Group items tagged

The company combed through its popular instant-messaging service – responsible for roughly half of the world’s IMs – and found that even its most distant users are pretty well connected. With 30 billion instant messages sent by 180 million people in June 2006, Microsoft found that the average social chain between two strangers is only 6.6 steps. And 78 percent of pairs connected within 7 degrees or fewer.

The exclusive partnership allows Getty Images to invite Flickr members to participate in a Flickr branded collection on www.gettyimages.com that will be available for licensing to Getty Images' creative, commercial and editorial customers in the coming months.

Getty Images will be the exclusive commercial rights manager of the photos selected to become part of the collection

Looking inside of those numbers, it’s not surprising that the bulk of content creators are simply social networking users that do things like post photos or links, but there’s also a quickly-growing number of people participating in more involved activities like blogging or uploading their own videos.

As you can see in the above chart, 71 million people created content on social networks last year, while 21 million posted blogs, 15 million uploaded videos, and more than 11 million participated in virtual worlds. Overall, eMarketer arrives at the 82 million number – which counts everyone who generated content at least monthly - by accounting for the overlap within the respective categories measured.

"That's the biggest scam in the Bay Area," John said. "It totally felt like a blackmail deal. I think they're doing anything to make a sale."

So here’s the observation. If you manage a brand online, get ready for people to leverage it — both professional and personal — for their own gain.The big question is whether to grease the skids and enable it, stand by and watch it happen, or send in the clowns and get all legal. The question is this: should I be giving product to bloggers and twitter users to activate this sort of self-managed promotion/contest or am I on shaky legal/ethical ground? I did rip into the “Blog Slut” phenomenon and don’t want to demean the Lenovo brand name by getting into any kind of payola arrangements. That aside, @moon has pounded the word Lenovo and gotten other people to Tweet it far more than the usual organic flow of the conversation would have. So should I shut up and be happy for the free branding?

Consumers are key for companies. Key because they’re clients and best advocates of the brand.

CRM is meant to increase loyalty by offering information and generating repeat business.

Web offers to brand a vast conversation facilitator toolbox such as blogs, forums, twitter, digg-like platforms, social networks, and instant chats to develop an intense relationship with consumers.

is such an unusual magnet for consumer attention and recall that it is worth every penny.

Consumers want to see the ads; they're akin to entertainment.

In my six years of monitoring game spots, there's been no question that brands that "prime the pump" around their Super Bowl spots get far bigger buzz dividends than brands that don't.

Well the truth of the matter is, they are going to leave negative comments about your company elsewhere on the web, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to stop this.

Being on home court gives you the ability to quickly find out issues, so why wait for them to bubble up elsewhere on the web, consider this a ‘free alerting system’ –embrace!

these are individuals that want you to improve your product, so embrace them,

social media being used to make real differences in people’s lives, beyond branding and business

What’s really interesting is that many non-profits’ use of social media is than sophisticated than many Fortune 1000 companies, who often, have the same goals.

140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary

to scope out minute-by-minute trends.

eading some to suggest that the microblogging service could become a powerhouse in social media.