Category Social Media
Congratulations! Tom Polanski has one of the top 10% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012!
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Posted by eBrand Media Public Relations Department in Guest Contributors, Social Media, Success Stories on February 11th, 2013
Lift, from Obvious Corp., a social network for ‘human potential’
The Obvious Corp. has announced Lift, its first start-up, and its not obvious as to what exactly Lift is.
Obvious — a San Francisco incubator started just about two months ago by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, and former head of product at Twitter Jason Goldman — unveiled the new project in a blog post Wednesday.
Lift, Stone wrote in the post, is an “interesting new application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement. We love this software for what it does, and because we’ve tried it and it works. Our plan is to build something extraordinary together.”
How will Lift positively reinforce, uplift, encourage, give an ego boost to its users? For now, Obvious and Lift aren’t saying.
The application is in a private alpha stage and “a long way from opening the doors,” said a separate blog post from Tony Stubblebine, who co-founded Lift with Jon Crosby.
Stubblebine is a former employee of Odeo, the podcasting company that eventually shifted gears to become Twitter after its side-project Twttr started taking off, and about a decade ago worked with Crosby. Crosby too has worked for various San Francisco start-ups, most notably Dave Morin’s social network Path.
Obvious, Stone said, is helping Lift with “strategy, design, funding, recruiting — in general, we’ll be helpful wherever possible. In exchange, Obvious will own some equity in Lift.”
The blog ReadWriteWeb reported that Lift is actually a revamp of a project that Stubblebine, Crosby and their one employee, student programmer Connor Montgomery, were working on earlier this year called Mibbles.
Mibbles, ReadWriteWeb said, looked and worked a lot like Twitter with users sending short messages to each other through an online social network.
“Back when it was called Mibbles, users joined multiple groups with names like Happydog (as in “I want to keep my dog happy”), Love or Home,” ReadWriteWeb said. “Then they gave themselves Awards when they achieved accomplishment leading towards the goals around which they were grouped around.
“The Mibbles team has been working with Obvious all Summer and the service itself appears to have been under active development since at least the spring. The website underwent a dramatic redesign to take on its snazzy new look just a few weeks ago, by which time it was already renamed as Lift.”
– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Guest Contributors, Social Media, Trend Tracker on August 25th, 2011
No Magic Bullet For Replicable Social Advertising Success
| Value of Social Advertising Over Next Two Years (% of Respondents) | |
| Value | % of Respondents |
| Very valuable | 60% |
| Valuable | 32 |
| Somewhat valuable | 8 |
| Source: PIVOT conference, May 2011 | |
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Social Media on August 10th, 2011
Social Network Advertising Influences But Doesn’t Drive
According to a recently released report, a collaboration between Forrester Research and GSI Commerce, social media rarely leads directly to purchases online. Less than 2% of orders were the result of shoppers coming from a social network during the holiday shopping period between November 12 and December 20, 2010.
Addressing social marketing, Fiona Dias, executive vice president of strategy and marketing for GSI Commerce, says “… buying things from retailers is maybe 10th on the list of things they want to do on Facebook… from a retail and commerce perspective, social media seems to have no effect…”
She says, though, that social media outreach is somewhat effective for distributing news about short-term deals, as 5% to 7% of purchases are influenced by social media activity.
What does seem to work, says the report, is more traditional online marketing, including email and search advertising. Most consumers in the study were exposed to some form of marketing by the retailers before they made their purchase. 70% of transactions in hard goods categories (like lawnmowers) and 82% in soft goods categories (i.e. clothing) occurred after the consumers had engaged in some interactive marketing tactic before their purchase. 40% of hard goods transactions and 60% of soft goods transactions came to retail websites directly from email and search
| Transactions That Started With Search Or Email During Key Dates (Percent Of Transactions) | ||||
| Hard goods | Soft goods | |||
| Search | Search | |||
| Holiday (excluding key dates) | 22% | 17% | 37% | 23% |
| Thanksgiving weekend | 26 | 14 | 40 | 20 |
| Cyber Monday | 31 | 15 | 44 | 18 |
| Source: Forrester Research, Inc., May 2011 | ||||
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Social Media on May 11th, 2011
Netflix Unfriended By Facebook TV
Facebook took some air out of the Netflix balloon when it announced its own movie streaming media service Tuesday. Working with Warner Brothers Digital Distribution, Facebook is testing a video service that will let users rent movies for $3, or 30 Facebook credits.
The first installment of the trial is the 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight, and users can have access to the rental for 48 hours. The move was not welcomed by Netflix investors who see Facebook’s 600 million-member social media site as a formidable challenge to company’s $8-a-month video streaming efforts.
Netflix shares fell more than 4% to $199.30 in early trading Tuesday. Given Facebook’s immense reach and the apparent ease at which it can keep users on the site while they watch movies, the move certainly threatens the Netflix model. Not only does Facebook give the studios access to its vast membership, it can also deliver advertisers a big group of consumers with shared interests.
For links and more stories visit the new Streaming Media section at HomeToys.com
Credit: Bob Hetherington
Posted by eBrand Media Research Department in Facebook, Social Media on March 9th, 2011