Yahoo Lets Ladies 'Shine' on New Community Site

Yahoo has launched a community-oriented site geared to women of all ages, reports CNET.

"Shine," part of a company-wide attempt to build more vertical content destinations, also aspires to challenge femme-centric giants like iVillage and Glam Media, which court ad dollars across myriad popular niche sites.

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Shine

Musicians take social networking into their own hands

50 Cent has more than 1 million friends on MySpace, but if the rapper ever decides to leave the social network, he'll be leaving behind those friends, too. So like a growing number of artists, he's started his own social networking site.

On Thisis50.com, fans can create profiles and friend lists just like on MySpace, but 50 Cent has direct access to the site's users and their e-mail addresses.

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Online Communities and Brands - Our New Hometowns

Some interesting thoughts on brands and online communities, and why they tend to be clunky, unusable messes.

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White Paper from StrawberryFrog

Yet another compilation of do's and don'ts for social media marketing. It does however, come with a preliminary case study of Scion's social networking efforts.

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Sochial Networking

Here's a clever, and subtle, use of social networking by a marketer. Every day, Facebook designs a new gift that users can send to their friends. Lexus is currently running "The power of H" campaign. So Facebook and Lexus designed an h gift. For every h sent, Lexus will donate to Earth Pledge.

The Social Club for The Anti-Social

Rockstar Games is about to launch a social network where gamers can track their achievements against other players. It'll even get Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 players on the same (web)page. It's called Rockstar Games Social Club. Though I think it should be called GTA+.

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The Rise of Social Search

As more and more people spend more and more time on social networks, they have less and less time to spend on b2c sites. How should marketers react? Here's a "search engine" point of view:

Part one

How to Run a Social Network Campaign

Nike wanted to put themselves in the middle of the 6th annual London run. No campaign site - all community driven - a launch teaser video and exclusive music track were seeded across community networks to raise awareness. Meanwhile, a MySpace community launched featuring rich Flash content explaining the event.

Campaign overview

Nike Supersonic MySpace page

Sports Sites Talk a Big Engagement Game

"As the pro football and basketball seasons hit their stride, some sport sites are proudly showing advertisers just how much time consumers are spending with their content in the hope those would-be clients believe engagement translates to greater advertising impact. Their eagerness to crow about such metrics suggests Nielsen//NetRatings' new time spent metrics may have come at the right time, but are advertisers listening?"

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MySpace and Friends Need to Make Money. And Fast.

"The numbers are amazing. MySpace's membership has ballooned from 20 million people in 2005 to 225 million today, an average annual growth rate of 513 percent. Rival Facebook grew at 550 percent a year during the same period. LinkedIn's rate was 182 percent.

"Yet one social networking metric is distinctly underwhelming: the one with a dollar sign. Lookery, an ad network specializing in social media, offers display ads on MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo for only 13 cents per thousand times the ad is served (CPM); Yahoo's average CPM is estimated at $13. Video ads on MySpace reportedly fetch just $25 per thousand showings; CBS charges $50 on affiliated sites, NBC as much as $75."

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Hennessy Distills Info from Social Networks

ADULTS AGES 21-24 LIVING IN the Northeastern U.S. generally have a "positive brand relationship" with Hennessey, one of Diageo's cognac brands, according to Networked Insights.

Surprisingly, the beverage behemoth didn't have a handle on this helpful marketing statistic until it tapped the Madison, Wis.-based company to mine social networks like MySpace and Twitter for qualitative data on factors like brand engagement and affinity.

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Side note to Tameka Kee, there are only two "e's" in Hennessy.

SocNets: The New Walled Gardens

The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users....

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The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Starbucks Grinds Out SocNet Site, Gets Bitter Response

Ewww…What’s That Smell? It’s MyStarbucksIdea.com

Granted, it’s way too easy to dump on Starbucks these days, but I was taken aback when I started to Google the name of the coffee chain’s so-called social networking site on Monday and discovered the glee people seemed to take in dumping on MyStarbucksIdea.com.

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Turning radicals into revolutionaries: the key to kick-starting your social strategy

Charlene Li looks back to the American Revolution to explain how a radical-minded employee can take advantage of the ongoing social revolution to spark a relationship between a corporation and consumers.

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Imeem Makes Its Own Platform Play For Music Apps.

Who’s OpenSocial? For those of you who thought OpenSocial was going to make things easy for developers who want to create social networking apps once and deploy them everywhere, think again. More splintering is occurring. Tonight, rising music social network imeem (an original member of OpenSocial) is releasing its own software development kit for programmers to create applications on imeem. Imeem is not abandoning OpenSocial, it is just that programmers will be able to build a lot cooler apps using the new imeem Media Platform. But don’t worry, support for OpenSocial is “coming soon.”
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Yahoo Backs Google's Push for Open Social Networks

Yahoo said it is backing a program by rival Google to make software work fluidly across different social networks, and will create a joint foundation to promote the effort. All to help make social networks a little less anti-social.

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Caroline McCarthy goes into more detail here

Decommoditizing Social Networks By Connecting User Profiles Via OpenSocial

Even The Jones are Keeping Up with Social Networks

According to eMarketer.com, the rate of affluent users joining online social networks dramatically increased this year. A new form of online slumming?

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Opening Windows for Social Networks

Microsoft Partners with Social Networks to Improve Data Portability

ADAPTING TO AN INCREASINGLY OPEN and wall-less Web, Microsoft on Tuesday agreed to let users of its Windows Live platform share their contact lists with five of the top social networks: Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, Tagged and Hi5.

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The Future of Social Networks

Charlene Li, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, has a bit to say about the future of Social Networking, saying they'll be "like air."

Here's an easier-to digest slideshow.

Apologies to geekandpoke.typepad.com for stealing their cartoon.

Widgets Get Wads of Advertisers on Facebook

Are his widgets worth half a billion? If Max Levchin's Slide can cure what ails online ads, they might just be.

Why widgets work

Why widgets don't work

Is Social Network Advertising an Oxymoron?

At a recent social media panel, MediaPost's Catharine P. Taylor heard opposing views of the future of advertising on Social Networks, and wonders who is right?

Battelle of Federated Media sees social media as the thing that will finally make online advertising truly engaging: “I think social media is the place that is going to happen. I really believe that,” he said on the panel. Denton of Gawker Media, meanwhile, said that the very thing that makes social media so attractive to consumers makes it a “failure as an advertising medium.” In other words, people don’t want to be sold to when they are deeply engaged in a highly personal medium.

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CBS Sports Takes March Madness Social

From Dan Greenfield's perspective, CBS Sports has done a terrific job in using its Facebook page to leverage the power of social media. Its Facebook bracket application is expected to engage millions of users, whether they are die-hard fans or casual observers.

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Marketers Increasingly Use Social Networking Sites

A new JupiterResearch report, "Social Networking Sites: Defining Advertising Opportunities in a Competitive Landscape," finds social networks to be a way for advertisers and marketers to break through the clutter and enlist brand advocates for their cause. This year will likely see an increase in the number of brands using social marketing to reach consumers.

In 2007, as many as 48 percent of brand marketers will deploy marketing on social networking channels. Last year, about 38 percent were messaging on the channel.

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Facebook Wins API Award

Programmable Web gives Facebook their Application Programmable Interface of the Year award

The statistics are impressive - nearly 12,000 applications produced on the Facebook Platform since its launch on May 24th of this year and according to Adonomics those applications were used over 36 million times in the last 24 hours.

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The top 100 Facebook apps developers

Video the Next SocNet Trend?

Will social networks become the next video frontier or a big miss?
Here's an interesting look at a crucial difference between a social networker vs. a sharing community member. And what it might mean for advertisers looking to mix the two up.

R.E.M. Hits Soc Nets Before They Hit The Shelves

The new album, Accelerate, will be streamed in its entirety courtesy of iLike a week before it's released on April First. Sorry, I know there's an easy joke in here somewhere, but I'm not making it.

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Do You Have a Social Network in You?

USA Network won Best Campaign in Social Networks at the 2007 OMMA Awards. Here's everything you need to know about it.
Show Us Your Character and how you did it
The Show Us Your Character portal
A little bit on the two runner-ups: Scion and X-Men 3

Welcome to the Hotel Campari

Two years ago or so, Campari launched a social network campaign to market, well, Campari. The campaign centered around the "Hotel Campari" and featured Salma Hayek. Here's a case study that discusses how well it went.

Campari case study, with another gratuitous shot of Salma

Putting a Face on Social Networks: Corporate Facebook Pages

When it comes to launching a social networking site, should corporations create their own from scratch or should they piggyback onto Facebook’s network of users?

The debate rages on.

Podcast debate with Brian Oberkirch, Jeremiah Owyang, Ted Shelton and Chris Heuer.

Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone

Social networks may be nothing new to habitués of the Internet. Several years of competition among Facebook, MySpace and Friendster have generated tens of millions of members.

But now the market is teeming with companies that want to bring the same phenomenon to the cellphone. There are so many “mobile social networking” upstarts, in fact, that when New Media Age magazine in Britain tried to identify the “ones to watch,” it ended up naming 10 companies.

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Target Beats Wal-Mart in Facebook

Here's a look on how Target successfully used Facebook, and Wal-Mart didn't. This article also features some pretty good do's and don'ts for social marketing.

Talk with, or do not talk with. There is no try.

It's not about you anymore. It's about you and them, them being the consumers. How do you market to them on social networking sites? A new medium oftentimes means new rules. Who makes the rules? Now, they do.

Traditional means are failing.

Rules for suceeding.

The right social network for you

"With so many social networks dotting the Web, though, it's hard to know which ones are worth your time and bandwidth. To help clarify things, 17 alternatives to MySpace in five broad categories are examined: general-purpose, special-purpose, taste-based, mobile, and media-sharing social networks.

Which one is right for you?

Bill Gates Leaves Facebook for LinkedIn

After deleting his Facebook account, Bill Gates announced his presence on LinkedIn by posing a question to the LinkedIn community: “How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?”

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Social Networking's Field of Dreams

Today’s corporate communications professionals probably don’t worry about baseball fields, but when faced with the idea of launching a social network they should not be faulted if they ask themselves the same question: “If we build it, will they come?”

More from Dan Greenfield