The Mars Hill Church in Seattle’s, with seven campuses around western Washington, is one of the first churches to introduce Twitter into their church meetings.
Twittering goes on throughout the entire service, with the messages, or Tweets, popping up on Facebook pages or the church’s official Twitter page.
Mike Anderson, a church goer said, “You see literally dozens and dozens of people during the service writing #MHC and you can search that on Twitter and just see everything that our people’s thoughts, their ideas.”
Topics being posted include:
How does the service impact them.
Who is attending the service.
What does worship feel like.
Sharing lessons learned with non-church goers.
It’s interesting to see all the different organizations adopting social media.
The additional funding will help KickApps continue to exand its product development and international expansion. Currently 35% of KickApps customers come from outside the US.
“KickApps is aggressively extending the scope of services we provide online publishers in a number of important ways,” said Alex Blum, KickApps CEO in a statement. “As a next generation website operating system, our mission is to transform a number of traditional services — video players, editorial presentation, advertising, analytics, marketing, customer relationships — into highly interactive experiences that are contextually informed by live, actionable data.”
KickApps currently powers social services on over 48,000 websites, including Guinness World Records and a New York Knicks Webpage. The company also powered John McCain’s social network, McCainSpace, during the 2008 Presidential campaign.
The additional round of funding in a turbulent market validates the continued customer demand for social media and KickApps business model.
Social Media has become mainstream according to Forrester and IDC predicts that over 70% of the content on the web will be user generated content. Content management conferences such as Gilbane Bostons 2008 - “Where Content Management Meets Social Media” are specifically dedicating conferences to the topic of social media.
Although, what I found impressive is that only 5 out of the 14 content management vendors (35%) who were attending really mentioned social media in their bios. This is specifically interesting considering the conference is focused on how content management vendors address social media.
With other topics such as SharePoint, Search, SEO, Multi-Channel Publishing, SAAS, and Content Management content management vendors have to choose their focus, given their limited resources. Consequently, it looks like many of the sponsors will be learning from the conference. Maybe next year we will see their social media offerings.
For those who are attending the conference to seek integrated content and social solutions you should for sure stop by the following vendors:
Rock You (www.rockyou.com) a company that develops social media applications including a multimedia slideshow creation tool popular on Facebook and MySpace has secured $17 million in series C funding. To date they have secured $52 million in funding.
The funds will primarily help Rock You develop applications for PC and mobile devices in Asia-Pacific. They also plan to open new offices in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit, and look for potential acquisitions.
The funding of Rock You at this time validates that social media is mainstream and has great potential not only in the US, but internationally. The Asia-Pacific market is a hot bed for social media and social media companies should seek alternative global markets that are still growing.
Recently Prime Visibility (PrimeVisibility.com), a rapidly growing integrated online marketing company specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC), released a study showing which presidential candidate was most preferred by social media sites.
Sites such as bookmarking (digg, del.icio.us), video (YouTube, MetaCafe), widgets, podcasts, image/photo-sharing services (Flickr, Photobucket), social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social knowledge (Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia), directory submissions (Google Directory, DMOZ) and online reputation management (ORM) were monitored.
Results showed that through Oct 17th Obama was leading 20 of the 43 sites monitored, McCain led three, and both tied in one site.
The two candidates tied on Yahoo, which had over 1.1 billion comments each.
Obama won on Google Blog Search with approximately 227.7 million comments versus 93.2 million for McCain, while Google search produced 201 million page views for Obama versus 141 million for McCain.
In the following video clip, Barack talks about his use of social media and how internet volunteers helped his campaign succeed in many states.
This recent study shows the power of the web and how candidates can no longer discount the need to leverage social media in their campaigns. Tomorrow’s election results could potentially validate if a win in cyberspace could be a good indicator of a true election win.
Vignette is financially strong and can weather these difficult economic times. We are based in Austin, Texas one the best places to live in the United States.
In addition to our focus on social software, Vignette provides a comprehensive suite of web experience management products, which will give you a lot of opportunity to work with many technologies that are defining the future of the web.
Let us know if you are interested. We are always looking for top talent that is experienced in the social space.
Recently, Appssavvy, a social media company that connects advertisers with social networks, secured $3.1 million in funding. Appssavvy claims they provide a platform that that lets advertisers launch advertising campaigns on popular social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and hi5.
In total they suggest that their platform can help marketers market to 50 million users and not have to worry about dealing with different vendors for multiple social networking platforms.
Some example of the work they have done includes building Facebook applications or helping advertisers sponsor existing applications. Here are a few of their projects:
Kohl’s Back to School Custom Application in Facebook
VO5 Ultimate Flirt Custom Application
Startship Troopers 3 Armies Sponsorship
The 2 Coreys - A&E Mesmo Sponsorship
My Boys - TBS Mesmo Sponsorship
Made of Honor Wedding Book Sponsorship
Funding social media companies even in a down turn market makes sense. Consumers today are spending more and more time on social media sites. Recent studies show how people are now spending more time on social networking sites than on pornography sites, which have been for a long time the second most sought after content on the web. Also, marketers are realizing the value of social media and many plan to reduce their spending on traditional media and focus more on social. As economic times get worse, companies will be looking at spending less and finding ways to reach their target audience at lower costs and social media is a perfect venue for such targeted lower cost marketing investment.
So in my opinion social media marketing spending will continue to grow in a down turn market and Appssavvy one of many companies positioning themselves to be successful in this down turn market.
The number of social media companies keep growing. H2O New Media is just another recent entrant. H2O Media is based in Dubai and was launched 6 months ago. To date they have 40 customers across different countries. Some of these include: Al Maya Group, Sian, Strawberry PR & Event, CMPI Exhibitions, CSM, Zaman, Euro RSG, the American Business Council to name just a few.
H2O plans to compete with other social media leaders such as Mzinga and Awarness. Companies whose valuations excess US$300 million.
A main difference between H2O and their competitors is that H2O plans to open source it’s technology, while selling a SAAS based version of its application.
As demonstrated by H2O, the social media market is growing, while the competition is going to continue to get steep.
Commcraft has done a great job in explaining Social Media in a simple and creative way in the above video. They compare social media to ice cream and how many people and companies can make their own ice cream and benefit from other’s creations. Their analogy describes popular social media technologies such as syndication, ratings, tagging, reviews, blogs, wikis, video, and podcasts.Their video already had been watched by over 61,000 people and can be purchases for distribution. Vendors trying to sell social media products or services can purchase this video and add their own logo or message to the video. Other social media related videos, published by Commcraft, include:
If you are trying to explain social media to a colleague, boss, or customer these may be a very quick and media centric way of explaining social media and its features.
As the web becomes more social we are seeing an increasing number of companies adding ratings and comments to a piece of content or product. The question people ask me all the time is, why should I add ratings and comments to my website and what value will I receive?
The good thing is that a lot of research has been done on the value of ratings and comments. Bazaar Voice, a social software company, has specifically focused on ratings and comments for eRetails. From an inside source I hear they are doing very well with revenues of about $30 million. So there are companies out there seeing the value in ratings and commenting.
The following statistics show the value of ratings and commenting:
The Number One Functionality Desired By Internet Users - Forrester Research conducted a study showing that user ratings and reviews was the number one feature requested by US internet users.
Makes a Site More Credible - According to a global Nielsen survey of 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets, consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of the study’s respondents. (Nielsen, “Word-of-Mouth the Most Powerful Selling Tool”)
People Trust Peer’s Opinions More Than Advertising - Online social network users were three times more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions. (“Social Networking Sites: Defining Advertising Opportunities in a Competitive Landscape,” JupiterResearch, March 2007)
#1 Aid To Buying Decisions - A consumer survey by the JC Williams Group ranked consumer content as the #1 aid to a buying decision, cited by 91% of respondents. (JC Williams Group, 2006)
Reviews Makes Your Website a Top Destination - When asked what sources of information they are “very likely” to consult before making a decision about their entertainment options, 62% named Web sites with user reviews as their top choice, even beating out a knowledgeable friend (59%). (Marketing Sherpa, July 2007)
More Likely to Buy - Two thirds of UK social networkers (66%) are more likely to buy a product as a result of a recommendation, compared to 52 per cent of non-social networkers. (Royal Mail’s Home Shopping Tracker Study 2007
Influences Purchase Decisions - More than eight in 10 (82%) of those who read reviews said that their purchasing decisions have been directly influenced by those reviews. (Deloitte & Touche)
Pay More - Consumers were willing to pay between 20 to 99% more for a 5-star rated product than for a 4-star rated product, depending on the product category. (comScore/Kelsey, October 2007)
Drives Higher Spending - Reviews usage drives higher spending: 27% of users report an increase of 5-10%; almost 7% report an increase of 20%+. (Avenue A/Razorfish “Digital Consumer Behavior Study,” October 2007)
For those companies who have adopted reviews and are posting fake reviews, I would recommend to stop doing. Number one it is not ethical. Second if you do not cover your tracks and consumers find out, your consumers will surely create a PR nightmare for you. Just look at what happened to Slide, a Facebook application company, who fabricated their own reviews. TechCrunch picked up the story, there were 92 comments about the story, and at least 7 other bloggers picked it up.
Besides just a PR nightmare, I believe it could be possible that fake reviews could also end up in a lawsuit. Just look at Sony, who promoted fake reviews about one of their films and got sued for $326,000 in 2002 and again in 2005 for $1.5 million.
In summary, reviews are very beneficial for companies and companies should stay honest in their review and posting practices, while allowing customers to speak openly about the company’s products and content. In the end of the day, if a company is listening and improving their products to meet customer needs, they will be successful.
