But analysts say GM is not the only company doubting Facebook’s ability to woo consumers with paid ads.

“Companies in industries from consumer electronics to financial services tell us they’re no longer sure Facebook is the best place to dedicate their social marketing budget – a shocking fact given the site’s dominance among users,” Forrester analyst Nate Elliott wrote in a  blog post, according to the Journal.

Bad news on the advertising front reflects poorly on Facebook just days before an initial public offering expected to reap billions for the company and value it at up to $104 billion.

Advertising is Facebook’s main revenue stream, and it has already admitted that it is not yet able to convert its mobile app’s growing popularity into more advertising dollars.

It will be psychologically devastating to sales management there, The Journal reported.

GM said it would still have Facebook pages, which cost nothing to create, to market its vehicles. GM pays no fee to Facebook for its pages, which allow the car maker to reach consumers directly.

“We regularly review our overall media spend and make adjustments as needed. This happens as a regular course of business and it’s not unusual for us to move our spending around various media outlets – especially with the growth of multiple social and digital media outlets,” a GM spokesman said in a statement.

The motoring giant is reportedly pulling out of the paid Facebook ad market because the company found its ads on the Menlo Park company’s social network to be ineffective.

While GM’s decision could be an exception in the advertising world, it marked the first highly visible crack in the Facebook strategy, said Brian Wieser, Internet and media analyst at Pivotal Research Group, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

“This does highlight what we are arguing is the riskiness of the overall Facebook business model,” he said.

“It is not a sure thing. It sure looks likely that it will be one of the most important ad-supported media properties, but it’s not certain because there will be marketers who are challenged to prove the effectiveness of the marketing vehicle.”

Facebook ads make up a small percentage of GM’s advertising budget, but the company said it is committed to the website to market its vehicles.

An acquisition announced this week could help Facebook in its mobile attempts, however – the company agreed to acquire the team behind a London-based mobile firm called Lightbox.

The deal is solely for the employees of the small company, which produced apps and products similar to Instagram, which Facebook has agreed to acquire for $1 billion, but Lightbox has more of a focus on Android devices while offering nonmobile options.

Lightbox will stop accepting new members and close its doors in about a month.

Car makers are increasingly turning to social media sites to reach younger consumers on their turf for less than a tenth of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign.

Locally, Holden’s social media and digital communications manager Andrea Matthews says there will be no impact on the local Facebook scene, as Holden doesn’t buy ad space on the site, carsguide.com.au reports.

“We don’t at the moment spend any money on paid Facebook advertising, but we do use it for a range of different things,” she says.

“For us it’s about building and maintaining our brand, creating awareness for our product, letting our customers know new products are coming, when special offers are available, and celebrating our heritage.”

Source : http://www.news.com.au/

According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, social networking is growing more rapidly in developing countries than in developed markets, where social network growth has already plateaued.  The survey measured increases in the double-digits for social networking in emerging markets such as Russia, Indonesia and Mexico, and found that “people in lower income nations who have online access use social networking at rates that are as high, or higher, than those found in affluent countries.”

The survey was conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project from March 21 to May 15, and showed that social networking is most common in higher income nations – where residents also have higher rates of internet access.  In developed nations like Israel and the U.S., half or more of the population say they use social networking websites.

In Ukraine (30%), Turkey (29%), Jordan (29%), and Egypt (28%) the percentage of users tends to be low because many do not use the internet at all; however, among those who are online, more are using social networking sites than not. This is a sharp contrast to some developed countries, like Germany and France, where the number of internet users who don’t use social networking sites outnumber those who do.

Though Brazil was not included in the Pew study, eMarketerquotes an F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi study that found 93% of internet users in Brazil engaged in social networking in August 2011.

Out of the countries studied, Russia and Indonesia actually had the highest penetration (86%) of social networking users among internet users in each country. In India 72% of internet users engaged in social media; this puts all three of these countries ahead of the U.S., which saw less than 60% of internet users participating in social networking online, as reported by eMarketer.

The study also noted the effect of political upheaval – especially when fueled by social media – on social network usage.  While most countries saw little change in social networking use between 2010 and 2011, Egypt and Russia – both homes of recent political movements in which social media played a part – each saw an increase of 10% in social networking use.

The rapid growth of social networking across developing countries will only grow faster as mobile use (and internet access with it) becomes more widespread in the next several years.

From : http://therealtimereport.com

Facebook, after filing its papers for its IPO will be starting its trading later this may. If other hot stock offerings of the past are any indication, investment funds and institutional investors probably grabbed most of the shares in the company’s oversubscribed initial public offering, despite the company’s efforts to spread some of them around.

That means you’ll be competing with mom-and-pop investors like Tessie Cuy, an East Bay real estate agent who plans to dive in when shares of the hottest new tech company in years start trading on the open market Friday morning.

“I’ll buy the stock just to see what happens,” Cuy said. “To a lot of people around the world, Facebook is the Internet, so I’d love to grab a few shares the first day it goes public. Plus, I can show them off to my friends and impress people.”

Facebook’s IPO has been one of the most widely anticipated tech stock debuts of the decade, and many analysts are bullish about the company’s long-term prospects. But some financial experts are advising individual investors to keep their cool.

For one thing, most individuals weren’t able to buy at the initial offering price. They’ll have to wait until public trading starts Friday, when demand is expected to drive the price much higher.”The investment banks tilt their IPO allocations to their biggest and best clients, and that’s rarely the mom-and-pop investors,” said Joe Magyer, a senior analyst at the Motley Fool, an investment advisory website.

Facebook made some effort to give small investors a crack at the IPO shares. It added online broker E-Trade, often used by smaller investors, to the list of underwriters that had the right to sell stock at the IPO price. Most of the 33 underwriters are big investment banks like Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, which primarily serve wealthy investors, big pension and mutual funds and the like.

Other retail brokers such as Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade and Fidelity have said they expected to get some IPO shares even though they are not underwriters. A Fidelity spokesman said his firm will have some IPO shares through an arrangement with Deutsche Bank, for example.

Those brokers have not said how many shares they expected to have. But they set minimum eligibility requirements for prospective buyers, anticipating that demand would outstrip limited supply. And most say that meeting those requirements wouldn’t guarantee customers will get their hands on any shares at the sought-after IPO price.

From: mercurynews.com

Amongst the measured topics most trending stories will appear in msnNOW section which will be constantly updating. The team of editors, in addition will create a certain write-ups for posts that manages to make up to the msnNOW section.

More on Mashable

1. Hide Your Online Status From Selected Friends:

So you want to use Facebook chat but don’t want some people to see your online status? Simply open up the Facebook Chat and click on Friends List. Start creating a new list calledBlockList.

Once the list is created, add those friends to the list that you want to appear offline to. When the list is complete, hover your mouse to the little green icon adjacent to the list and click Go Offline. Bingo! You will now appear offline to everybody in the BlockList.

2. View a Friend’s Profile Without Messy Applications:

If you are like me, you often get annoyed by the dozens of silly applications that people have added to their profile. Here’s a Grease Monkey script that allows you to view any profile without all those applications. Remember: the Mozilla Firefox web browser is a prerequisite for running Greasemonkey.

3. Display Your Facebook Status On Your WordPress Blog:

Want to display your Facebook status updates on your WordPress blog? There is a plugin that does exactly that. StatusPress lets you display your status updates to a widget on your WordPress blog.

4. Access Facebook Chat Through Your Desktop:

No need to go to Facebook.com if all you want to do is use Facebook chat. You can do it right from your desktop using clients like social.im , Adium or ChitChat.

5. Update Facebook Status From Firefox:

If you are a firefox addict you don’t need to use any other software to update your Facebook status. Simply install the FireStatus add-on and update your status right from your browser. You can also use the Facebook Toolbar to completely manage Facebook from your Firefox browser.

6. Create A Photo Collage From Pictures Of Your Facebook Friends:

Easily create a photo collage from profile pictures of all your Facebook friends using a simple Facebook app called Photo Collage.

7. Add A New friend But Hide It From Your Status Update:

A great tutorial by Tim Watson walks you through the process of hiding specific actions from your status updates.

8. Schedule Facebook Messages To Be Send Later:

If you want to schedule your Facebook messages to be send sometime in the future, Sendibleis a great tool to do that. You can also use Sendible to schedule your status updates.

9. How To Share Flickr Photos On Facebook:

My Flickr is a Facebook application that lets you display your Flickr photos and photo sets on Facebook so your friends can view and comment on them without leaving Facebook.

10. How To Download Facebook Photo Albums:

Ever felt the need to download complete photo albums from Facebook. You can easily do it with either a Windows desktop application named FotoBounce or a great Firefox add-onFacePad.

source : prohackingtricks.blogspot.com

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People have several reasons as to why they want more followers to their twitter account. Some might be needing more and more exposure to make themselves visible and heard and some might be looking for enhanced business opportunities. I have learned and currently applying some techniques that are not so difficult but one needs patience and a little bit of dedication and the result is near certain. Here are some points I would like to share to implement to increase your twitter followers just by doing what twitter allows you to do and not use any applications or tools.

1. Share contents that your prospective followers would like to reshare

Sharing content in itself a great idea to bring in more people into your ideas and interest. Its quite clear that most of the times we share those content what others have already shared. But sharing those content that adds value to others is a better idea of getting attention and luring others into your interest. Stop sharing just for the shake of having much content and filling up your website. If you do so, people of course will visit your initially but in the long run they will stop clicking your shared links.

2. Address your audience

Everyone or rather every business has their own niche, no matter how large the business is. Get a better understanding of what is the typo of your customers or followers. What are the content they expect out of you. Share and give them something which is within there expectation. Try and make people as participative as you can.

3. Play the role of resourcer

Its pretty clear that people are visiting or will visit your website or like your link because they are in search of something that you share and giveaway. Try to be adaptive to their wants and answer their queries honestly. Make your customer stay on your domain for whatever they need out of your expertise.

4. Draw a limit for yourself

There might be issues or stories that applies to you but I doubt everything of those are worth sharing or retweeting. Do share only those that have made you known in front of your customers. People might not value your shares if those share make or identity shaky. Be aware of what you have been doing to retain your customers.

5. Follow others smartly

Random following is not going to get the number of customers. People might think that if 1K people are followed at least 100 will follow back, but sadly thats not how it works. Instead what you need to do is identify the right group of people and carry out the conversations with the existing people in an organized fashion. Are you the kind of person that goes to a convention collecting a thousand business cards? Don’t you think is more productive to go and meet some key individuals that you might actually end up doing something. When you do this, you don’t just get the card and run away, you at least introduce yourself. What if you do the same thing on Twitter? Follow this individual (a prospect, colleague, competitor, vendor, whatever you want…) and introduce yourself. That person will most likely want to stay in touch with you.

6. Be and make others participative.

Since you have now followed some interesting and like-minded people, its now time to approach them and talk to them. You must be active and interactive in twitter to retain those whom you have followed. I think that if you follow a 1000 people in one day and do nothing for a week you will loose 2000 people from your account.

7. Send invitations to your blog

Integrate your blog with twitter and facebook as well. Call them to your blog, ask them to participate. Place a button to your twitter account in a very distinctively visible location in your website. Display your twitter feed in your website.

8. Beyond Twitter

Add your twitter and blog url to whatever you print be it a business card or an event promotion banner.

1. Don’t Assume. Ask
The secret to building a big social following is to deliver relevant, interesting content to your audience. But how can you create great content if you don’t know who your audience is? Ask! Create a simple survey and send it out to your followers, fans, and customers. Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey offer tons of free templates that you can customize by adding pictures, your logo, and company colors.
Ask who your customers are, how they’re using your product or service, and how satisfied they are. The more you know about your customers and what they want, the better you’ll be able to provide them with information they find useful and interesting.

2. Promote, Promote, Promote
Creating great content is the most important step, but it is only the first step. Once you’ve created that content, you have to promote it as far and wide as possible. That means Tweeting about it, posting it on your Facebook page, and relevant Linkedin group pages. Remember the 80-20 rule, which says that you should be responding to other people’s content 80% of the time, and promoting your own content just 20% of the time. It’s a natural rule of thumb—no one wants to hear self-promotional mumbo jumbo all day long.
But in practice you can blur the line a little bit, and it goes both ways. Comment on a blog or one of your fan’s Facebook posts, and if it’s relevant, include a link to your site. Re-tweet information that other people in your industry have said, if it’s not direct competition and will be useful to your customers. Check out Linkedin Answers, and when someone has a problem which your service or product could help solve, offer it. Just make sure you return the favor by commenting, re-tweeting, and liking your fair share (80%).

3. Outbound Marketing Is Soo 2011
These days it’s all about Inbound Marketing, which should come naturally once you’ve mastered steps 1 and 2. By providing your customers with interesting, relevant information, and promoting it through the right channels, it won’t take long before you’ve established yourself as a trusted expert in your field.People will come to your auto company blog, not just when they want to buy a car, but when they want to know what people are saying about 2012 models. They’ll start spending more time on your site, and get used to checking it since they know you post regularly (nudge nudge, wink wink). Your sales will correlate with the amount of time people are coming to your site, and that will correlate with how well you’re doing steps 1 and 2.

4. Don’t Fear The Negative: Be Proactive!
A lot of SMB decision-makers I talk to are afraid that going social will open them up to all kinds of negative publicity. I’ve experienced this first-hand—hardly a week goes by where there isn’t a peeved customer venting on our Facebook page, whether it’s directly related to our product or not. This can be scary, I know, but you have to remember that customers appreciate the risk you’re taking by putting yourself out there like that, and they will respect you for it. At the end of the day, they’re going to be more suspicious of the company that hasn’t taken the social plunge than one that occasionally catches some heat on their Twitter page. And for every disgruntled customer, we have 5 satisfied ones posting their satisfaction with our product. Their comments are more beneficial to our brand than the negative ones are hurtful.

]]> http://www.zerobulletin.com/social-media/the-abc-of-socializing/feed/ 0 http://www.zerobulletin.com/social-media/tips-for-social-media-lifestyle/ http://www.zerobulletin.com/social-media/tips-for-social-media-lifestyle/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:39:54 +0000 admin http://www.zerobulletin.com/?p=1249

Wake up in the morning – check your Twitter/ Facebook for any urgent replies/ status updates.

On the trip to work – take a cool photo, upload to Flickr and/or Instagram. Keep scrolling through your Twitter/ FB replies if you have a lot of activity.

At the Coffee shop – check-in on Foursquare, you want that Mayor badge!

At work – see what your social network contacts are talking about, can you add any value to their current discussions? Start posting your new updates to Twitter/ Facebook/ LinkedIn etc.

Talking with your colleagues – tap into their expertise, is anything they are saying worthy of a social network conversation, blog post, tweet, Facebook update etc.

Out at lunch – gone somewhere fancy? Photo please – upload to Facebook/ Instagram (make sure you are using hashtags to get lots of Likes).

Afternoon in the office – get on LinkedIn, check for any new inMails or invitations. Any discussions or Q&A you can help out with? Any industry colleagues you want to connect with?

Evening – craft your blog posts for tomorrow, or just jot down some ideas to keep your ‘blog bank’ full.

Trip home – stopping somewhere for dinner? Make sure you check-in on Facebook/ Foursquare, tag friends if they are with you.

Out to the Pub – photos with friends please, upload to Facebook and tag location.

Laying in bed – before you goto sleep, have a quick check of your social network accounts to see if there has been any feedback in the evening, or anything pressing that you need to do tomorrow morning.

Source : http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/

Susan Hunnisett took out her iPhone this Christmas and shot a quick video of her family.

The mood was festive, but a brutal realism also hung in the air: Ms. Hunnisett quickly uploaded the video to I-Postmortem, a website that lets people build their own memorials online, when they’re alive and well.

Knowing any day could be her last, the forward-thinking twenty-something is squirreling away her moments for the partners, family and friends who survive her, like virtual memento mori.

“As I’m in my twenties, it’s more of a journal, but I keep in mind the real purpose of the information,” said Ms. Hunnisett, a Torontonian who works in private banking. “As I get older I’ll use it more specifically for direct personal messages and planning.”

While virtual memorial websites have been around since the mid-1990s, traditionally they’ve helped the living venerate the dead. The latest crop, including I-Postmortem, a Silicon Valley start-up launched last fall, encourages the living to commemorate themselves, essentially writing their own obituaries.

And they offer another, somewhat unsettling feature: Users can have their notes, videos and recordings dispatched to their loved ones on a designated schedule, in some cases years after their deaths. Think sending your son advice on his 18th birthday, a posthumous man-to-man.

“When we talk about building immortality, this is what we refer to, the ability to continue to interact with living people long after you have gone,” said I-Postmortem chief executive Jacques Mechelany, who charges an annual fee of $49.99 (U.S.) for his “i-Memorials.”

“Would anyone get upset if they suddenly discovered, 10, 20 or 50 years later, a letter left for them by a deceased parent or grandparent?”

Mr. Mechelany compares it to an insurance policy: “People do not think twice about taking [those out] for their cars, homes or even their lives, hoping obviously that nothing will happen. The thinking process here is the same: It is about being prepared.”

He’s left messages for his family, friends and business partners, “telling them all the important things that you do not say every day.”

If you want, you can utter your last words directly from your Facebook wall: A new app called If I Die publishes your final missives here, right above that cat video you posted before shuffling off unexpectedly.

Users record videos and compose messages to be posted on their wall immediately after their death, or according to a schedule of their choosing. Three “trustees” from their friends list are then appointed with verifying the death so the messages can be shipped out.

“It can be a bid farewell, a favourite joke, a long-kept secret, an old score you wanted to settle, or even some valuable advice,” suggests If I Die’s cheekily morbid online ad. The ad features a hand with its middle finger extended (presumably an adios to rivals) as well as a bottle of suntan lotion, a caution to beach-bum Face-friends.

Co-founder Eran Alfonta said he got the idea after a friend and his wife narrowly avoided a serious car accident in Italy: “After they recovered, they began to think about what will their kids get from them if they died,” beyond an insurance policy.

The Israeli-based company is creeping toward 100,000 users, 7 per cent of them Canadian. The target audience is age 30 and up. So what happens if Facebook – or If I Die, for that matter – goes belly up before you do? “We will allow our users to withdraw their message and deal with it in another way,” assured Mr. Alfonta, whose service is free, with fees coming for an as-yet-undeveloped private messaging service.

Sharon Mnich, founder of VirtualMemorials.com, the first website to let people celebrate their deceased back in 1996, said the newer services can help, especially for those leaving young children behind.

“If you want to share messages that they wouldn’t be ready for, you can share stories and memories as they get more mature, so they would still have something of you to see.”

Her site is slowly seeing more people setting up their own memorials, including some who are terminally ill and “a few who are very controlling.”

“Some people want to share their side of the story so that is the only one recorded,” Ms. Mnich said. “If your life was complicated, your death will be complicated.”

Beyond divas in the family, Ms. Mnich sees privacy as a big concern: “If you’ve left something only meant for your children and it gets out to extended family or friends, there would be a whole realm of complications. Once someone’s gone, there’s no clarification.”

Experts are divided as to whether virtual memorial sites help or hinder the grieving process of survivors on the receiving end of posthumous messages.

Tim Blackmore, professor of media studies at the University of Western Ontario, noted that “people very often shoot first and think later” with social media. He sees “a particularly virulent case for that” in the new bereavement services.

“You might, in anger or in joviality, record a message which is not clear or hurtful and then set it off, leaving it as an emotional bomb that somebody will pick up, whether they like it or not, on their 21st birthday or on an anniversary.”

Prof. Blackmore also dismisses the notion that the sites offer any kind of conversation: “The come-on is that somehow, this is communication from beyond the grave. But of course it isn’t. It’s communication from before the grave; it just appears posthumously.”

Others laud the new technology as a natural extension of older mediums used after death.

“We have been able ‘hear from’ the deceased for a long time by reading a letter or watching a videotape,” said Mike Massimi, a University of Toronto PhD candidate who looks at technology and the bereaved.

“What is new about computing is that the deceased can now determine in advance … when each message arrives, who receives it and how it should be displayed.”

Mr. Massimi pointed out that we’ve long used the Net to announce births and plan weddings, and now that is slowly turning to end-of-life issues: “We are witnessing the adoption of widely available modes of communication such as Facebook to respond to a natural part of the human lifespan.”

Source : http://www.theglobeandmail.com

Thinking of posting your CV online via a social networking site in an attempt to boost your career opportunities? Before you do, advise Guardian Jobs, consider the case of John Flexman.  A former HR executive, who highlighted that he was open to job offers on a professional networking site and was subsequently summoned to a disciplinary hearing by his employer of the time.

Flexman, 34, had uploaded his CV to professional networking website LinkedIn; innocuously registering an interest in receiving information regarding further ‘career opportunities’. However whilst on holiday in America, he was contacted by his employers, RG group, claiming he had breached new company policy regarding the use of social media.

Flexman’s attempt to now sue the oil-exploration firm for constructive dismissal has been adjourned until May by an employment tribunal.

His extraordinary case, a first in the UK, sheds further light on the issue of employers using social networking websites to observe employee behaviour. However it seems you don’t have to be employed to be under the watchful eye of your employer. Similarly, those now looking for employment face the same sort of scrutiny.

According to Guardian Jobs, an increasing number of prospective employers and recruiters now use social networking websites to check a potential candidate’s qualities and credentials.

A recent survey carried out by social media monitoring service Reppler found that more than 90% of recruiters and potential employers use or have used social networking websites as part of their employment screening process. The study also found that a whopping 69% of recruiters have rejected a candidate based on the content found on the social networking profiles.

Facebook seems to be the first port-of-call, with 76% of recruiters and prospective employers using the website to screen potential candidates.

This survey comes weeks after YouGov, an internet-based market research firm, published results showing four out of 10 students were worried that their personal details, publicised on social networking websites, could blight their chances of finding future employment.

Seemingly job seekers are unaware of the importance of checking privacy settings on social media websites; naïve to the fact that details of how they socialise and behave in general could be seen by potential employers. With this in mind, Guardian Jobs- via their official Guardian Jobs Facebook page- are now advising job seekers to create ‘job specific’ e-mail and Twitter accounts; the details of which could be included on their personal CVs, and to watch their privacy settings.

Visit http://jobs.guardian.co.uk  for all the latest job news, job postings and events

Source : http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/