Posts tagged Media
SourcingLink.net Engages Mega World Media for Online SEO Marketing of Alliance … – Sacramento Bee
May 10th
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SourcingLink.net Engages Mega World Media for Online SEO Marketing of Alliance …
Sacramento Bee Mega World Media's proven formula utilizes superior web development, forceful SEO/SMM, mobile marketing, social media, email marketing and publicity on television programs like MoneyTV with Donald Baillargeon. This combined effort will allow viewers to … |
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How to Use Social Media for Powerselling: Interview with John Lawson
May 10th
We’re all familiar with the concept of making money off the internet. Some of us may have even been burned by get-rich schemes that lure people in with the promise of quick returns with minimal effort (translation: truckloads of money while you sleep). Lucky for us, there are folks like John Lawson who are willing [...]
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SourcingLink.net Engages Mega World Media for Online SEO Marketing of Alliance … – MarketWatch (press release)
May 9th
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SourcingLink.net Engages Mega World Media for Online SEO Marketing of Alliance …
MarketWatch (press release) Mega World Media's proven formula utilizes superior web development, forceful SEO/SMM, mobile marketing, social media, email marketing and publicity on television programs like MoneyTV with Donald Baillargeon. This combined effort will allow viewers to … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Top 5 Reasons Why SMBs Should be Afraid of Social Media
May 9th
Social media presents great risks as it does rewards for small and medium-sized businesses. With an increasing number of SMBs exploring the power of social media marketing, here are solutions for social media pitfalls you might encounter.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
SEO Inc. Adds Social Media Training to SEO Course at UCSD – Sacramento Bee
May 8th
 PR Web |
SEO Inc. Adds Social Media Training to SEO Course at UCSD
Sacramento Bee By Search Engine Optimization Inc. CARLSBAD, Calif., May 8, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Marketing," a course taught by SEO Inc., a Carlsbad, CA based search engine marketing company, will be back at the University of … How to #SEO Your Business Blog: Free SEO Webinar Why SEO is Best in Recession SEO Should Be Called Integrated Digital Marketing |
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On Its Release Date, “New” Social Media Book Is Already Outdated
May 8th
The subtitle of Friends, Followers and the Future ($15.95, City Lights Publishers), a book coming out today by Emmy-winning journalist Rory O’Connor, has a dark ring to it. “How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media” conjures up images of everything changing, and not necessarily for the good.
But the book itself seems split on whether social media – and the challenges it presents to our old-line institutions – are good or evil. All at once, O’Connor seems amazed by YouTube, okay with the speed over accuracy rule of news distribution on Twitter and concerned with the typical laundry list of privacy violations committed by Facebook, Google and other big, digital media players.
I’m OK with those parts of the book. Like a lot of people and, apparently, like O’Connor, I raise concerns about privacy and Facebook while still checking it a few times each day. I worry about whether the filter bubble limits my news diet, but still find myself clicking on headlines that seem like they were tailor-made for my interests. I worry about the accuracy of sensational tweets, yet find myself checking Twitter when I’m stuck for something to write about.
In reviewing Friends, Followers and the Future, the Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray noted that it seemed too basic for the tech-savvy reader – the kind of people who “punch up websites like Techmeme and GigaOM first thing in the morning” and, presumably, are also fans of ReadWriteWeb.
“O’Connor offers a portrait of the current digital landscape as well as the historical context in an efficient, but pedestrian way,” Bray wrote. “His book is devoid of original insights and unexpected observations. I felt as though I was reading back issues of Wired magazine or the technology sections of last year’s newspapers.”
That assessment starts to speak to my problems with the book, and also raises a broader question: Is it even possible to write a book about an industry that changes as quickly as social media?
Book Publishers Will Struggle To Break Social Media News
The book’s official publication date is today, but Friends, Followers and the Future has been available on Amazon for the past several weeks. And it was clearly rushed to press: I counted no fewer than 12 typos, a sure-fire sign that the book was pushed through the editing process at breakneck speed. I was willing to forgive them because, ultimately, O’Connor has an engaging, straightforward writing style and this book will be a solid reference of what social media looked like in 2011, complete with a history of the sector up to that point..
The book references news events that happened in late 2011, but think of everything that has happened since then: Facebook filed for an IPO and spent $1 billion to acquire Instagram, an app many of us were only hearing about for the first time when O’Connor was most likely sending proofed galleys back to his publisher. Twitter has remade TweetDeck, said it wouldn’t file for an IPO and publicly acknowledged difficulties in generating revenue.
And, oh yeah, have you heard about Pinterest? The breakout social media hit of 2012 doesn’t even warrant a mention in O’Connor’s book, in large part because it was just starting to make it onto the radar screens of the mainstream tech press by the end of 2011.
In daily journalism, we talk about “evergreen” stories. Those are the explanatory stories and features that can hold for a day, a week or even a month or two because they aren’t necessarily time-sensitive. Books were once the place to tell the truly evergreen stories – the ones that are more in-depth and more likely to stand the test of time.
Changes in publishing and profit models make that less so now, but books are still supposed to have a longer shelf life than, say, this blog post. Books like O’Connor’s – or at least his voice, research and perspective – would have been more useful to me three, four or five months ago. But in tech in general – and in social media specifically – the landscape changes too damn fast.
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No, We’re Not In A Social Media Bubble
May 8th
Last in a five-part series.
In 1997, Scott Cherkin was the tenth employee and first salesperson hired by theglobe.com. Cherkin, now an executive vice president with Complex Media, remembers the company’s initial public offering, a year-and-a-half after he joined the company. At the time, theglobe.com had $15 million in annual revenue and no profits.
“While our IPO set records at the time, we were far from the exception of the time where venture capital was flowing like mad and IPOs were common,” Cherkin said.
This week, ReadWriteWeb has been looking at the current social media landscape and trying to answer the question of whether we’re in a social media bubble. While we have tended to side with the bears for most of the week, not everyone agrees with us. Today, we’re speaking with people like Cherkin, who think the current growth of social media is different from the dot-com boom (and subsequent bust).
“You will know a bubble when you see a brand new social network raises $20 million, or $50 million or goes public when you’ve never heard of them” – Scott Cherkin of Complex Media.
The Numbers Don’t Add Up To A Bubble
Yammer’s co-founder and CTO, Adam Pisoni, points to his company’s performance last year, when it tripled year-over-year sales for its enterprise product. That’s in line with what he’s been seeing in the broader social media space.
“The rate of adoption looks a lot more like boom than bust. 49% of companies will have investments in social networking solutions in 2012, while social enterprise apps and related services will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61% to become a $6.4 billion market in 2016,” he said, citing statistics from reports released this month and in November by Forrester Research.
Mike Crosson, publisher of the social media news site Social Mediopolis, almost takes a “too big to fail” stance when arguing why social media has not entered a bubble.
“Social media has become integrated into our personal and business lives in ways that never existed in the past. It has become a glue that holds together and enriches relationships,” Crosson said. “That will not go away. The wild popularity of sharing sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Flickr have proven this.”
Times Have Changed
Cherkin says both Wall Street and Silicon Valley have learned lessons since the 1990s. Today, “it is hard to go public with less than $100 million in revenue. Facebook did it with $3.7 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profits last year. LinkedIn did over $500 million in revenue in 2011, up 115%,” he said. “These are real companies that are growing like weeds.”
If Facebook has a valuation topping $100 billion following its IPO, as most observers expect, it will be valued at 25 times its 2011 revenue. Following its IPO last year, LinkedIn was valued at 22 times its 2010 revenue.
“Both of these feel high, but until they miss numbers, this is what the market sees as their long-term potential,” Cherkin said. “And for Facebook to spend 1% of its valuation on Instagram certainly seems like a small amount to pay for such a strategic asset.”
Don’t Judge A Bubble By A Single Deal
Experts on both sides of the debate caution that it’s too soon to say whether Facebook’s Instagram was a bargain or a ripoff. And experts on both sides of the debate frequently dismissed arguments in interviews last week that it was hastily carried out.
“There was similar bubble speculation around Google’s acquisition of YouTube for $1.6 billion,” said Stephanie Critchfield of social marketing firm Engauge. “Google knew exactly how it was planning to monetize YouTube, and similarly, the argument can be made that Facebook has an idea of how it will monetize Instagram.”
The bottom line for experts who do not believe in the emergence of a social media bubble is that the companies being discussed this time around are proven players with identifiable business models.
“You will know a bubble when you see a brand new social network that raises $20 million or $50 million or goes public when you’ve never heard of them,” Cherkin said.
Prior stories in this series:
-Part 1: Experts See Parallels Between Dot-Com, Social Media Bubbles
-Part 2: Who Will Survive the Social Media Bubble?
-Part 3: Fear and Speculation Drove Facebook’s Instagram Buy
-Part 4: Is Now the Time to Launch Your Social Startup?
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
SEO Inc. Adds Social Media Training to SEO Course at UCSD – MarketWatch (press release)
May 8th
PR Web (press release) |
SEO Inc. Adds Social Media Training to SEO Course at UCSD
MarketWatch (press release) CARLSBAD, Calif., May 8, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Marketing," a course taught by SEO Inc., a Carlsbad, CA based search engine marketing company, will be back at the University of California, San Diego this … How to #SEO Your Business Blog: Free SEO Webinar Why SEO is Best in Recession Talk Like Yoda Day Webinars: Implement These 10 SEO Tips, You Must |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Free Social Media Training by JM Internet Group Kicks Off Small Business Classes – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
May 6th
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Free Social Media Training by JM Internet Group Kicks Off Small Business Classes
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) May 06, 2012 The JM Internet Group, www.jm-seo.org/, a leading provider of Social Media Training, is excited to announce their upcoming free Social Media Marketing training webinar, entitled "The Top Ten Free Social Media … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Who Will Survive The Social Media Bubble?
May 3rd
Second in a five-part series.
A New York Times article in Sunday’s editions highlighted smaller, niche social networks that gave people more control over their privacy when compared to the giants such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. The article reviewed Path (for sharing with a small group of people), FamilyLeaf (for sharing with family members only) and Pair (for sharing with one other person).
These networks, and hundreds of others like them, fill an obvious void that the big three social networks are missing. The question is whether that void is big enough to justify revenues that will allow all of these lesser social networks to survive.
Some will undoubtedly fail. Others will follow Instagram and win the merger lottery, getting scooped up by a bigger company. What seems less likely to either of those options, however, is that the smaller niche social networks will continue as independent firms.
“No one doubts that it likely overpaid for Instagram in what seems to be an impulsive move, but if anyone can use scale to elevate a potential contender into the next Facebook… perhaps it is Facebook.” – Mike Seiman, CEO of CPX Interactive.
“In the early days of the auto industry, there were thousands of car companies. Just a few survived. But those few became business giants,” said Amy Bruckman, professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. “The [social media] boom is no different. There will be a few big winners, and lots of losers.”
But Bruckman warns that most small startups will not be as lucky as Instagram: Most will ultimately fail.
“I don’t anticipate as much consolidation as took place in the auto industry – there’s room for more winners than that. But there are going to be a lot of losers,” Bruckman said. “It seems obvious that companies like Google and Amazon know how to turn a profit. It’s also obvious that companies already on their way out like Ning don’t.”
Bruckman doesn’t like the term “social media bubble” for what is happening now, nor does she like dot-com bubble for what happened in the late 1990s.
“I’d call it natural selection,” she said.
The Network Effect
Angelo Sotira, CEO of the online artists’ community deviantART.com says the $1 billion Facebook paid for Instagram is a result of Instagram’s ability to create a so-called “network effect.”
“All of these types of startups sit on a petri dish attempting to achieve this effect,” Sotira said. “Instagram will hit 100 million users by the end of the year. Any company that can do that is worth $1 billion to Facebook, Google or Microsoft from a threat analysis alone.”
Traditional investors, however, may not understand that kind of thinking which, in turn, may give rise to their willingness to throw the “bubble” label on the entire social media sector.
“This is hard to understand for most investors, so there’s going to be some dumb money floating around the photo-sharing space,” Sotira said. “The real value is in any company that can grow rapidly out of that petri dish to achieve network effect. If you can do that, you get a billion bucks.
“Go ahead and try,” he added. “Bottom line: Instagram is a gem worth every penny on that battlefield.”
Facebook Is Big Enough to Make Some Mistakes
Even if Facebook did overpay for Instagram, it’s probably not a big enough deal to do lasting damage to the company. As we interviewed experts about the social media bubble, we kept hearing the word “scalability.”
“If Facebook has one advantage that could possibly make its own ‘go-fever’ a little less destructive, it is unique in its ability to bring unparalleled scalability to the table of its acquisitions,” said Mike Seiman, CEO of CPX Interactive, a digital advertising company. “No one doubts that it likely overpaid for Instagram in what seems to be an impulsive move, but if anyone can use scale to elevate a potential contender into the next Facebook… perhaps it is Facebook.”
Coming Tomorrow: Fear and Speculation Drove Facebook’s Instagram Buy
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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