I was really excited to read another article from eMarketer Daily (Andy already covered today’s Australia article) on social networks going mobile.
Mostly, though, it was about social networks. But it there was a little new information: According to a survey of over 1,400 social network members conducted by Compete, social networkers use an average of three sites, and many would visit even more.
In fact, 45% of those surveyed said they wo

If you’re tired of having to visit your favorite social network, whenever you want to message friends or share content, why not have the network come to you for a change?
That’s exactly what Mozilla has planned with their Mozilla Labs experiment, “The Coop“. The Coop is a Firefox browser extension that places the social network exactly where you’d use it the most - your browser.
We want to create a fun and easy way t

There’s a little buzz surrounding the newest pay for Diggs service called Subvert and Profit with both the Online Marketing Blog and Tech Crunch have covering it. It’s not the first website created specifically to game Digg and it won’t be the last.
I’m not going to debate the ethics involved with gaming Digg or any other social media site. It is what it is. I do want to warn anyone thinking about using such a service. Dig

TechCrunch reports that MySpace will be holding the first presidential primary on Jan 1-2, 2008. In Michael’s post and in its comments, there are a number of contentions and concerns about this announcement, including: It’s a publicity stunt
It will really influence real world primaries
It won’t really influence real world primaries
“This is pure crap that will be spun as voter base support for a candidate.”
The pr

I’ll just have to assume that these announcements aren’t April Fools jokes. The Washington Post launched a reader loyalty program for subscribers to earn points by reading stories online. Earn enough points and you can get gift certificates, travel and more. The points can also be earned in the real world with a keychain used at participating companies like CVS. Steve Hills, president of Washington Post Co., says that you can ea

The April Fools’ Jokes in Search have already been well covered. In my blog reading today, I’ve only seen one mention of social sites’ April Fools’ jokes. Here’s what Facebook creators thought was funny (with my friends’ info anonymized): Any readers catch any other April Fools’ jokes by social sites?
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USA Today has the scoop on Topix.com’s (no longer .net) new initiative to encourage the general public to post news and reports from their local community.
“We’re doing this in every ZIP code in the country,” says Topix founder Rich Skrenta. “We see a big hunger for local news. Since Day One of our existence, people have been sending us news, even though we had no place to put it. We have a (tech help) form, and peop

iMedia Connection has two useful articles in as many days. I like to read their articles, but I seldom feel prompted to link to them. But these might be helpful. Check them out: The Best Website Metrics Are…: If you don’t already know it, your website should be measurable. It should be giving you lots of beautiful data. (I love data. That’s why I love web analytics.) Even if you already have well established web analytics

It’s been like a day since we’ve talked about Twitter, so I guess it’s time again. (Okay, it’s really been two weeks, but I just keep hearing so much about it that it’s hard to remember that I didn’t write those things!)
So, in our first brush with the IM/SMS-based “miniblogging” platform, Liana Evans had already covered how Twitter could become useful to business. A few businesses caught the ide

I like the idea behind Citizendium. It’s good. In fact, it might actually be the best model we’ve found yet. But it’s still a flawed idea—and it’s been flawed since before wikis were ever conceived.
With Citizendium going live this week, there’s been some discussion about its model. If you’ve missed it, the short version is that Citizendium requires contributors to prove their identities and provide a biogra

One of the most common features you’ll find in social networks such as LinkedIn, is the ability to recommend others and effectively vouch for their credibility.
SoWeSay is a new social networking site that focuses purely on peer review and recommendation, allowing you to create profiles, rate and review anyone you know or encounter online and offline.
Ok, we’ll have to watch this one. On one hand, I like the idea of being able to

Andy Kessler has republished his WSJ interview with 22-year old Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
If you need a refresher on Facebook, it’s a good article to read. Of interest? Two uses of Facebook, that appear to be polar opposites.
Exhibit A
I watched a 23-year-old family friend, PK, solicit expert opinions gathered around his laptop asking which of the “hotties” he was connected to on Facebook he should pursue. Exhibit B
“For th

Day one of reading the many feeds submitted by our readers, and I’m already sharing a lot of cool stuff over at my link blog.
Worthy of further consideration is Andrew Girdwood’s suggestion that mobile phone networks should look to embrace social networks as a way to grow their user-base. One of his ideas…
I think a great way phone networks could encourage loyalty from their subscribers is to offer a mobile social networking pla

One of the biggest criticisms of Wikipedia - apart from the addition of nofollow links - is that anyone can add, delete or modify an entry anonymously. This often causes major headaches - vandalized entries or spam links - and is the Achilles heel of the world’s most popular online encyclopedia.
Larry Sanger was part of the original team that launched Wikipedia and he’s now behind a new rival, Citizendium, that hopes to improve on Wi

CNET has a great interview with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, in which she discusses how big companies like Yahoo - her new boss - can innovate and develop great products, in the same way as a small start-up.
Of interest is Fake’s comments on what it takes to build an online community.
We very carefully built the community on Flickr, person by person. The team and I greeted every single person who arrived, introduced them around, hung ou

Engagement is getting to be quite the buzz word lately. While it’s certainly important to any site, engagement is the lifeblood of community websites. If you’re thinking about building an online community, a new study by online community developer Communispace can help.
Time for data. (Oh, numbers, how I love thee!) (And some words. Whatever.) From MediaPost: 86% of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities wit

War Games, as it turns out, is more than just an early Matthew Broderick movie. They’re a series of events involving prominent business schools, including Harvard, MIT and the London Business School. In the past, these war games have accurately predicted events like the AOL/Google search deal, “the game of digital entertainment supremacy last year, which was iPod versus News Corp. versus Microsoft versus Vodafone or Verizon, that Ap

Local CBS affiliate, WRAL, has just reported that Wake County Public Libraries plans to prevent computer users from accessing MySpace.com. The library already has filters in place to prevent users from viewing pornographic web sites and those same filters will now work against MySpace accounts.
The reason? Too many people using MySpace to view pornographic content, which school children could be exposed to.
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When Evan Williams bought back Odeo in October, it looked like the newly formed Obvious Corp, would keep growing the podcasting site. Since then Obvious’ other property, Twttr, has taken-off, so Williams has decided Odeo would be better off in someone else’s hands.
It seems likely Odeo is worth more to someone else than it is to us at this point, so we’re looking for a new home for it

So, Yahoo launches a new Suggestion Board format for visitors to browse suggestions submitted by users of properties such as Yahoo Autos, and it looks very similar to Digg.
Digg users get their underpants in a wad, and start screaming that the site is a blatant rip-off of Digg.
Diggers even go as far as spamming the new Yahoo Suggestion Board

ClickInfluence’s Nick Wilson just spoke in a social media session at SES London, and he’s posted an extended transcription of his presentation, “How Blogs and Social Media can Help Your Company gain Targeted Traffic and Better Search Engine Rankings.”

It’s an introductory primer on the steps companies should take to get involved in blogging and participate in social media — not just because everyone’s doing it, but because it can drive targeted traffic to their site, and have an SEO benefit from the inbound links.

He also let slip during his presentation that Performancing had been sold this week

We’ve already covered the PPC campaign for Election 2008. The candidates are making more headway in their Internet campaigns every day. From blogs to online video to MySpace profiles to their own social media networks, it’s clear that anyone who’s serious about the presidency in ‘08 has hired someone who knows their Internet stuff.
To help us all stay on top of the developments in the Internet campaign ‘08, TechPresident.com debuted this week

Business Week is reporting plans by many social networking sites to open up their network to content developers, in an effort to grow their user base.
[Facebook], MySpace.com, LinkedIn, Friendster, and Google’s orkut are expected to…open their code to third-party developers this year as well—promising to kick off a spurt of innovation in social networking.

Virgin Mobile is among the many company’s licking their chops, at the thought of tapping into these mega-networks

Jason “I love SEO” Calacanis brings to light, news that Wikipedia has only enough funds to last 3-4 months. He believes that a few hard-core Wikipedians are being stubborn, by not considering advertising on the site.
I find it really ironic that a certain percentage (and I’m not gonna give percentages anymore) of the Wikipedia core team feel that they should decide for the entire Wikipedia audience the advertising policy….What happen to consensus people…80% of people

MySpace has announced a partnership with Audible Magic to identify and screen uploaded videos for copyrighted content.
Audible Magic uses audio fingerprinting technology to identify the audio digital signature in any video file and then looks for matches against a database of copyrighted content.
MySpace said it maintains a database of fingerprints uploaded by content owners

It seems not a day goes by that a new “Digg-clone” pops-up on the radar and everyone chastises them for copying the popular voting model.
Well, according to Business Week, Digg’s about to start copying another popular online community - StumbleUpon.
Later this year, Digg will launch a recommendation tool able to expose members to fellow Diggers who appear to have similar interests, says Rose

Esnips’ Eran Arkin has compiled a nice list of the “movers and shakers” of social media - aka Web 2.0 sites.
It’s based on Alexa data, so not necessarily the most accurate gauge of what’s popular, but if nothing else, it’s a great way to view all of your favorite social networks.
What is interesting? Marketing Pilgrim has more traffic than Odeo, Oodle, Pageflakes, Zoho and Feedster - yep, as I was saying, you have to trust the Alexa data

Kevin Rose has just announced that Digg is scrapping the Top Diggers list, believing the move will take away the perception that just a few hundred Diggers control the majority of the 5,000 submissions each day.
Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg…After considerable internal debate and discussion with many of those who make up the Top Digger list, we’ve decided to remove the list beginning tomorrow.

While Rose suggests Digg will introduce new ways to connect it’s users, this might certainly alienate the very users that have helped grow Digg

MyBlogLog is certainly the talk of the blogosphere these days. Readers know that I’m a big fan of the service - even though I can’t wait for their move to faster servers - and the company continues to add new users every day.
Lee Odden had a chance to ask Scott Rafer a few questions. Not too much info - Scott’s a busy man - but we do learn that they have over 50k users and growing by 2% each day.
Meanwhile, Shoemoney, has a list of ten features he’d like to see added to the service

We caught a brief glimpse of Technorati’s WTF, yesterday, when Rubel captured a screenshot before the service was pulled. Today, Technorati’s David Sifry makes the official announcement about the launch.
So what exactly is WTF?
When you see a top search with an orange flame next to it, it means at least one person from the community has written their view as to why that topic is hot - right now

I’m with Pete Cashmore on this one. Popular video search engine, Blinkx, had launched a widget for blog owners and social networks (MySpace etc) that allows them to display relevant videos on their site.
But why?
Ok, so the videos are targeted, and the widget is not very intrusive, but where’s the benefit for me? Us? Bloggers?
I already have a number of widgets on Marketing Pilgrim - each already slowing down load times

I think I’ve just discovered the new spokesman for our “Nofollow me to Wikipedia” campaign - Stephen Colbert.
As Rand points out, Colbert has already taken many stabs at Wikipedia - even getting his viewers to change the entry on “elephants” to say the population has tripled in the past ten years

Steve Rubel managed to capture a screenshot of a new site called WTF (Where’s the Fire), before it was taken down. It appears to be the work of Technorati, the well known and trusted blog search engine.
Boy, I’m excited to see this move by them. Digg has become a very closed community, and it’s virtually impossible to have your site featured, if the top users decide they just don’t like you

Michael Arrington has news that business social network LinkedIn has secured another $12.8 million in financing.
LinkedIn has seen great growth, with $10 million in revenue in 2006 - impressive for any social network - and the successful launch of LinkedIn Answers. So, the question is, with that type of success, what do they need the money for?
Clearly they have plans to roll-out new features but would they need $13m for that? Maybe they’re looking to make an acquisition, which is what my money would be on.

I always thought Mashable had a fresh, clean look to it. Pete Cashmore’s decided it needs more of a Web 3.0 feel and has launched a new design.
The new look is great and clearly Pete’s looking to provide more bang-for-the-buck to his advertisers, by adding eight 125×125 slots - which is becoming the norm these days

I’ve noticed a new referrer in my Google Analytics stats, over the past few days. DoTheRightThing.com has been sending some decent visitor numbers to the Yahoo story we ran a couple of weeks back.
I headed over to the site to see who they are and discovered a digg-like community that rates companies positively or negatively based upon their actions.
The company was founded in 2006 by Ryan Mickle and Rod Ebrahimi and it appears their goal is to provide a platform of accountability for big businesses.
GoDaddy, Wal-Mart and Starbucks are among the current companies under the social microscope

I’m a huge fan of case studies. I find it inspiring to hear success stories. Sverre Sjøthun of SEOBomb has posted about his most recent viral campaign success for Crestock.com.
Sverre coordinated a photoshop contest with some very high profile judges and the results were amazing.
Crestock.com got 200,000 unique users from the contest, went on Digg, doubled their average daily traffic after the contest, got over 5000 new customers and increased their organic search engine traffic by 1258% - in one month!
With so much talk about linkbait and social media marketing lately, we tend to forget there has always been that traffic magnet for the web, viral campaigns

When news spread that Wikipedia was going to add the “NOFOLLOW” attribute to all external links, in an effort to reduce spam, I suggested that the issue could be resolved if everyone linking to Wikipedia, added a NOFOLLOW and effectively reduce the value of a Wikipedia link. That would take care of the issue in the same blinkered way that Wikipedia deemed appropriate.
That sentiment appeared to resonate with a few other bloggers, so I’ve decided to turn it more into a campaign

SEJ reports that Wikipedia has gone ahead and added the NOFOLLOW attribute to all external links, effectively dismissing any link-juice value from Wikipedia links.
While marketers may still benefit from the actual link traffic, this marks the end of receiving any PageRank value from the highly-respected resource.
So, in response, any future links to Wikipedia from us, will include a NOFOLLOW

I don’t know who’s smarter, Nick Wilson for writing this excellent post on linkbaiting tactics for 2007, or Danny Sullivan for persuading him to publish this post (which is blatant linkbait itself) on Search Engine Land. Regardless, it’s a great read.
Linkbait, as we know it, can be summed up using just one of Nick’s paragraphs…
Good linkbait is remarkable

Found this via Michael Arrington. I agree it’s a great way to build buzz. It’s the funniest video I’ve seen in ages.
Has mildly bad language…

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Yahoo has just opened a whole new bag of Social Media Marketing fun for us Internet marketers. On the 360 blog they announced the ability to star Yahoo Answers questions.
Starring questions lets the Answers community surface the best questions on the site. When a question is starred, it is automatically nominated to appear in the new “Popular” list on the front page of Answers (check it out!).
Answers’ Popular list is similar to Flickr’s “Interestingness” and the del.icio.us “Hotlist.” Sharing popular content has made these community experiences much better, and we believe our community will benefit from sharing interests with each other.
So we now can create Yahoo Answers marketing campaigns with unique and interesting questions about related topics to our websites and have the question answered using the site we want to promote as the source

By now you’ll know of the great search marketing tools you can get when you sign up for SoloSEO (disc). They’ve just announced a set of free tools that will help you get the most out of the MyBlogLog community.
“The Missing MyBlogLog Tools” include:
Compare Blog Visitors
Compare Your Contacts
Compare Community Members
There’s a few more and each are worthy of MyBlogLog providing themselves

Over at Search Engine Journal, Loren has an interview with the co-founder of Megite, a real-time news aggregation service.
I’m not overly familiar with them - they’re a mixture of Digg, Google News and Techmeme - but it appears they’re not that familiar with us either - just 69 referrals in the past six weeks - so we’ll call it quits.

Sally Falkow suggests that social media marketing can be utilized to build a more “traditional” email marketing list.
She outlines some case studies that support the notion and offers the following key tips:

You have to identify an audience interested in your content on a relevant social media site

You  have to offer them interesting and relevant content

Once you become a trusted source of information you’re home free - they convert very well. 

The concept certainly has the potential to do wonders for a marketing campaign