@Publish

Facebook's practice of scanning messages and counting links as likes isn’t a privacy issue. It's common knowledge that what users do online - even in so-called private messaging - is potentially public. Rather, Facebook's activity raises a credibility issue. It shows that the company is fudging the numbers when it comes to advertising.

“It's not in Facebook's best interest to proactively solve this problem," said Tom Corson-Knowles, an online marketer who consults with small-business owners on ways to promote products on social networks. "Facebook's revenue is directly proportionate to the number of pageviews the site gets, and banning one percent of [pageviews] will cost the company a lot of missed ad impressions."

“You talk about low barriers to entry and reaching potential sci-fi and game consumers, and its hard to look much further than the numbers on Machinima’s YouTube channel,” McCloskey says. “It’s a fantastic vehicle to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We wouldn’t have reached as many people or gotten them excited about the game if we had put up a bunch of barriers to entry, like making them pay, going to a theater, stuff like that.”

Scripted web shows are taking off online, but many of the popular ones focused on gamers. Felicia Day‘s web series The Guild receives millions of views on YouTube, and is on its sixth season of production. Machinima also runs other popular shows, like Mortal Combat: Legacy.

Mobile interaction is the Internet 3.0. If Internet 1.0 was static websites and Internet 2.0 was all about the first social sites designed for interaction, 3.0 is now about the mobile platforms and apps that are driving more and more online traffic and more customized user experiences. As noted above, there will be a huge increase of mobile-only Internet users in the next few years, leading to whole new ways of web usage that demand marketers’ attention.

the typical page had reach of 26%  prior to the Sept. 20, meaning that, on average, 26% of a page's subscribers would see messages posted on the page. That reach has dropped to 19.5% since Sept. 20.

In short, according to the Facebook source, if brands are seeing less engagement and reach on their Facebook pages, it’s because they’re not creating engaging content. “If a brand is continually putting up low-quality content that no one is engaging with, that content is going to be optimized out of the Newsfeed,” the source said. 

Facebook measures the quality of content through engagement: number of likes, clicks, shares and comments. Typically, a post’s reach is between 15% and 20%.

Essentially what Facebook is doing here is making users pay to improve their EdgeRank score for individual status updates, the system that Facebook uses to determine how high individual stories appear in the news feed

It is really not all that different from how Google has structured its own business, where companies or individuals can pay for keywords to appear as advertisements in search results. The difference is that Google’s search engine is a much more impersonal mechanisms than is the Facebook news feed.

Where Facebook is making a mistake is in crossing the bridge between paid sponsored posts for businesses and applying it to individuals

With the new tool, Twitter’s advertising partners will be able to conduct surveys on the social network from the new @TwitterSurveys account. These survey questions — an example of which you can see above — will appear in the user’s timeline just like Promoted Tweets currently do. The user will then have the option to answer the question directly in the tweet.

You click. You buy. An advertiser pays. In an over-simplified sense, that’s how desktop digital advertising works. That system doesn’t work as well on mobile, however, where an estimated 40% of clicks are accidents (or fraudulent) and advertisers are still wary of their value. Research firm eMarketer projects that advertisers will dedicate just 2% of their budgets to mobile advertising this year--even though customers are increasingly logging in through their mobile devices.

At Google and other companies that sell advertising, the golden question has become not how to get consumers to simply click more mobile ads, but how to measure effectiveness beyond the click--even if that means tracking offline actions or purchases made on another screen.

“There’s this incredibly new, incremental engagement point called ‘out and about’ or called ‘sitting on public transportation’ or called ‘at home on the couch in front of the TV' and these are places where we didn’t used to be connected,” Jason Spero, Google's head of mobile ads for the Americas, tells Fast Company.

Twitter users follow at least one brand, and that more than half of users follow six or more brands.

Twitter also studied the reasons why someone follows a brand, and as you might expect, freebies and discounts are definitely a factor. But according to Lunenfeld, people also said they were interested in getting access to exclusive or promotional content.

The big message of Lunenfeld’s talk was to encourage advertisers to understand that advertising on Twitter isn’t separate from regular content. Brands should think of conversations on Twitter as a canvas where “you can paint some amazing stories,” he said.

By the end of the year, 80% of companies plan to use social media for customer service. On the consumer side, 62% of customers have already used social media for customer service issues.

A study by A.T. Kearney found that, of the top 50 brands, 56% did not respond to a single customer comment on their Facebook Page in 2011. Brands ignored 71% of customer’s complaints on Twitter. And, 55% of consumers expect a response the same day to an online complaint, while only 29% receive one.

. Create humanized response models to engender loyalty and build relationships. Many companies are guilty of creating robust and well-planned strategy for social customer service delivery -– but fall at the final and most important hurdle — creating a voice your audience can relate to.

Focusing on vanity metrics--such as the sheer number of media placements you received this month--will only set you up for disappointment because it's not a strategic way of thinking about what delivers the best ROI.

Media mentions aren't the only ROI for your business. We've done SEO analysis and found that some of the "small" placements actually provide the best search value.

Klein's consulting business untrikiwiki previously advertised SEO consulting services that implied that the firm could take advantage of Wikipedia as a very powerful SEO source. Language previously appearing on the untrikiwiki site included the following: “A positive Wikipedia article is invaluable SEO: it's almost guaranteed to be a top three Google hit. Surprisingly this benefit of writing for Wikipedia is underutilized, but relates exactly the lack of true expertise in the field. ... WE HAVE THE EXPERTISE NEEDED to navigate the complex maze surrounding 'conflict of interest' editing on Wikipedia. With more than eight years of experience, over 10,000 edits, and countless community connections we offer holistic Wikipedia services.” Since the story broke, that language has been removed,

"We’ve never made a single edit for which we had a conflict of interest on Wikipedia – ever. Although we have advertised such a service, we’ve not aggressively pursued it – and we have not accepted any clients interested in on-Wikipedia work." 

the best approach may be to get your fans to support your reputation for you.

Reputation defenders will do anything from passively monitoring social media to creating paid, positive reviews in order to counteract negative posts - and dominate the first page of search results. (For more insight on how the process works, see Brian Proffitt's post: Inside The Mysterious World Of Reputation Management.)

Wyer's advice for businesses looking at negative reviews is to stay positive. In almost every instance, an aggressive rebuttal will look defensive. “Our experience is that, in most cases, this approach only antagonizes the attacker and this, in fact, can escalate the online conversation, accusations and attacks.”