PushON Ltd » MySpace

Do Social Networks Invade Your Privacy?

Guest — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 09:58:50 +0000

With a growing number of professional, educational and recreational ‘networks’ on Facebook are individual users losing the freedom to behave in a way that they deem fit?

In the past few months we’ve read about Oxford University students being fined for their post exam celebrations and how employers are using facebook to do background checks on job applicants; but if you thought all that was bad the worst is still to come.

Yesterday Jeremiah Owyang form Web-Strategist.com commented on what happens when parents try to ‘socially interact’ with their children. He goes on to suggest a handy crisis management template for any parents faced with a similar predicament. (The template may need slight modification for usage in the UK but you’ll get the general idea.)

So as social networking is becoming overrun with all those authoritative figures that we signed up to facebook to escape from what’s next… possibly a question for Web 2.5 beta !!

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Technology for Online Marketing – Twitter and Flickr to Report Events

Katrina Gallagher — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:22:08 +0000

We’ve been experimenting this week with Flickr and Twitter… and although we’re not entirely convinced of the benefit of these tools, it’s been interesting to see what can be achieved.

There are 3rd party tools for example that make mobile updates much easier – ShoZu is a software application for your mobile that allows you to add photos direct to your Flickr account.

Roy’s blessed with a Nokia, so he’s been trying out Fring, which among other things allows you to publish messages to Twitter using mobile internet – and therefore avoiding SMS charges.

There are some great plugins that you can use to show latest photos, and latest twitters on your web pages; this combination should be well suited for commentating on events as they happen. Meaning there is an illustrated report (or evidence!) typed up and published before you get home from the event.

MySpace doesn’t like JavaScript, which make the default Flickr plugins pretty useless, but there are some workarounds created independently which work very well in MySpace. A couple that I tried were Badgr, which creates a Flash plugin for your account, and flashandburn, which outputs a PNG image of your latest photos.

We’ll be using these tools for the Big Chip Awards… unless we’re too inebriated.

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Launching a Viral Marketing Video

Simon Wharton — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:07:28 +0000

When does a video become viral? To my mind it’s at the point when it starts propagating outside your direct sphere of influence. So until you reach that point it’s something of misnomer to use the term “viral” until you see evidence of traffic being generated from outside your efforts. At the moment we seem to be just on the cusp of the video reaching authority sites 2 steps removed from us. So how have we got to that point?

Various approaches we planned included:

Existing Trust Networks such as forums we have presence on
Authority Forums
Social Bookmarking
The good old telephone
E-mail marketing
and some other angel dust

One of the points to this exercise is to learn lessons. One lesson we have learnt is to test, test, test. We didn’t test our social bookmarking early enough. It wasn’t working. Not great.

So far YouTube has been very good. Best of all though is forums where we are known. People who know what you do are interested in what you do. Seems to have generated some direct leads which wasn’t the objective but certainly is appreciated. We’ve spent some money on paid for reviews as well. We’re students of the wisdom of Aaron Wall. He’s running a review service called, strangely enough, ReviewMe. We asked for a mixed range of review at various prices. 1 rejected the opportunity pretty quickly, which was fine as the material could be seen as contentious. Another one reviewed and seemed to like what we’ve done. We got immediate traffic as well. We’ve also started generating linkage from authority websites as well. Now that’s what I like to see.

As I write, it’s late in the UK. I can watch the rest of the world waking up via our stats as new people, generally in the English speaking world follow links into the video. I really had best get some sleep.

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MySpace as a Tool for Online Marketing

Simon Wharton — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:30:01 +0000

We’ve been playing with using the various rich content social sites as part of our marketing campaigns for our clients for quite a while now. We’ve not done all that much for oursleves though. However, we’ve been starting to deliver some rather fun rich media content which we think this might be a rather good channel for. There is of course the now legendary (ish) PushON video. Soon to follow is the Soundtrack podcast. That’s a diferent kettle of fish all together. So clearly you need a some kind of vehicle to take this rich media form you. It’s taking the content to the user in smaller ponds if you like, rather than trying to be a big fish in the Ocean that is Google. Of course these ponds feed into the Ocean. mm, perhaps I’m labouring the analogy a little too much. Anyhoo, there’s a lot of strategic thinking to be done about where to place the content and when. Clearly we’re after linkage. Quality linkage as well. So ideally we want to have our videos available via the site. Our thinking at the moment is hosting the video via YouTube, which also gets round the issues of loading our servers if the demand for video gets a little heavy. We can then pull it into the site and then our initial marketing effort can be to the site itself. We then push the content to the PushON Myspace online marketing account. Now, if it was text, I’d worry about a duplicate content penalty with that approach but as far as I know, we’re safe at the moment. Clearly each centre of content (Google Video, MySpace, YouTube, Squidoo etc) will have their own opportunities. Which works best? I don’t know but this provides us with some opportunities.

So if you’re one of those Teens with a MySpace account, c’mon, give us an add!!

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