Tag Archives: social-networks

Now LinkedIn Will Be Featured in a Lot More Apps

LinkedIn has opened up its platform to developers. It can be accessed at developer.linkedin.com . "Over fifty million users entrust their professional identities and relationships with LinkedIn, helping build LinkedIn into the largest global professional network today," says LinkedIn' Adam Nash. "However, professionals around the world use a wide variety of applications and Web sites to get their work done, and they have spoken loud and clear that they want the ability to leverage their professional networks wherever they work." Now developers can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications. LinkedIn's developer site has APIs and widgets. "Over the past months, LinkedIn has supported integrations with some of the most prominent and critical software applications in the enterprise," says Nash. "Partnerships with companies like IBM, Blackberry (Research in Motion), and most recently Microsoft, have given us time to invest in both functionality and scalability of the platform." Developers interested in using LinkedIn in their apps need only fill out a form at the site. The LinkedIn platform leverages the open OAuth standard, so integrations should be that much more simple. On a related note, Twitter client TweetDeck is already utilzing the LinkedIn platform . They just announced that you can view or take action on your LinkedIn network updates from within the TweetDeck application. It should be interesting to see the kinds of apps that start taking advantage of LinkedIn's APIs. This could turn out to be a very significant event for increasing business networking, and even matching prospective job candidates with jobs. Related Articles: > LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook To Forge Ties > LinkedIn Tests a New Design > LinkedIn, Twitter Connect Through Status Updates Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged adam nash, business applications, developers, linked, microsoft, professional, related articles, review and story, social-networks, widgets, work | Leave a comment

“What’s Happening” with Twitter?

There's a lot of change going on with Twitter these days. Recently we got the highly-anticipated Lists feature , which helped us to organize our streams and discover new, interesting people to follow. Then Twitter began rolling out its retweet button feature , which seemed like something that had been strangely missing from the service for a long time, but has ultimately caused something of an uproar among some of its users who don't like the way it was implemented. Now Twitter has gone so far as to change the text above the field from which users update their statuses. In fact the reason for this is that Twitter is no longer simply about updating one's status. "Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service—an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life by sending and receiving short, frequent answers to one question, 'What are you doing?'" explains Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone. "However, when we implemented the service, we chose to leave something out. To stay simple, Twitter did not require individuals to confirm relationships. Instead, we left things open." "People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, "What's happening?" A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive," he adds. So that's what Twitter now asks you: "What's happening?" It's no longer "What are you doing?" It's hard to miss the practicality of the change, especially after reading Stone's comments on it. But you can't make changes to a popular service without people finding a reason not to like it. This move will probably not cause the controversy that the retweet feature has caused, simply because it does nothing to alter Twitter's functionality. In fact, I'm sure many will agree with the company that "What's Happening?" really is the better question. I'm almost certain that a much greater amount of people will respond with a complete lack of caring. Stone closed his explanation of the change fittingly with the following statement: "We don't expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter, but maybe it'll make it easier to explain to your dad." Related Articles: > Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged button feature, controversy, ingenuity, life, social-media, social-networks, statuses, traffic, tweeting, twitter, uproar | Leave a comment

You May Get More Traffic from Twitter Than You Realize

If you use Twitter or create content, you have probably figured out by now that it can be a great tool for driving traffic to your site. There are measures you can take to expand this if your content is not bringing in the Twitter traffic on its own. Is Twitter a significant traffic source for your site? Comment here . If you're not seeing much traffic from Twitter, there is a chance it's coming in anyway, and you're just not aware of it. For that matter, if you are getting a lot of traffic from Twitter, you may be getting even more than you thought. Stan Pugsley, director of business intelligence for iCrossing says that nearly 70% of referral traffic from Twitter goes unmeasured, particularly if you are using web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Omniture. "The problem is not with the web analytics tools, but with the Twitter applications like Tweetdeck and Twhirl that are not based in an Internet Browser," explains Pugsley. "When a user clicks through a link in a tweet, those applications do not register a referring URL that can be picked up by the destination website. It appears that they are coming directly to the site. According to TweetStats, only 31.7% of tweets originate from twitter.com, and those are the visitors that can be tracked back to tweets." Pugsley suggests testing this for yourself, by installing a twitter app like Tweetdeck, installing the Live HTTP headers plug-in for Firefox, and clicking through the URL in a tweet, then looking at the referrer. His observation about missing Twitter traffic stats is not a new one, but probably still a topic that gets overlooked frequently. Back in the summer, Danny Sullivan wrote a couple of articles for Search Engine Land tackling the subject. These dig in quite a bit further. If you feel like you are being shortchanged on your Twitter traffic, these are required reading. As far as simply increasing your traffic from Twitter, here are a few tips: 1. Include some kind of Twitter/tweet button on your content. 2. Abide by this equation, or at least the principle behind it. 3. Make your Twitter presence known throughout your site 4. Use your Twitter presence along with your site on business cards, signatures, etc. 5. Actively engage on Twitter. 6. Tweet your own content. If they're following you, they must be interested in what you have to say (that doesn't mean to just Tweet ads and sales pitches. Tweet useful information). 7. Include ways to share your content on other social networks. It will often find its way to Twitter by other people. 8. Integrate Twitter into your other marketing channels (email for example). I'm sure there are plenty of other tips that could go here. Feel free to share some if you have them. Twitter is much more than a way to drive traffic, but when traffic is the goal, it certainly holds a great deal of potential. If you were unaware that you may be getting Twitter traffic that is not being counted as such, perhaps you will see even more potential. Have you found Twitter traffic that wasn't being counted by analytics services? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends... about it . Related Articles: > Driving Traffic with Twitter > An Equation for Getting More Traffic from Twitter > Where Social Media Fits Into the SEO Equation Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged danny sullivan, destination website, equation, firefox, internet, internet browser, omniture, people, referral traffic, social, social-networks, traffic | Leave a comment

Twitter Continues Beta Testing of Retweet Feature

Update 3: Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged article, feature, means, retweet, retweeting, retweets, social-networks, spam, traffic, trending-topics, trends, twitter, twitter-status | Leave a comment

MySpace Launches New Music Charts

Today MySpace announced the beta launch of MySpace Music Charts . This is the social networks' attempt at ranking musicians based on popularity. "When it comes to users, our commitment to "interestingness' will drive engagement," says MySpace Music President Courtney Holt. "Our audience cares about two things- what's bubbling up and what's hot right now- and our editorial teams are focused on actively surfacing the most interesting and relevant artists, music and content to satisfy their needs. We also understand that the interests of our users change based on trends which is why the pulse of this charts system is the new "Movers" section, offering users and artists alike an immediate "in the moment" view at who and what is trending up in music across our network. MySpace's Music Charts include: - Artist, Song, Album, and Video Charts across all music genres. - Unique charts for all territories. - The ability for users to friend and connect with artists they discover in the charts - A new "Movers" section that highlights fastest rising artists and content across the network. - Artist contributed content which enables MySpace Music to feature the best content from all artists, both small and large. - The ability for users to engage directly with the Chart content. Songs, albums, videos are available for free to stream for users in all territories. - An updated look and feel with clean navigation. A quick browse though MySpace's charts tells me they have a lot of work to do in this "beta" version. Perhaps the work really lies within the classification of artists by label. I'm not a big fan of labeling music, but there are clearly issues when Staind is in the hardcore section, or when Seether is in both the indie and major sections under the metal category. Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged artist song album, based-on-trends, executive-team, hardcore section, metal category, music, review and story, social, social-networks, space-music, video | Leave a comment

Salesforce’s “Facebook for the Enterprise”

Salesforce.com has introduced a new enterprise collaboration application called Salesforce Chatter . A representative for the company bills it as a "Facebook for the Enterprise." "Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be deeply connected," she tells WebProNews. "In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will instantly become social." Salesforce Chatter lets users collaborate securely in real time with: - Profiles - Status updates - Feeds - Groups - Social Apps - Social Content (docs, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.) - Social Sharing Model - Twitter and Facebook - AppExchange (apps build on Force.com platform) - Mobile (available for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device and iPhone) The Salesforce Chatter social platform includes a rich set of pre-built social components. Developers will be able to add profiles, status updates, groups functionality, feeds, and social content to apps. There is a set of APIs that let developers push data from any app into Chatter feeds, and there are Google, Facebook, and Twitter developer toolkits. Salesforce Chatter will launch in 2010, and will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user, per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content, and Force.com. Related Articles: > Adobe Teams With Salesforce on New Flash Builder > Salesforce Launches Mobile App Update for iPhone 3.0 OS > Salesforce Gives Force.com Users Free Sites Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged apis, chatter-edition, developer toolkits, enterprise applications, flash-builder, iphone, launches-mobile, mobile, salesforce, salesforce chatter, social-content, social-media, social-networks | Leave a comment

A Few Guidelines for Drafting Social Media Guidelines

For all of the great opportunities that can come from social media, there are plenty of negatives that come with it as well. This is of course why many businesses are hesitant to adopt social media strategies and/or let their employees engage with different social networking tools. It is also why many of the companies that do have social media strategies in tact, and do allow employees to use these tools have guidelines in place. Does your company have social media guidelines? Continue reading

Posted in Business, Pay-Per-Click | Tagged audience, Business, companies, drafting, employees, media platforms, media strategies, networking tools, personas, pick-the-brains, reputation, reputation management, review and story, social-networks, wayne sutton | Leave a comment