposed to be taken by a user are certainly, we would argue, not authentic,” he told AP.  Now Facebook is saying that anyone caught sharing her or his password with a third party could have her account shut down.

While USocial’s Digg practice of selling votes was unethical, we’re not sure who is acting the least appropriately in this “Friends and Fans Fiasco” – Facebook or USocial. This could simply be seen as hiring a contractor to handle your profile, just as book have ghostwriters, for example. Do OnStar’s outsourcers answer the phone “OnStar” or “Sitel, outsourcer for OnStar?” And do we care?

Facebook has little right to say with whom you can share your password. Just as with the recent high-handed LinkedIn “limit your connections to 30,000″ decision, one must wonder if Facebook is considering its profilers or its wallet.

Dick Costolo, former Google product manager and CEO of Feedburner, a Google acquisition,  is Twitter’s new COO, effective next week.  This follows closely on the heels of a VentureBeat announcement by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone that his company is exploring commercial directories and analytics tools as possible money-makers for the text-focused social site. It might also be in response to Facebook nipping at Twitter heels with its own FriendFeed acquisition.

Twitter would seem to be eminently monetizable. According to new research from the Kamaron Institute eight out of ten tweeters are using the product for business purposes. ComScore has reported 44.5 million Twitter users worldwide, with 7 million new tweeters in one month.

Facebook has just announced its acquisition of online sharing service FriendFeed, with all 12 FF employees staying with the firm.  ”Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, in the announcement. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

We use FriendFeed happily as well, primarily as a delivery-assist for Twitter posts, and almost certainly Facebook is taking on Twitter with this acquisition.

Not everyone is enamored with FriendFeed, however, and it really never caught on with the mainstream social public. “If [FriendFeed competitor] Posterous makes micro-blogging quick, easy and useful, FriendFeed is at the complete other end of the spectrum, filling your data stream with lots of noise, data, and in this author’s opinion being completely unusable,” wrote Search Engine Land writer and online marketing speaker Michael Gray. “What FriendFeed does is allow you to aggregate all of your social media information into one stream -  all of your tweets from Twitter, links from StumbleUpon, pictures from Flickr, Facebook updates, Blogger posts, and so on – are now in one nice package to share with your friends. On the surface this sounds like a really great idea, but it quickly turns into an unmanageable fire-hose of information. If you have a small group of friends who are active in social media, it quickly becomes so noisy that it becomes impossible to extract the value.”

While the Facebook announcement does not disclose terms, The Wall Street Journal has said that the price tag was $50 million – $15 mil in cash, and the remainder in Facebook stock. Conjecture by BusinessInsider’s Dan Frommer is that FriendFeed will operate as is for awhile, but “it wouldn’t be surprising if Facebook took the best FriendFeed features it doesn’t have already, stuffs them into Facebook, and shuts down the old FriendFeed.”

UPDATE: Shortly after we posted this announcement Tech Crunch posted information on a limited-access Facebook Lite beta – what someone described as a simplified version of Twitter, with comments enabled. Or, come to think of it, a simplified version of FriendFeed. hmmm….

ComScore’s report on top Web sites worldwide for June put social networking king Facebook in fourth place in terms of unique visitors per month, just after Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and ahead of AOL and EBay.

The reasons aren’t hard to discern. During June, Facebook gained 24 million unique visitors for a total of 340 million unique visitors throughout the world. That’s higher than the official number of 250 million active registered users: you don’t have to be registered to visit some of the site’s pages.

During the last year, Facebook grew by 157 percent, adding 208 million visitors.

During June, Facebook had 77 million unique users in the U.S. putting it in 6th place (AOL and Fox Interactive Media joined Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ahead of Facebook in the U.S.).

Here’s the complete list (worldwide numbers):

– Google Sites – 844 million
– Microsoft Sites – 691 million
– Yahoo Sites – 581 million
– Facebook – 340 million
– Wikimedia Foundation sites – 303 million
– AOL – 280 million
– EBay – 233 million
– CBS Interactive – 186 million
– Amazon – 183 million
– Ask Network – 174 million

The Conference Board is an invaluable service for monitoring the economic status of the U.S., particularly in these uncertain times. For AIM Group readers, the organization publishes job information as well as a Consumer Confidence Index.

All that data will now be released immediately via both Facebook and Twitter.

Other Conference Board publications to get the social media treatment:

– Leading Economic Indexes for the United States and nine other countries/regions,
– The Employment Trends Index
– Help-Wanted Online Data Series
– Measure of CEO Confidence

A new job site has raised another $1 million, bringing its total to $3 million. Koda.us calls itself a “social recruitment service” that will bring together social networking and job recruiting. The idea is to be “more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn”.

From the site: “The best organizations want to hire individuals who not only have relevant academics, but also the right skills, strengths, personalities, values and life experiences.”

In a sense, Koda wants to validate what recruiters are already doing: snooping around to gather as much information as they can about a potential hire. Koda will put it all in one place with a positive user-controlled spin.

On the company side, Koda aims to give employers the ability to show off the feel of their corporate culture.

The site entered beta two months ago; it’s been under development for two years.

The site’s biggest competition, of course, are the very sites Koda is trying to bypass – Facebook and LinkedIn. Will job seekers really need another service wedding the two? Unless Koda can figure out a way to import profile information automatically from existing social networks, it may be a tough road, $3 million in the bank or not.

Koda claims to have relationships with some 350 corporations, non-profit organizations and private businesses and already lists several thousand of jobs.

The site is free, although the word “currently” is tacked onto that line in the FAQ.