See this YouTube experiment, very much in development, called "Cosmic Panda". It is a new interface for its videos, playlist and user channels.
According to YouTube, here's what to expect:
A new experience for watching videos and playlist
More page designs and better editing tools to customize your channel
Keep watching watching when moving between videos, playlist, and channels (Chrome only)
Stylish new look and feel
In its announcing blog post, YouTube says: "We are obsessing night and day over how videos are presented. Our team is constantly experimenting, tweaking and playing with new ways to make your experience exactly what you're looking for."
Want to catch quickly investors or venture capitalists' attention?
First have a presentation prepared to pitch your idea and business plan in less than 20 minutes, says Bill Clack, the CEO of Microventures, a securities broker/dealer that user crowdfunding to invest between $1,000 and $10,000 in startups online.
Have a cover page with your logo, business name and a tagline which give insight into your company and be easy to remember.
Summarize all the information highlighting the most interesting facts about your business, as well as any huge milestones you may have hit. Include any press you've received.
Team. Investors are not only putting money toward your idea, they're investing in your team. Include the people's background, their successful exits and how all relates to your company. Emphasize that your team has worked together in the past or for a long period of time. It shows you can and like to work together. List any important advisors you use.
Explain the problem your concept is going to solve.
Value proposition to solve the problem. Demo your product and include any case studies to show that your product has worked for existing customers.
Show the market size to your product and know the cost of acquiring new customers. Explain the growth of your current sales and forecast future revenue.
Financial projections. Present the milestones that you've already reached and try to create projections.
List your competition and say why your product/service is different from their model. Every business has competition even if you think you're offering something new and unique. Highlight any large barriers to entry in your field. They indicate that you have limited competition, that your concept has first-to-market exclusivity for a longer period of time. If your competitor have been acquired, list acquisition prices and who acquired them.
Business model. Tell investors how you plan on generating revenue. Show a list of the various revenue streams for your model and the timeline for each of them. How will you price your product and what does your competition charge. Also tell how you will keep your customer engaged. Remember that every investor wants to get his money back. They are always thinking about the exit, so have a strategy in place and be able to talk about it. List any companies that may acquire yours, including similar products that have been acquired in the past.
Financing. Talk about what you have accomplished with minimal funding. Investors like to see entrepreneurs who have invested their own money. If you have already raised money, talk about how much, who invested and what you did with it. If you are pitching to raise capital, list how much you're looking and how you intend to use the funds.
It seems that Google cloud apps are ready for prime time.
The NYT mentioned last month the case of the InterContinental Hotels Group that has decided to move onto Google's Web-based productivity and communications programs all the company's 25,000 workers using Microsoft's Office. The savings will add up to millions of dollars a year.
Other new users include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with 25,000 employees; the State of Wyoming, with 10,000 workers, and the McClatchy Group, a publishing chain, with 8,500 workers.
To halt such defections, Microsoft has begun to sell Office 365, a cloud-based version of Microsoft's e-mail, whiteboard collaboration software and word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs.
Google claims more than 30 million active users of Google Apps, the service running in the cloud. About 12 million of those users are university staff and students, who typically get free access to the apps. The standard charge for business and government customers is $50 per user a year –versus the $200 to about $400 of Microsoft Office users. The new Office 365 package that contains Word, Excel and Word is around $72 a year.
Other cloud-based business e-mail, productivity and collaboration tools are Zoho, Zimbra from VMware, Lotus Live from I.B.M. and Chatter from Salesforce.com.
Google+ social networking site has had 20 million unique visitors since its launch (three weeks ago), according to ComScore.
This is an impressive growth, considering that access it is by invitation only and Google hasn't yet marketed the service.
The idea of letting people share comments, articles, photos and videos with various "circles" of friends or contacts while retaining some measure of privacy, is catching up.
Also, the "hangouts" feature, that lets people do "video chats" speaking to numerous friends simultaneously, is really appealing.
Google has a long way to go to reach the scale of Facebook, with 750 million users. But definitely it has become a competitor.
Now, imagine for a second that Google+ works. What would be next?
Google can incorporate features of Google+ in YouTube and other services.
Personal information posted by its members would let marketers target specific demographic group or people with certain interest.
People's data could change the way Google's search engine works. Sites could be ranked based on what users and their friends like or find useful.
Google would allow software developers to create "social" games and other applications that would run on top of Google+.
To explain its new TouchPad device, Hewlett-Packard has launched "Everybody On" campaign.
As part of it, the company's Web site has posted several videos. See above a couple of them.
The H.P. campaign includes a bundle of social media efforts, especially a Facebook application called TouchPad LaunchLine, where visitors can answer trivia questions, watch videos and involve friends.
Personally I don't think that campaign will make much impact.
Linkedin is the first publicly traded success story of the social networking era, valued at $8.4 billion, a 547 times the company's 2010 earnings, and it keeps attracting new members. (See its CEO Jeff Weiner in the above's video)
But what strucks me more than this whopping valuation are its new revenue sources beyond advertising and subscriptions. For example, recruiting firms pay Linkedin an average of $8,000 a year for each employee who uses its avanced tools to search through profiles on the site. Hiring solutions accounted for 42 percent of revenue in 2010.
In this fied, a few companies are using Facebook's network to take on Linkedin directly.
San Francisco's BranchOut gives Facebook users a way to discover job opportunities through their friends
Monster has launched BeKnown, a Facebook app for professional contacts.
There is a new start-up called Shopobot for figuring out the cheapest time to make a purchase. Basically, it helps shoppers track prices and decide when to buy.
Shopobot, backed by Google Ventures and AOL, crawls the Web sites of 12 retailers, including Amazon.com, Newegg.com and Walmart.com, several times a day.
Learn from the BET Awards (celebrated last month) how to do a successful social media integration.
They used live streaming video from backstage throughout the show, as well as a visualization of what fans twitted using the #BETAwards hashtag.
The network dedicated its lower third to show comments being shared on Twitter and Facebook. BET also shared social media content being published by some of the celebs in attendance.
"BET's efforts underscore what's becoming a fairly big trend with award shows. The Grammy's have been lauded for some of their digital efforts leading up to their broadcast (...) and MTV has integrated social media into their award shows for the last couple years,"said Mashable.
With Israelis and Palestinians physically separated, the best way to be interacting is a Facebook page, facebook.com/yalayl.
This site, created by a former Israel diplomat, allows people to talk about everything at once: the prospects of peace, soccer, photography, music... Usually people don't talk about about a two-state solution or a one-state solution but about being a young person in Israel or Palestine. People share a frustration about greater powers restricting them.
In its first month it has had 91,000 views, and of its 22,500 active users, 60 percent are Arabs — mostly Palestinians. There is a lot enthusiasm around this page, and the NYT suggested last week that the Facebook-driven revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt may offer some guidance here.
The site has already sponsored a photography contest and discussions are under way for sponsorship or involvement from the Italian government, the Barcelona soccer team and MTV. Mr. Peres and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, have chatted by phone about the effort. Facebook.com/yalayl has official letter from Peres and Blair. It gives the site a feeling that there is something behind it.
The founder of the site, Uri Savir, who was chief peace negotiator for Israel in the 1990s as well as the director general of its Foreign Ministry and a member of Parliament, has said in the NYT:
"Today we have no brave leaders on either side, so I am turning to a new generation, the Tahrir Square and Facebook generation. We need to emulate Tunisia. My goal is to have 100,000 people working on Yala on joint projects that will lock our leaders into making peace."
And he adds: "All communication today is on the Internet — sex, war, business — why not peace?”
The most frequent points of discussion in these tweets were jobs, the economy, housing and the legalization of marijuana.
This is how is worked: 1) Twitter Search algorithms identified the most-engaged-with tweets, 2) the Mass Relevance Platform aggregated and filtered questions, 3) a panel of eight seasoned Twitter users with experience discussing the economy chose the final 18 questions from some 60,00- submissions that were then 4) read live the the President by Twitter executive chairman Jack Dorsey.
Check out statistics and the full-video of the event.
I usually highlight social media successes. But what about social marketing disasters?
Let me list some of them:
Creating too many Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook pages, groups and accounts. "One Facebook page with 5,000 followers is usually better than 5 pages with 1,000 followers each. Sub pages can cannibalize from your main company page or group," says an expert of our eMarketing Association Network.
Tweeting too often. Avoid tweeting 20 times a day; people will un-follow you. Ad some value with statistics, really interesting links, and discounts/promotional offers.
Incomplete and bad Facebook page information. Ensure that your company description or your profile is accurate and up to date.
Not allowing people to post on your wallwhen having a group.
Not adding a Facebook and Linkedin like box to your home page. Go to to this url to find out how. You can get code for your Linkedin group under "send invitations" tab.
The Vatican is leaping into the world of new media with the introduction of a news information portal called News.va.
It aggregates information from the Vatican's various print, online, radio and television media in a one-stop shop for news about the Holy See.
The portal is outfitted for live-streaming of papal events, audio feeds from Vatican Radio, photographs from L'Osservatore Romano and printed texts of papal homilies, statements and speeches.
It is also equipped to be social-media friendly, with Twitter feeds and Facebook links.
The problem is that portal contains no search functions and it requires to download a Silverlight plug-in. In my view, usability and design is outdated.
After the failure of Orkut, Google Wave and Google Buzz, Google makes another try to take on Facebook.
Last Tuesday, Google introduced a social networking service called Google+, which is initially available by invitation. The service allows people share and discuss status updates, photos and links, much as they do on Facebook.
Only big difference: it is meant for sharing with groups, not with all of one's friends of the entire Web. It also offers group text messaging and video chat.
Google+ users will select people from their Gmail contacts, drag and dropping friends' names into different groups. Unlike on Facebook, people do not have to agree to friends with one another. They can receive someone's updates without sharing their own.
It is worth to note that Facebook introduced last year Groups. And there are services like Path for sharing with small groups, SocialEyes for video chat and GroupMe for group texting.
At stake is Google's status as the most popular entry point in the Web. When people post on Facebook, which is mostly off-limits to search engines, Google loses valuable information that could benefit its Web search, advertising and other products.
The White House continues to use intensively social media platforms to deliver, listen and collect information.
Earlier this year, President Obama visited Facebook's headquarters in California and fielded questions from Marc Zuckerberg. The event was live streamed and the questions and answers were displayed on Facebook's platform.
In June, members of Obama's campaign team announced that the President would be posting his own tweets on the @barackobama Twitter account from time to time, signing them, BO. With more than eight million followers, that account is used primarily for his-reelection efforts, while the @whitehouse account is used for administration news and updates.
Now Obama will host this week a "Twitter Town Hall", where he will answer questions about jobs and the economy that people across the country poses, using the hashtag, #askobama.
Two gigantic screens will display the conversation on Twitter in real time. Twitter will identify the most popular questions relying on its own search and curation features as well as a company called Mass Relevance to help find questions and topics that are the most frequently mentioned.
How many times we forget that content is the cornerstone to social media, and the new marketing is about publishing great content?
Yes, in order to create engagement with your target audience you need produce valuable free content and follow a strategy. You need to be the authority in your area.
