MySpace launches its own “news feed” feature called “Friend Updates”

The success of Facebook’s “news feed”, which provides a user with constant updates from his or her friends, urged MySpace, its main rival and social networking behemoth, in launching a similar feature.

It was announced yesterday by Peter Levinsohn, president of MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media, at the Reuters Media Summit. “The concept of a news feed is something we are very focused on, and we'll be well down the path in the next 30 to 45 days”, Levinsohn told Reuters.

This new feature is still in beta version and can only be used by users from Ireland and New Zealand at the moment. Below you can see the pop-up message from MySpace, notifying the user of this new feature.

In the actual Friend Updates, except the “Home” tab where all the updates will appear, one can find a “Subscription Preferences” tab where the user can select what sort of updates will be received by selecting or deselecting the appropriate tick boxes. The feature, as the image below shows, is providing notifications when friends have updated their profiles, or when they added new photos, videos, blogs or music (the later is only available for bands).

A third tab titled “My Subscriptions” show the user’s friends list where one can select / subscribe to their friends updates. Finally, the last tab “Subscription Privacy settings” allows the user to choose the updates that his or her friends receive when his own profile is updated, or a new photo, video or blog is added. As with Facebook’s “news feed”, MySpace “Friend Update” is “concerned” about privacy and includes the following message:

A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the “news feed” could be used by brands to socialise with consumers (since brands are allowed to create profiles which could effectively treated as “friends”) and also place products in the social context of its popular feature “news feed”. It looks like MySpace is trying to catch up with Facebook in this field.

So Many Ads, So Few Clicks [Business Week]

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An interesting article regarding the decline in click through rates of online ads and the future of targeted online advertising as presented by Social Networking Sites such as Facebook.

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Can more targeted pitches on Facebook and other sites reverse the shrinking response to online ads?

In June, Luke Mitchell's student marketing service, Reach Students, ran a series of Web ads to promote an offer from a major parcel delivery service. The timing seemed perfect: just when college students decide whether to store belongings for the summer or ship them home. So did the placement--on the Facebook social network, where students hang out for hours. Yet when the results rolled in, Mitchell was stunned: Only 0.04% of those people who got the ads on their screens bothered to click on them. He had expected at least 1% to respond. "We had just a handful of users come to the site," he says.

The truth about online ads is that precious few people actually click on them. And the percentage of people who respond to common "banner ads," the ubiquitous interactive posters that run in fixed places on sites, is shrinking steadily. The so-called click-through rate for those ads on major Web destinations such as Yahoo! (YHOO ), Microsoft (MSFT ), and AOL (TWX ) declined from 0.75% to 0.27% during 2006, according to Eyeblaster, a New York-based online ad serving and monitoring firm. It says that last March the average click rate on standard banner ads across the whole Web was 0.2%. This reflects a surge in new ads and Web pages, fueled by the rise in social networks.

Click-through rates have been declining for years. The novelty of Web ads that helped fuel higher responses in the beginning has worn off as online marketing hit the mainstream. That explains much of the froth around Internet acquisitions these days. Google (GOOG ), Microsoft, and others are spending billions to buy advertising networks and develop systems that enhance their ability to deliver ads to the people who are most likely to respond.

The latest phase in such ad targeting will begin on Nov. 6, when Facebook is expected to explain how it will help pinpoint users who are most likely to be interested in what marketers are selling. Facebook has revealed little of its plans. But Erik Qualman, head of marketing for Travelzoo (TZOO ), an online travel outfit that sponsors a travel group on Facebook, thinks the site will allow targeting based on demographic profiles and interests that users reveal about themselves.

NUMBING EFFECT
If a user says on his Facebook profile he is interested in football and attends Harvard Business School, he might get ads for New England Patriots tickets. "Social networks have great insights into their users," says Mike Walrath, CEO of Right Media, an ad outfit bought by Yahoo that works with social sites. "The more targeting options that are available to a social network, the more likely they are to be able to get better prices."

To some extent, declining click rates reflect how Web users are getting numb to the least sophisticated Web come-ons. That's bad news for advertisers, who increasingly pay based on the number of banner ads served up, not the clicks they draw. Response is especially low on sites with Web-savvier audiences, such as social networking sites.

Of course, not everyone is happy with the move toward targeted ads. On Nov. 1, the Federal Trade Commission was to begin hearings related to consumer privacy and online advertising. Consumer advocacy groups hope the FTC will restrict the amount of data companies such as Google and Yahoo can collect and use to make ads more relevant. Web advertisers say they are adopting ways to protect users' data.

But as responsiveness declines, ad targeting grows more attractive. Marketers see increases of 30% to 300% in click rates when ads are customized based on criteria such as the location, content of Web pages visited, or information researched on search engines. Kevin Lee, co-founder of search marketing firm Didit, says: "Targeting will come in to rescue all forms of digital advertising."

Found @ Business Week

Conversational marketing: Word of mouse [The Economist]

Will Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites transform advertising?

DEPENDING on your age and memory, it was a week of radically new or reassuringly old developments in the advertising industry. To Mark Zuckerberg, who is 23 and the boss of Facebook, a popular social-networking website, it was the former. Standing in front of about 250 mostly middle-aged advertising executives on November 6th, he announced that Facebook was offering them a new deal. “For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people,” he said, “but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation.” Using his firm's new approach, he claimed, advertisers will be able to piggyback on the “social actions” of Facebook users, since “people influence people.”

Mr Zuckerberg's language was strikingly similar to that of Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz in their book “Personal Influence”, a media-studies classic from 1955. They argued that marketers do not simply broadcast messages to a passive mass audience, but rather that they target certain individuals, called “opinion leaders”. These individuals then spread, confirm or negate the messages of advertisers through their own “social relationships”, by word of mouth or personal example.

Messrs Lazarsfeld and Katz, of course, assumed that most of these conversations and their implicit marketing messages would remain inaudible. That firms might be able to eavesdrop on this chatter first became conceivable in the 1990s, with the rise of the internet. Thus the main thesis of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, written in 1999, was that “markets are conversations” which the web can make transparent.

Mr Zuckerberg's underlying idea is therefore hardly new. But, says Randall Rothenberg, the boss of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association, the announcements this week by Facebook and its larger rival, MySpace, which has a similar ad system, could amount to a big step forward in conversational marketing. If new technologies that are explicitly based on social interactions prove effective, he thinks, they might advance web advertising to its fourth phase.

In the past decade the internet has already produced three proven advertising categories. First came “display” or “banner” ads, usually in the form of graphical boxes on web pages, now often with embedded videos. Today these account for 32% of online-advertising revenue. Next are classified ads, now 17% of the total. The bane of many small-town newspapers, these are the postings on sites such as Craigslist. The third, and now largest, category is search advertising, with 41% of the total. Proven though not invented by Google, the biggest search engine, these are the text snippets that appear next to search results for a specific keyword.

Together, these three types of online advertising are already transforming entire industries and businesses. This week IAC/InterActiveCorp, a struggling web conglomerate, said it would break itself into five separate companies, primarily so that its advertising-focused sites—including Ask.com, another search engine, and Match.com, a dating site—could be valued separately from the retailing, lending and ticketing sites. Meanwhile, antitrust watchdogs in America and Europe are scrutinising (but seem unlikely to block) the acquisition by Google of DoubleClick, a big display-ads firm, in response to fears that Google might become as dominant in that category as it is in search ads.

From the point of view of marketers, these existing types of online ads already represent breakthroughs. In search, they can now target consumers who express interest in a particular product or service by typing a keyword; they pay only when a consumer responds, by clicking on their ads. In display, they can track and measure how their ads are viewed and whether a consumer is paying attention (if he turns on the sound of a video ad, say) better than they ever could with television ads. Yet now the holy grail of observing and even participating in consumers' conversations appears within reach.

The first step for brands to socialise with consumers is to start profile pages on social networks and then accept “friend requests” from individuals. On MySpace, brands have been doing this for a while. For instance, Warner Bros, a Hollywood studio, had a MySpace page for “300”, its film about Spartan warriors. It signed up some 200,000 friends, who watched trailers, talked the film up before its release, and counted down toward its DVD release.
Facebook, from this week, also lets brands create their own pages. Coca-Cola, for instance, has a Sprite page and a “Sprite Sips” game that lets users play with a little animated character on their own pages. Facebook makes this a social act by automatically informing the player's friends, via tiny “news feed” alerts, of the fun in progress. Thus, at least in theory, a Sprite “experience” can travel through an entire group, just as Messrs Lazarsfeld and Katz once described in the offline world.

In many cases, Facebook users can also treat brands' pages like those of other friends, by adding reviews, photos or comments, say. Each of these actions might again be communicated instantly to the news feeds of their clique. Obviously this is a double-edged sword, since they can just as easily criticise a brand as praise it.

Facebook even plans to monitor and use actions beyond its own site to place them in a social context. If, for instance, a Facebook user makes a purchase at Fandango, a website that sells cinema tickets, this information again shows up on the news feeds of his friends on Facebook, who might decide to come along. If he buys a book or shirt on another site, then this implicit recommendation pops up too.

There are plenty of sceptics. Some people may find all this creepy, so Facebook will allow people to opt out of sharing their information. Another potential worry is that the analytical information passed on to advertisers may be of poor quality, because so much of what people put on their profiles is made up or out of date. Chris DeWolfe, the boss of MySpace, counters that his research shows that 98% of American MySpace users correctly report where they live. And they tend to report important changes in their lives—such as getting engaged—promptly. This presents great marketing opportunities.

Yet another problem, says Paul Martino, an entrepreneur who launched Tribe, an early social network, is that the interpersonal connections (called the “social graph”) on such networks are also of low quality. Because few people dare to dump former friends or to reject unwanted friend requests from casual acquaintances, “social graphs degenerate to noise in all cases,” he says. If he is right, social-marketing campaigns will descend into visual clutter about the banal doings of increasingly random people, rather than being the next big thing in advertising.

The Economist

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Note from Epicurus:

It’s indeed amazing the fact that more than half a century after its conception by Katz & Lazarsfeld, the Two-Step Flow model of communications is used in the digital domain by social networking sites proprietors in order to attract advertising revenue. Not only that, it might actually give birth - according to this article - to a whole new category of online advertising!

In audience theory, the concept of "two step flow" communication perceives that the influence of media is being mediated by “opinion leaders” or “gatekeepers”, within the audience community.

The following image illustrates this point:



Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. (1955) Personal Influence. New York: Free Press.
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Social networks overtake webmail

This is a very interesting study from Hitwise.

"For the fist time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services. As the chart below illustrates, our custom category of the top 25 social networks, which includes Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, compared to 4.98% for Computers and Internet – Email Services, which includes Hotmail; Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, amongst others."

This is the case for upstream traffic as the article and the following graph suggests:

"As the chart below illustrates, social networks now also refer as much traffic to other websites as web-based email services"

Two case studies in the UK show that Social Networks can drive traffic

There are two case studies conducted in the UK (by Hitwise) which proved that the power and commercial influence of MySpace and social networking sites is indeed great.

Heather Hopkins, VP of Research at Hitwise UK, on two different case studies found out that visits to Topshop.co.uk and Asos.com originating from MySpace had surpassed those coming from Yahoo! and MSN UK Search combined!

“The #2 source of UK visits to TopShop.co.uk was MySpace, accounting for 5% of site visits. MSN UK Search and Yahoo! UK Search each accounted for just over 1% of visits” she says.

In addition, as the figures below show, on January 2007, more than twice as much traffic from MySpace than from MSN and Yahoo! Search combined was received by the two retailers.





However, many things have changed in the social networking landscape since January 2007 and I strongly believe that a new research will show even greater upstream traffic originating from social networking sites. It looks like social networks are steadily becoming major players that can drive traffic, especially to commercial websites.

found @ Hitwise

Microsoft CEO going crazy

Watch Steve Ballmer (Microsoft's CEO) go crazy at a Microsoft employee convention (first video) and then watch the Zune spoof ad based on his craziness (and the ipod ads). Very funny!

DOVE EVOLUTION - UNILEVER VIRAL AD

OPEN SOCIAL PRESENTATION- GOOGLE CAMPFIRE ONE

tv-links.co.uk +++++ R.I.P +++++

TV Links shut down for linking

And if linking is illegal, how many of us are guilty?

October 20, 2007 1:42 PM

The TV Links disclaimer

According to a report in The Guardian: "A 26-year-old man from Cheltenham was arrested on Thursday in connection with offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet, Fact said."

The arrest and the closure of the site - www.tv-links.co.uk - came during an operation by officers from Gloucestershire County Council trading standards in conjunction with investigators from Fact and Gloucestershire Police.

Fact claims that tv-links.co.uk was providing links to illegal film content that had been camcorder recorded from cinemas and then uploaded to the internet. The site also provided links to TV shows that were being illegally distributed.

It's a pity the Gloucestershire Police started with such small fry. There are a couple of multibillionaires called Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- the founders of Google -- who provide vast numbers of links to content that is being illegally distributed. Indeed, as everyone knows, they actually host plenty of illegal content on their own video site, YouTube, which has a UK operation.

Is the message that it's less criminal to host illegal content on YouTube than it is to to link to it from a site such as TV Links? Or is it just that FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) and the police won't tackle anybody with enough high-powered lawyers to fight back? Is The New Freedom blog correct in saying: "They just have so much money that they have become above the law."

Of course, there is a difference between building a site around links to content that could be presumed to lack copyright clearance and linking unintentionally from a site set up for a different purpose. However, I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how significant this is. (Is shoplifting OK if you have a proper job but criminal if you're unemployed and starving?)

It will be interesting to see who FACT picks on next. There are plenty of newspaper journalists who nowadays, as part of their proper jobs, link to YouTube videos and other internet content. It would be amazing if every single bit of material -- some of it "repurposed" -- had full and correct copyright clearance.

In future, do I risk being thrown in the slammer for linking directly to a YouTube video? What if I just say "go to Google and search for [YouTube xxx yyy]" or whatever? Oh dear, I forgot, Google's illegal so that will have to be closed down.

Perhaps I am already breaking the law by linking to Google, YouTube, TV Links, Pirate Bay and other sites that link to illegal content because this must also count as contributing to "the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet" -- and, by the way, I expect you are breaking the law if you link to or even read this story.

Indeed, if linking is illegal, we might as well shut down the Internet, because there is no practical way anybody can guarantee the legality of what's on the end of any link. Even if you could guarantee it at the time of linking, there's no guarantee it would still be legal less than a second later, or for the rest of time.

Found @ The Guardian