For now, the free app is ad-supported, but a version without ads will be available soon for those who would prefer a cleaner experience.

Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka told VentureBeat in an interview that Angry Birds is used more than 65 million minutes per day on the iPhone (paid app). Now that it's on Android, Vesterbacka predicts the game will soon be used 100 million minutes per day.

GetJar has the exclusive launch for now - the game will be featured on its site alone for the first 24 hours before hitting the Android Market. This promotion will be a major boost for the large cross-platform app store, not yet a household name. GetJar has been aiming to change that lately with new initiatives that involve giving away free applications to GetJar visitors.

According to Vesterbacka, GetJar was an obvious choice for its launch. "GetJar's global reach and popularity as well as their unique App It! download service ensures that we reach a massive audience of fanatically loyal Angry Birds addicts," he explained. "The unique App It! link means we can also cross promote our Symbian and Android versions without the need to send folks to multiple places to get their favorite game."

So how can you get your hands on a free copy of Angry Birds today?

You can either go to the GetJar download page or, from your mobile phone browser, head to m.getjar.com...that is, If the websites can stay up!

This comes in the wake of a "no guarantees" policy toward accuracy or speed for Twitter users with more than 2,000 followers and general claims of delays, issues, and inaccuracies. Do we smell inadequate infrastructure?

To mitigate the costs of scaling, users are now being begged to purchase their once-free daily emails containing stats on their new Twitter followers and friends and the tweets that may have led to new followers or losing followers. SocialToo is charging a one-time $20 fee that will reportedly "put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account."

Sure, it might seem like the humane and reasonable thing to do for SocialToo users; after all, we've all got twenty bucks, right?

But over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern reminds us of the old "if you teach a man to fish" adage when he says, "My only concern with the $20 one-time fee is that he has lost nearly all chance to get more revenue from his power users. I assume many of the SocialToo power users will pay the $20 which will provide a quick stream of cash. I'd rather see him set the upgrade as a yearly fee. This way in a year Jesse can bring in new features and grab another set of funds. At this point his only chance to gain more revenue from those newly-paying users would be to offer more services and hope that they will upgrade again."

Today's email/blog post continued, "As always, our auto-follow and unfollow services will always remain free from the time you join SocialToo forward. In addition, you will always be able to create SocialSurveys and share them with your friends for free as we have always provided."

Users are also charged negligible to moderate amounts for other SocialToo services in the usual freemium fashion.

In the past, Stay has made much of Twitter's limiting API calls to 20,000 per hour and their "pulling the rug out from under its developers" by only allowing users to follow maximum of 1,000 people per day. After having leveled such heavy criticisms in the past, stating that Twitter was holding back business growth, it is interesting that his real growth challenge should come in the form of inadequate resources for scaling the service.

Enter new media marketing for new media products! A rash of online promo videos for social products show how Internet and mobile entrepreneurs have taken lessons from traditional broadcast advertising as much as they have from YouTube.

Best of all, the videos have given great ROI (that's "return on investment" for you non-advertising types).

Regarding this promo video for MyNameIsE.com, founder and designer Renato Valdés Olmos said, "That video actually cost us rental money for the camera, some drinks, and pizzas!"

In 3 days, the video got "4,000 views and great responses" before Vimeo took it down; apparently, the site doesn't allow commercials. However, the E team got the video up on YouTube.

"Sign-ups spiked as soon as the video started being posted around," said Olmos, "and it also works great in pitches and presentations."

All this was acheived with no marketing budget and little support from major bloggers and Twitter influencers.

Another promo video making the rounds comes from iPhone app Birdhouse.

"There's no question that the adoption of Birdhouse benefitted hugely from the exposure that came from the promotional video we put together," said cofounder Adam Lisagor. "We knew from the beginning we'd be making a video people would enjoy despite any interest in the actual app. We heard over and over, 'I don't even know if I'll use Birdhouse, but the video made me buy it.'

"This is something that almost all software developers overlook: the power of entertainment to communicate why you built it and why you want others to enjoy it as much as you."

A third video we've seen is almost a straight-up live demo for LoveToGoOut.com, a new site that aims to organize pub crawls, club nights, and other nocturnal, boozy get-togethers.

"Originally, the video was created to promote the site at a local university event here in the UK," said advisor Barry Pace.

"[We] haven't promoted this too much online (if at all). Measurement of success is more about local awareness rather than attempting to monitor any buzz online."

Nevertheless, if current trends are any indication, site traffic will spike with proliferation of the video.

12seconds.tv, a video messaging service that lets users record quick videos only 12 seconds in length, has been popular among Twitter users since its launch in summer of 2008. With the service, you can send out a tweet to your Twitter friends once you've posted a video on the site. That's precisely the functionality which appealed to marketers looking for an entry point into Twitter. The only question was how do you get 12seconds users to tweet out videos about the brand?

The solution that 12seconds.tv is introducing today is called the "12omercial." And yes, like it sounds, it's a Twitter commercial made using the 12seconds service. Here's how it's going to work: brands and companies will sponsor 12seconds users to create 12omercials on their behalf. The videos created by the users will be a response to a question asked by the brand. Once recorded, the 12omercials are automatically posted to the Twitter streams of the users involved. Those tweets will include a link back to their video.

The first brand to participate is LG who will begin using the platform to promote their new phone, the Versa. The question they're asking is "what's your Versa vice?" Or, in other words, what's that thing you do with your mobile phone that you know you shouldn't? Is it text-messaging while driving? Checking Facebook while in a meeting? The answers to this question will be varied and perhaps even humorous (or so the company hopes, that is).

Play Along, Win Fabulous Prizes

You may wonder what incentive 12seconds users have for creating these user-generated commercials for these companies. Fortunately, they won't be paid to do this. We say fortunately because once cold, hard cash becomes involved, too many people looking to earn a quick buck would end up creating these "12omericials" and then would clutter up our Twitter streams with their spam. 

However, users will be encouraged to participate - they just won't earn actual money by doing so. Instead, the creation of a video will equate to a sweepstakes entry where they have the chance to win some sort of prize, as determined by the brand. What the prize will be will change with each promotion, but with LG, it's a trip to Las Vegas.

Another reason users may participate is because there's also the possibility of having their video seen by a far larger audience than just their Twitter friends. It's up to the brand how the content will be used, but there are a number of possibilities. Some companies will be selecting the best videos for use on their own web sites, others may use them in online ads, and there's even a chance that videos could find their way to a TV commercial. (In LG's case, there will be a dedicated mini-site set up for the promotion.)

But What If People Say Bad Things?

As we recently saw with the Skittles social media campaign, when people realized they could get their tweets on the Skittles homepage just by using a particular keyword in their posts, they started to abuse the system. Some people posted really (and we mean really) offensive messages to Twitter just to see those messages on Skittles.com...and perhaps to prove to Skittles that their campaign was a terrible idea.

But 12seconds co-founder, Sol Lipman, doesn't think the Skittles campaign was a bad idea at all. He thinks it was an ingenious experiment and perhaps even representative of the future of advertising. According to Lipman, we're moving past the point when brands want to communicate with customers through press releases and banner ads. It's user-generated content that is the future. And what better way to learn about a brand than through a trusted friend's tweet?

Of course, when you put the power of brand advertising in the hands of the people, bad things can happen. That was certainly true in the case of Skittles, but even so, Lipman argues that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, some people got out of hand, but at the end of the day, people were talking about Skittles. Just because some people did terrible things, it probably didn't mean you started hating the candy or boycotting it. Instead, you just had it a bit closer to the forefront of your mind the next time your sweet tooth kicked in.

Be Brave, Companies - Engage! (It's Your Only Hope)

This radical repositioning about what it means to advertise may actually be a bit too scary for some companies and some will be hesitant to get involved. User-generated content has been known to backfire before. For example, in 2006, Chevy let YouTube users make commercials for the 2007 Tahoe, but what they got were videos about how bad the truck was for the environment. Still, that's not stopping other companies from attempting nearly the same thing. Case in point: Ford. This month, the company will launch their "Fiesta Experiment," a marketing effort that puts promoting the new car into the hands of 100 twenty-somethings who will blog, record video, and post to social media about the their experiences.

In a similar vein, the 12seconds.tv Twitter commercials will offer brands an opportunity to start conversations while abandoning their control over the exact messaging. They may have to take the good with the bad. But in the end, only genuine conversations will convince the jaded, over-saturated customers of today...and especially those known as "Generation Y." As we noted before, that generation especially tends to rely on a network of friends for product recommendations, not traditional advertising.

Check It Out

In addition to being used for branded campaigns, these 12omercials can be created for any promotional purpose. Users can include a URL in the video that links to anything they want - their blog, something they're selling, a charity event, or whatever. A back-end analytics package will help them track the campaign, too.

As far as the sponsored promotions go, each will run for a week. This may change as more brands get on board. LG is up first, followed by Xobni, the social inbox plugin.

Another interesting fact about the downstream clicks from Twitter is that very few users go from Twitter.com to retail, business, or finance sites.

Here are a few other interesting findings:

• after visiting Twitter.com, more users visit Etsy.com, the marketplace for buying all things handmade, than Amazon
• in terms of downstream clicks, CNN.com is the most popular news service on Twitter
• Yahoo Mail gets more downstream clicks than Gmail or Windows Live Mail

One caveat about this data that Hitwise does not mention, however, is that a large number of Twitter users never even visit Twitter.com because they use more fully-featured desktop or mobile clients like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or Tweetie. Hitwise obviously doesn't have access to this data, but it would be interesting to see if those Twitter users who use a Twitter client exhibit a different behavior compared to those who use the web site.

Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.

It's notable as well that Hulu didn't build its own social network from scratch. That would have been a waste of resources. Instead it is leveraging already established social networks elsewhere.

The most important consequence of the announcement may be that the OAuth protocol used to securely access social networking data without requesting a user's password is now being placed in front of millions more people than it has been before. That's good news.

Concerns About Hulu Friends

On the other hand, it's sad that the OpenID community remains small enough to be left out in the cold by Hulu. In theory the site should be able to add an OpenID login button to its list and pull in standard Friend of a Friend data from any identity provider at all.

Barb Dybwad at Obsessable wonders whether Hulu Friends is actually a reason for Hulu to be less "friendly" with other social video platforms that want to play Hulu content in their communities - specifically Boxee.

Finally, we're concerned that Hulu Friends isn't being featured very prominently on the site. It takes a few too many clicks to get to the friend syncing page on Hulu. We're not seeing Hulu activity pushed out to social network activity streams, either. In fact, it looks like Hulu is using the legacy Facebook API, not the fancy new Facebook Connect. Is the company being overly cautious about Hulu Friends? If they are, its limited adoption could become a self fulfilling prophecy.

All in all, though, we feel positive about Hulu Friends. We hope the company innovates on top of the idea and makes more moves towards integration with the open web.

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Web Trends

MySpace's Former Owner: Facebook Will Win - for Now

Brett Brewer, who co-founded InterMix Media - the company that developed MySpace - and turned a tidy profit when that company and MySpace were sold to NewsCorp for $580 million, says MySpace's ongoing battle for social network supremacy with Facebook won't last much longer. In his opinion, Facebook has already won - but it won't remain a winner for long.

See also: MySpace: User Engagement Up, Unique Users Flat

25 Random Things Meme Is a Boon for Facebook

According to the latest data from Compete, the '25 Random Things About Me' meme has not only given us access to a plethora of random facts about people we barely know, but this digital fad has also been good for Facebook. According to the latest data from Compete, four times more people than usual visited the 'Notes' section on Facebook in January. Compete estimates that close to 20 million users used 'Notes' in January, while only about 4 million used it in October 2008.

Comcast Property Sees 92% Success Rate With New OpenID Method

The most-watched geek event of the week may have been the OpenID UX (User Experience) Summit, hosted at the Facebook headquaters. The most discussed moment of the day will surely be the presentation by Comcast's Plaxo team.

Plaxo and Google have collaborated on an OpenID method that may represent the solution to OpenID's biggest problems: it's too unknown, it's too complicated and it's too arduous. Today at the User Experience Summit, Plaxo announced that early tests of its new OpenID login system had a 92% success rate - unheard of in the industry. OpenID's usability problems appear closer than ever to being solved for good.

A-Team Update: Series A Funding Growth Is Strong

We first reported on VC Series A deals in the web-tech sector in October 2008, following the financial meltdown, and we updated our coverage in November, reporting some improvement. Now it is time for the good news from December and January. The amount invested by VCs in Series A deals for web-tech ventures went up from $19.1 million in November to $28.8 million in December, and up another notch to $30.3 million in January. Looking very good.

Craig Newmark's Keynote Unlocks the Secrets to Building a Community

In an era where user generated content is changing our entire culture, rare is the company that can successfully harness the collective creativeness of its community, cultivate loyalty, make money consistently, and continue to flourish. Enter Craigslist. Listed as the tenth top site in America on Alexa and with close to 50 million unique visitors a month according to Compete, Craigslist is one of the few companies that appears to have worked it out. This week at the User Generated Conference in San Jose, CA, founder Craig Newmark gave us an insight into what has and what hasn't worked for the privately held company.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Discover the Semantic Web, at a Dow Jones Webinar.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
• Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 allows you to create interactive social media experiences.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• DEMO09 is the launchpad for emerging technology.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Jobwire

Obama Names Former Bush Aide to Review US Cybersecurity Efforts

Former Bush administration official Melissa Hathaway has been named by President Obama to lead a 60-day review of the government's cybersecurity efforts. Hathaway was named acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security Council as well as the Homeland Security Council. While with the Bush administration she was "credited with helping to develop a multibillion-dollar classified initiative aimed at better securing federal systems and critical-infrastructure networks against online threats".

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

richrelevance: Is its Adaptive Recommender System the Next Generation?

Last week we looked at Baynote, a recommendations company that focuses on real-time community behavior instead of personalization. This week we looked at a company that takes a broader approach: richrelevance uses personalization extensively, plus the wisdom of the crowds when relevant. richrelevance claims that its approach is "adaptive AI" and that customers such as Sears and KMart are using its technology. We spoke to richrelevance founder and CEO David Selinger (ex-Amazon), to find out more about the product and what makes it different to Baynote and others.

See other posts in ReadWriteWeb's special series on Recommendation Engines

Amazon's Kindle Gets an Update, But Doesn't Wow

This week Amazon announced a new version of its highly successful Kindle eBook reader. The new Kindle now features 2GB of memory, and a new 5-way controller for easier navigation. Amazon has also upgraded the screen, which can now show sixteen shades of gray instead of just four, and the battery, which now lasts about 25% longer. The old retro look of the Kindle 1 has given away to a far sleeker, more high-tech looking device, but nothing about the new Kindle is really more than an minor evolutionary step forward. Even the price ($359) has stayed the same.

Beyond Latitude: 4 Innovative Location-Based Apps

Google's new geo-aware mobile application Latitude which lets you share your location with friends may have received all the hype, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best or the most innovative app out there. We've recently come across some smaller, lesser-known services that could give Google a run for their money - that is, if anyone knew they existed.

New Tweetdeck Out, Here's What It Includes

Popular Twitter desktop app Tweetdeck released a new version this week and we're pretty excited about what's been added. If you've never used Tweetdeck, it's the most powerful application available for sending and receiving Twitter messages. In the new version there is language translation, StockTwits integration, forwarding by email, switching to one column view and extensive support for conversation topics by hashtag. It's quite an impressive upgrade for an already very feature-rich application.

The iPhone Becomes a Web Server

When those Apple advertisements tout "there's an app for just about anything," they aren't kidding. The latest example? A new iPhone application which just debuted in Japan's App Store transforms the handheld into a full-blown web server. Called "ServersMan@iPhone", the application allows your iPhone to appear just like any other web server on the internet.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Kashflow vs Sage: SaaS Battles in the Tornado

If you sell SaaS, security is the big concern you have to deal with. Get past that one and you'll draw serious attention from potential customers. Stumble on the issue and you're in deep doo-doo. That is ever truer when money is involved. Who wants a leak in their accounting data? When a big vendor slips up with security, David is given a clear shot at Goliath. And when a market is in the "tornado" growth phase, vendors do what it takes to highlight their competitors' weaknesses. This is the story behind the emerging battle between two UK accounting vendors, Kashflow and Sage.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages which we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about... Socialtext: Enterprise 2.0 Adobe: Flash media server Dow Jones: Semantic Web webinar Mashery: API management services TaxACT: online tax filing Rackspace: cloud computing experts DEMO09: launchpad for innovative products Crowd Science: demographic data Wild Apricot: membership management Eurekster: custom topic portals Our Hosts and Blogging Software: Media Temple and SixApart

Semantic Web Weminar by Dow Jones

Dow Jones is hosting a webinar about the Semantic Web, on Thursday, February 12, 2009. Dow Jones notes that "these days it's critical for organizations to consume, digest, and share news and information. The Semantic Web is no longer ahead of its time and is rapidly changing how organizations keep up with information overload." This webinar is Part I of a series and in it you will learn how Semantic Web Technologies enable you to re-use valuable information to save costs, facilitate easier collaboration and sharing of critical information across your business, and increase search relevancy and surface the most valuable information needed to remain competitive

You can register for the Semantic Web webinar by clicking here.

Socialtext

Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration. It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free whitepaper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. In the Business of APIs conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper Five steps to scaling your business development using web services to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

TaxACT

TaxACT is an efficient way to file your taxes online, in either desktop or web-based versions. It offers two ways to enter data: the interview format, or the forms-based entry method. TaxACT also provides its users a highly reliable and robust alerts system to prevent costly mistakes generally caused by omissions or missed opportunities to maximize deductions. Regardless of the TaxACT version, all forms are IRS and State approved. The software was developed by professional accountants and CPAs.

You can see a tour of TaxACT online by clicking here.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 offers powerful streaming with a flexible environment for creating and delivering rich, interactive, multiway social media experiences to a broad audience. You'll find a superior video experience, with new features such as Dynamic Streaming, DVR functionality, HTTP delivery support, and H.264 enhancements.

Check out the Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 to add interactivity and media streaming to your social media applications.

DEMO09

DEMO09 is on March 1-3, 2009, at Desert Springs. With more than 20,000 technologies reviewed and 1,500 companies selected to launch on the DEMO stage over the past 19 years, DEMO remains one of the best places to launch your new product. The show is made up of 70 six-minute presentations in two days and you'll see a lot of innovative products unveiled for the first time. In the past four years, DEMO companies have raised well over $2.5 billion dollars in the months/years following their debut at DEMO.

You can register for DEMO09 here.

Wild Apricot

WildApricot enables clubs, associations and communities to automate and streamline administrative tasks, using their online membership management software.

The company has an active and well written blog, focusing on issues and trends in web technologies that help your organization achieve more with less. Example posts include Show, Don't Tell: Google Earth Outreach for Nonprofits and How to Learn More About Your Website Audience.

Wild Apricot gets lots of love in the social media; book sales pro Ann Kingman, for example, says she has "been very happy with Wild Apricot in the past few months we've been using it. Great customer support."

See for yourself what Wild Apricot can do at http://wildapricot.com.

Eurekster

Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on RWW, a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice (in our case web tech), powered by the community.

People build swickis on all kinds of topics, some people build a lot of them. Alex Holmes, for example, builds really nice looking swickis on topics like the 2008 Election, Ocean Animals and Home Buying.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's MovableType.

If you've ever wondered what RWW looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the MovableType publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

We wish everyone put this much care into promo videos - then our jobs watching promo videos would be even more fun. And the serious business of promoting important web startups would overcome one of its most challenging obstacles - getting people to listen to and understand your explanation of some crazy new idea. So check out the Sayvee video we like best below, stop by their site for more and sign up there for notification when the new service is available.

These guys are going to have a hard time challenging incumbents like Dawanda and ShopWindoz, much less the awesome powers of Etsy. Maybe their whole site will be as cool as their videos though!

For the marketer, this is an quick way to quickly push a message to wide group of people. Tag 20 friends, and through the friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) network, you could easily reach thousands.

According to AdAge, photos are an ideal vehicle for marketers for three reasons. Sam Lessin writes, "First, people love them and tend to click on them all the time. Second, they get incredible real estate in news feed. Third, any message put into photos has a strange automatic relevance because it is attached to the name of a friend. Finally, there is a huge curiosity factor as to why a friend is tagged in an image."

What's worse is that he concludes the article by encouraging people to use this new method of promotion. Yikes! We absolutely hate this idea and hope that Facebook figures out a way to stop this marketing loophole before news feeds get filled with spam.

Photo courtesy of Facebook

Approximately 200 respondents told GooseGrade that while blogs aren't a major source of news for most of them, they often find errors on blogs and that makes them less likely to share the content they find there with other readers. While unsurprising, these numbers are a good illustration of just how much things have changed in media - or not.

The company asked a demographically diverse group of respondents on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website to fill out the survey and published the results today on the GooseGrade company blog. The bulk of respondents spent some time reading blogs but were people who remained dependent on "mainstream sources" for most of their news.

We thought that the most interesting findings were these:

• Spelling and grammatical errors harmed a reader's opinion of a blog, their willingness to spend time on the site and to share its content nearly as much as perceived factual errors did.


• Respondents believe that spelling, grammar and factual errors on blogs are common. Only 20% of respondents said that it was "not often" or "never" that they found such errors.

Good writing is a rare skill, though it often goes unnoticed when it produces easily read text. Bad writing is very, very common and if you're someone who finds it distracting - you're not alone. Many of us fluctuate somewhere in between, but this study is another reminder that it's not a casual matter if we wish to communicate effectively. If you're response is that this study is over exagerating it's conclusions - then your probly not paying attention. (Ha!)

Below are a few of the charts, you can see the rest on the GooseGrade blog. The lesson here? It seems pretty clear. We bloggers are harming our own credibility and traffic with our inattention to details, not just in the facts, but in the basics of our writing. Let's do better!

Well Spelled Charts

This question came to mind after a friend of RWW emailed us yesterday asking, "how can my startup keep the momentum from our launch event going?" We sent them thoughts based on our own strategy for maintaining momentum after our launch yesterday of a new content channel called Jobwire, a site dedicated to reporting on new hires in tech and new media. It was pretty clear, though, that this question is one of universal interest.

As we said in an internal email to team members last night, and again to our friends at the other company that happened to ask on the same day (if you'll indulge me for a moment):

We've got to come out strong for the rest of this week and keep as much of this momentum as we can. If there's one thing I've learned about winning in the blogosphere it's that every day is a new day, it's a "what have you done lately" kind of field if you want to be at the top. We've got a great foundation to stand on (RWW and the Jobwire work done so far) but in order to emerge victorious we're going to have to take the same awesomeness we've leveraged so far and just keep on cranking it up, notch after notch.

Hopefully our teams will find those words inspiring but what kinds of tangible strategies can be put into action based on these ideas? First let's start with a few words about what not to do, which unfortunately is what most companies do.

What Not to Do

As a new media press outlet that gets tens if not hundreds of emails a day pitching us for coverage, we can tell you three things that do not work.

First, how many of you in marketing or PR have heard the boss say that what you need is a press release one month after launch touting user numbers or new partnerships since the first announcement of a product? This happens all the time and in the rare case that the user numbers are genuinely shocking or the partnerships are substantially innovative - that's great. They almost never are though and these kinds of follow-up announcements feel like a crude attempt to manufacture a news event. A month is a long time to wait to take action after a launch announcement, too. It's a new world and there's a new news cycle. Monthly is too often to expect to have your announcements covered and it's too infrequent a period to make yourselves publicly visible.

Second, companies often try, shortly after their initial launch, to announce new features or services that aren't big enough to warrant coverage. That's the kind of thing that decreases your credibility in making future announcements.

Finally, be really careful about tying a campaign to a big public event of general interest. Thank goodness the US Presidential elections are almost over, for example! If several of the biggest web companies on earth launch a relatively innovative portal dedicated to the elections, our readers still yawn. Your tiny company's "unique" way of facilitating conversation about the election is not something that anyone cares about, unless it's really honestly new tech being used and is going to reach outside your tiny userbase as a matter of course. It's probably not, though.

Strategies We Suggest Instead

The following suggestions are listed in order of least to most effective and we offer examples as much as we can.

Do Something Else Remarkable and Announce It

You might think this would be the best strategy, but we find that it's less effective than some others. If you can do something different and new, quickly after your previous announcement, then you can leverage some of that initial mindshare and momentum to build even more. That's made harder by all the companies making false claims of new achievements shortly after their last one, though.

We spoke with a company yesterday who was putting out one press release every month, in order to maintain momentum. That's exhausting and probably not a good idea. It can lead to each status update from the company being perceived as less credible.

If a company has multiple people working on the kinds of projects that can be announced publicly, then sometimes the timing can be right for one after the other announcements. When we announced last month, for example, that we got a syndication deal with the New York Times, that was a different group of people than the group that built our Jobwire site we launched yesterday. Had those been closer together, we would have maximized that proximity.

Ultimately, though, visibility in the new social media space isn't based on big-bang announcements, it's based on small daily successes, ongoing engagement with other people and consistently building a reputation as a provider of value to the lives of others. It's consistent, light contact, to build traction over time, not big weighty announcements that shove the needle over all in one day.

Follow Up With People Publicly and Privately

Following up with people privately might seem intuitive but it's one of the most important things you can do immediately after launch. We paid close attention not just to blog posts linking to our Jobwire announcement yesterday, but also to the people who posted Twitter messages about it and even those who gave it a "thumbs up" on FriendFeed. Some of those people are folks that could appreciate some more in-depth engagement with the project. There's business development potential in some of those Tweets.

It's also useful to respond publicly to initial feedback. Leaving comments in response to other peoples' comments on blogs helps answer common questions and give the impression that you're honestly engaged - not just pushing announcements to press like they were your PR toys and then forgetting about them and their readers.

Many companies will post a round-up blog post on their own blogs a day or two after they make an announcement, linking back to all the blog posts that were written about their news. This serves many purposes but one is that it sends a track-back email to the writers who covered them. You might be surprised to know how quickly journalists forget who we've written about even earlier that day. Make a blog post that links to our post and we'll quite likely return to your site to see what you said about us. If we haven't subscribed to your blog yet, we may well do so then. Either way, the weight of our memory of you will be increased substantially. We hate to say it, but if it's bloggers you're reaching out to - installing the MyBlogLog recent visitors widget and using the BlogJuice bookmarklet to check out the 20 most recent visitors to your site throughout the day or two after your round up of coverage is one way that you can know exactly which bloggers responded to the bait and returned to your site.

These kinds of tangible tech steps are helpful to understand. Want another example? Our wonderful MobableType FriendFeed plug-in allows us to copy any comments we make on posts over to their corresponding items on the popular aggregator FriendFeed. Each time an item gets a new comment there, it's moved to the top of the timeline for everyone who has themselves interacted with that item or who has a friend who has. Thus just replying on our site to comments left by readers can help keep our announcement visible off-site.

Say Smart Things in Public Conversations

Mindshare is a big thing, but it's a resource that can slip through your fingers quickly if you don't maintain it. Leaving knock-out smart comments on blog posts around the web and resharing high-value resources in your social networks are always good ways to get noticed. Doing so in the days after a major announcement and making sure an appropriate URL is in your profile field (not cheaply spamming the comments field above your name) is a great way to subtly establish yourself as a company that's a part of the scene.

"Who is that person that just left that great comment on this post about cloud computing?" blog readers ask. "Well if it isn't someone from that comic strip aggregation service I read about yesterday on another blog! I wonder how they use cloud computing? That sure is a smart comment they posted, that must be a smart company that I should keep paying attention to." As journalists, we notice these things and they influence our coverage of companies and their sectors and as tech users they influence our decisions regarding which services to use and recommend.

In old media authors went on book tours and made TV appearances. These days you can try to be a guest on a podcast, but just ratcheting up your engagement in the public sphere online shortly after an announcement is really helpful in maintaining your momentum.

Self-evaluate Publicly or Deliver Some Other Kind of Value

People love case studies - so why not make yourself one? If not yourself, any case studies and other data points that people can use for their own work aren't just "link bait" - they are the kind of contributions to the community that leadership is built with. Good examples of this are:

• Nonprofit consultant Beth Kanter, the Queen of public self-evaluation. Her studies of her own online fund raising campaigns using social media can bring a crowd to its feet and increase her visibility substantially.


• Benchmark studies based on anonymized aggregate user data is great stuff, check out what Mint and Freshbooks have done in this department lately.


• AideRSS relaunched this week as Postrank.com and now would be a great time to do another blog post like their recent studies of the most engaging marketing blogs on the web and the best times of day to put up blog posts for maximum social media impact.


• Everything Sam Lawrence posts on his personal blog makes people more likely to pay more attention to whatever his employer JiveSoftware has announced lately.


• Finally, we hope that this blog post right here will help drive people to the announcement we made yesterday about Jobwire, our new site about people who've been hired to new jobs in tech and new media. Check it out!

Eat Your Own Dog Food and Rock It

Like the Postrank example above, other vendors follow up announcements by publicly using their own tools to deliver high value resources that demonstrate how valuable those tools can be. This is easier said than done but it's the best way to follow up momentum from an announcement that we know of. Two of our favorite examples are Slideshare adviser Dave McClure's slideshows about what startups in general should know about and the graphic design tutorials made by SaaS design tool company Aviary. These are the kinds of media items, built with the company's own tools, that get passed around to audiences far wider than just those who would be interested in the companies themselves. They demonstrate though, just how usefull the tools can be. Instead of marketing to one thousand people who might be interested in Slideshare or Aviary, these resources reach audiences of hundreds of thousands of people, of which a smaller percentage but larger absolute number of people will be interested in the company itself.

Got that? After a launch event, follow it up by using your own product or services to create a resource that "goes viral!" No problem, right? Of course this is much easier said than done and is done poorly far more often than it is done well - but nobody said any of this would be easy. We're going to try to do this ourselves with our new Jobwire product - we're going to try to use it to break news and write great Hire of the Day posts for this, our primary blog. We think that some new hires are important, fascinating news. We'll put that to the test by posting some of that news here and we'll see if our readers agree with us and share these items throughout social networks as you do many of our other posts.

These are the steps we suggest as ways to keep momentum rolling after a launch event, do you have other strategies you've found to be effective? We'd love to read about them in comments below.

Photo credit: Eddie Van Halen pic, Creative Commons by Flickr user Anirudh Koul

Sometimes it feels like social media is just not relevant to the people you're trying to reach. That's a common dilemma, but we believe it doesn't have to be that way. In this post we discuss five strategies for using social media to reach people who don't use social media, and we've listed specific tools you can use to do it.

All of the strategies and tools below are most effective when they're used well - it's easier said than done.

Develop Relationships with People Who Bridge The Gap Inside Other Organizations

You may want to target senior executives, older people or others who just aren't very likely to read your blog posts, Twitter messages, etc. but chances are - those people have co-workers, family and others in their lives who would. By adding value to the lives of less senior people inside organizations, you can gain mind-share with the people in whose interest it is to make good recommendations to their superiors at work.

Similarly, many mainstream journalists now participate in social media conversations for their research. Making yourself known as a topical expert to them online can help increase your visibility when it's time to write a story off-line.

Here's a recommendation we offered to one non-profit organization that we often use as an example now for others.

Let's say you work locally on a particular issue and you're interested in getting traditional press coverage. One way to pursue this is to subscribe to a feed for national media outlets, filter that feed for keywords related to your topic of interest and keep your eye out for breaking news or important topics on the national level. You might even set up an RSS to SMS alert.

Then, when a story comes out in the New York Times about water quality, food transport costs, or whatever your issue of interest is, you can contact local press about it and say "I don't know if you've seen this national coverage on this topic [they probably haven't because you've automated watching for it] but if you're interested in a local angle, our Executive Director/CEO/[or insert more down to earth person] is a good expert source for a local perspective."

You don't want to do that too often, but occasional and appropriate use of this tactic should be appreciated by the press you reach out to. It's mutually beneficial for both parties and could help you get that coverage in traditional media that's more likely to be read by your off-line target market. Even the smallest organization could grow its mind-share in mainstream markets quickly using tactics like this.

Tools to use for these tactics: For general participation and visibility among the social media users that do exist in your area of interest, check out Twellow.com for a directory of Twitter users by industry, do some searches on FriendFeed.com and find out what the top blogs in your area of interest are using the methods described in our post "Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche." Just participating with like minded people in this space will move you up on their list for biz dev and marketing.

If you're not familiar with RSS feeds, start with this introduction: RSS in Plain English. FeedRinse.com is one of the easiest to use feed filtering services. Feed filtering is also available inside Zaptxt.com, one of our favorite RSS to IM/Email alert systems. See also Pingie, a new alert service we've been using and Alerts.com, an even newer one we wrote about this week.

Use Web 2.0 Tools to Learn About Real Life Public Events

There may or may not be relevant events in your field that are attended by non-social media users and are listed on sites like Upcoming.org and Eventful.com. It's worth a look and worth subscribing to the RSS feeds for those searches.

More likely, perhaps, is that your local newspaper's website has those kinds of events listings. Trade associations, nonprofit groups and other kinds of sites often have events listings as well. What has this got to do with social media tools? You can subscribe in the same RSS feed reader that you read blogs in to those event listings. All too often there aren't feeds available, but there are tools you can use to create them (see below).

Tools to use for this tactic: An RSS reader, be it Google Reader, iGoogle, MyYahoo or another - there are lots of options. If events listings aren't being published by RSS, here's what you can do. Find pages where they are listed, scrape a feed using Dapper.net (see how to do this) then filter the feed for keywords related to your industry if need be using a tool like FeedRinse.com or Pipes.Yahoo.com if you feel brave. (Want a 5 minute screencast intro to the basics of using Yahoo Pipes? Well there you go.)

For example, I just scraped a feed from my local paper's news site event listings, then ran that feed through Yahoo Pipes to filter for tech or startup related events. The end result? A feed that's empty today but could deliver just what I'm looking for later - mainstream events that I can attend after having learned about them using new tools on the web.



Make Your Blog an Email Newsletter and Promote it Elsewhere

Feedburner, Google's RSS publishing service, makes it easy to offer any RSS feed, including the one your blog should publish automatically, as an email newsletter. There are lots of companies that buy AdSense links on Google for links to their websites and blogs for key search terms. Your marketing department may write guest editorials in traditional press already and any other traditional marketing campaign can lead people to an "email newsletter" page - really your blog with email subscription.

If your target audience doesn't read blogs or participate in social networks, they probably do like email. This is an easy thing to do and can prove quite effective for non-technical audiences if framed in a non-threatening way.

Look Harder, Your Audience Probably is Using Social Media That You Aren't Aware Of

There were 5 billion videos watched on YouTube just by people in the US in July. There are people in your industry using LInkedIn, we guarantee it. Where are people talking about you or your industry online? Check out Kingsley Joseph's Social Media Firehose to find examples (click the "list" button to see a list view of links).

A couple of other places to look include Ask.com's blogsearch, sort by popularity, and the social bookmarking site Delicious, where you can search for and subscribe to the most popular or most recent bookmarked links by keyword. You'll want to use the site in different ways depending on your field. http://delicious.com/popular/chiropractic may not unearth a lot of resources, but http://delicious.com/tag/chiropractic+blog looks pretty interesting, for example.




It is not surprising to find an equine dental assistant on LinkedIn.




Use the Internet to Make Yourself Smarter In Real Life

The best way to use social media to reach people who don't use social media is probably just to use social media to kick more ass. You may be the only person in a meeting that reads blogs (unlikely, really) but that doesn't have to be what people notice; the fact that you know more, sooner, about your shared interests (as a result of reading blogs) well will be a big help.

Easier said than done? Check out our recommended tools in this regard:
Check out our article about how to find the top blogs in any niche and then combine those sources with the methodology describe in our post How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet (or the best content on any topic).

We also recommend taking those top sources you identify and turning them into a Google Custom Search Engine, which is remarkably easy for even the least technical people to do. Search against those top sources as reference and you'll unearth all kinds of useful knowledge from the archives of your industries online experts.

Build your reading list with the tools described in those posts above and you'll be using social media to advance your career and connect more effectively with more non-users of social media.

We Think it Can Be Done!

Participation in these technologies is expanding rapidly, but a huge portion of the world is still not likely to read this blog post, for example (their loss!) much less to connect with the kinds of communication we all share on a daily basis.

How do these strategies look to you? We'd love to know what methods and tools you've found particularly useful in using social media to reaching outside of the echo chamber. Let us know in comments.

Image at top: "Nuke!" CC from Flickr user Jaako





]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_ways_to_use_social_media.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_ways_to_use_social_media.php Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:36:08 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick According to a Nick O'Neill at the Social Times blog, MySpace is charging app developers for the "featured" spots in its App Gallery, which it officially launched last week. The Gallery has featured spots for applications on its main page and on each of 22 category pages. O'Neill is reporting that the price of advertising on the featured spots is between $50,000 and $100,000 per week.
]]> So far, it looks like Slide has been the only taker and their applications occupy all four featured spots on the main page of the Application Gallery. "This is the first platform which has actively attempted to generate revenue directly from application developers," said O'Neill, who thinks that this could spell trouble for smaller app developers whose applications may be marginalized in the gallery by apps paying MySpace for extra promotion.

Facebook faced a small backlash from some developers last month when it appeared that the network was playing favorites with partners.

We noted in early April that MySpace was planning to put out joint press releases with app developers. Giving app developers access to the Fox Interactive Media PR machine was an unorthodox step but it showed developers that the company was serious about pushing apps developed for its platform. Any goodwill that may have been built with developers though, might be lost if MySpace starts playing favorites with well-funded, larger app companies.

App spam, which has been a problem on Facebook, is another issue that MySpace may need to contend with. We're all curious how they will deal with it once the applications platform grows (MySpace currently has 1,000 apps in their Gallery, compared with nearly 24,000 at Facebook); we hope their solution won't be to charge premium access to advertising in the "Friend Subscriptions" feed.

That said, paid advertising for apps within the the confines of the Application Gallery seems pretty benign. It's not much different than application developers paying to place Social Ads on Facebook (something that Facebook encourages on their ad sales page). As long as MySpace makes sure that paid promotion doesn't come at the expense of other applications in its Gallery, they should be fine.

What do you think of MySpace charging for premium real estate in their Application Gallery? Fair game or does it spell trouble for smaller app developers? Will it discourage some developers from utilizing natural viral channels? Let us know in the comments.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_charging_for_app_promotion.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_charging_for_app_promotion.php Social Networks Thu, 01 May 2008 22:00:01 -0800 Josh Catone