Twitterverse

There are, probably, all Twitter applications in this Twitter ecosystem, from social CRM to location-based services.

Click to enlarge

Created by Brian Solis and JESS3 this map should help you learn more about all the tools available. You can even order the poster-sized info-graphic to hang in your office and teach others about Twitter.

The original and interactive version can be found here, check it out.

Your Facebook book!

Facebook started with people wanting to move their social lives online. Now people will have the option to move them back offline, not for privacy reasons, but because the more options we have to access our memories, the more flexible those memory becomes.

This American start-up company is still looking to rise $US 10k in order for the project to take off. Until February 5^th anyone can visit the Kickstarter website and make a donation, or better to reserve a copy of your own book.

What will you find on your book? Yoursocialbook is a 8.5" x 11" personalized book with cool or significant status update, top conversations with your best friends, photo albums…basically your most important Facebook moments.

The cover is also personalized in signature Facebook blue with your Facebook name in white text and comes in your choice of paperback or hardcover.

See video for a better explanation.

The company so far managed to rise only 8% of the $10k and it has five days left to find the remaining.

Pointless. I won’t get one.

I'm now following you!

Based on the concept that now everyone "Follows" and / or "Like" a brand, a product or even a person Alfa Romeo, a great Italian car maker, came up with this cool ambient marketing.

Very cool....but also quite annoying!

Oman companies on Facebook - TOP 10

Here follows an update on the top companies in Oman using Facebook.
Just like last time  I have only taken into consideration the ones that use a Facebook Page (business page), therefore not groups or personal pages, and the ones in English.

Here is the top 10 in terms of fans/likers:

Position              Company Name                       N. of fans           
1                         Chips Oman                               25147   
2                         Burger King Oman                       9194     
3                         Oman Sail                                    6020    
4                         B+F Roadside Diner                     4875     
5                         Haya Water                                 4239     
6                         Oman Air                                    4026    
7                         Muscat Buy or Sell                       3931     
8                         Grand Hyatt Muscat                     3183    
9                         Gourmet Burger Kitchen             2812   
10                       Tips & Toes - Nail Spa                  2446

I might have missed some, if so please let me know and I'll update it.

Can we manage (not) to do it for 2 minutes?

Just a quick post today.

Working too long in front of the PC? Need your eyes to take a break?

Try this.

Didn’t the two minutes seem to last forever?

Social media is free!

I hear it and read it a lot. I also hear social media saves time. Those are the biggest lies ever.

It’s very easy and fast (and free!!) to set up a Facebook page, and a Twitter account, and a YouTube channel, but…

…have you thought about having a strategy…?

…Have you thought about producing the content…?

…Have you thought about the ongoing execution - the “community manager” part…?

…Have you thought of getting your company internally ready (legal, guidelines for employees, initial training)…?

…Have you thought about measuring your online presence?

Getting the answers is going to take man hours. Lots of man hours. Multiply that by the pay scale of the person/people doing that research and your costs are already starting to go up.

None of these come cheap unless you already have someone in your company with the right skills and experience, and then again, you’d need more than one person to do all that.

Also, yes Facebook is free, but if you’d like a great page or a unique application you’ll need to invest a little $$$$. Not to mention that if you’re looking at having a YouTube channel you’ll need to invest in a camera and crew.

Compare that to a print ad and yes it’s clear that social media offers a cost-effective solution.

So, is social media marketing really free? Don’t take this as a reason not to hit the social media world to market your company, though. When you start putting together your social media marketing initiative, take a realistic look at the expenses involved. Identify the results you’ll need to generate a sufficient return on your marketing investment.

Social media marketing doesn’t have to be free to be effective; it just has to be well-planned.

Any help you know where to find me…;)

How about this for an advertising campaign?

Sometimes traditional advertising fails, well, probably in many cases. Creativity might not be enough to attract people’s attention so you might want to choose a different medium, for example crosswalks.

Crosswalks are a great medium as they are strategically located and very cost effective. Here follow some of the best done in previous years.

South Africa Tourism

Hair salon in India

Unknown!

Coca Cola in Spain

 Mr. Clean (Unknown location)

McDonald's in Switzerland

Latina Insurance in Peru

St. Louis Symphony in USA

Unknown

Shopping Mall in Brazil

Cool ideas...but i would not walk on the coffin one...And how do they keep Mr. Clean so clean??

Wikipedia turns 10

Wikipedia, the online reference tool that allowed countless students to avoid the library, turns 10 years old. Today, and throughout the year, the world will be celebrating with 414 events.

As of today, Wikipedia is the fifth largest Internet commodity with 410 million unique visitors per month. It features some 17 million articles in 270 languages.

But how did it start? In 2001 founder Jimmy Wales said: “The idea here is to write a complete encyclopedia from scratch. Some people think that this may be a hopeless endeavor and that the result will necessarily suck. We aren't so sure. So let's get to work!”

The hope of Jimmy and his colleagues was to tap into the collective wisdom of humanity, by allowing anyone to contribute and to edit articles, and over time add up to the most complete, impartial and accurate information source around. Good thinking.

Of course there’s a dedicated Facebook page where you can check events close to you, and a LinkedIn group, Wikiversary. There’s an interesting video by Jimmy Wales here.

So what's the plan for the next 10 years?

In a conference call with journalists earlier this week, Jimmy Wales and Executive Director Sue Gardner said the goal is to expand the breadth of topics and diversity of voices on the site.

In 2011 and beyond, they want to reach out to more women, older people, experts in the arts and humanities and less-represented geographic areas such as South America.

Well done and good luck.

Omanlog, your social network in Oman!

A new network has been recently launched in Oman, Omanlog.com, by Thom Maarseveen and Ceren Koca, respectively founder and co-founder. Omanlog is exclusively for people living in Oman and the aim is simple; easily keeping in touch with friends and meeting new ones. 

So i have asked them a few questions Thom and Ceren who were kind enough to get back to me despite being extra busy these days. Here follow some extracts.

What exactly is Omanlog.com?

It is a social networking site but more so it is a medium to not only keep in contact with friends across the Sultanate efficiently, but also to meet new people and make new friends in the local community very easily.

How did you come up with the idea?

It initially started just for fun really. It was a hobby website for me to work on whilst working on another project of mine. My co-founder urged me to develop it and implement our creative ideas and thought it would be a great idea to make it locally targeted as it suits the friendly nature of the Omani and expat community and integrates them much more easily.

How do you intend to cope with social media giants, i.e. Facebook. And what makes Omanlog different from Facebook for example?

There really is no competition. Social media giants will always exist, however Omanlog is locally targeted and it is FOR Oman and its residents. Just like Hyves and Facebook both exist and are widely used in Holland, we aim for the same sort of idea for Oman.

Omanlog provides similar and fundamental applications as Facebook along with some innovative ideas to suit the community. This involves applications such as the local newspaper, weather, uploading music, setting up business dates via Omanlog and organizing daily routines, games, quizzes and an upcoming marketplace/souq and many more.

Where do you see Omanlog in 5 years?

We are very ambitious for this website and for the time being, our aim is for most of Oman's population to be using it on a regular, daily basis.

What else would you add?

Also companies can register groups and invite people, customers and employees to join and send them notifications with the latest news. Hopefully as Omanlog grows companies will realise that this network can also be a different way to reach customers and engage them into something new.

Well, surely it’s going to be tough but we wish all the luck to Thom and Ceren. Why don’t you check it out, here, and let me know?

A global experiment to create the first user-generated movie

Everyone has a story. Every day has a story.

"Life in A Day"is a cinematic experiment, by Ridley Scott, that captures life around the world in a single day and brings together contributors from all over the globe in a unique way.

The movie is set to premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival on January 27th and is being billed as "the first user-generated feature-length documentary." The film incorporates about 4,600 hours of footage submitted by YouTube users from 192 countries, 80,000 clips created on 500 cameras distributed to “remote areas of the world” on one single day, July 24th 2010.

For those of you who want to see it before released the film will be live streamed on youtube.com/lifeinaday at 6pm and will be re-broadcast again on January 28th and subtitled in 25 languages.

They are calling the movie a "historic global experiment to create the world’s largest user-generated feature film: a documentary, shot in a single day, by you." It certainly is  something new and interesting; I'm curious to watch it as there's a lot of work in selecting the best footage, but will the whole movie be that interesting?

Should be a good one to watch.

"We had to do something to make it a special night"

And that is exactly what Spainair did on December 24th to all its 190 passengers traveling from Barcelona to Las Palmas.

Call it "ambush" or "ambient" marketing this perfectly executed low cost operation has been beautifully amplified by the media. 

Covered in gold, silver, red, purple and green candy-stripes and decorated with flamboyant ribbons, the unexpected packages chugged past the astonished passengers. People gradually began to notice their own names on the parcels' gift tags, but nervously watched them go past a couple of times before daring to pick them up.

After awhile, they began to pick the presents up and shake them suspiciously for clues as to their contents. Eventually they tore open the wrapping to reveal gifts for every kind of passenger. For the kids there were teddy bears, giant candy bars, toy horses, cars, trumpets, puppets and costumes; and for the adults, beauty products, cameras and hats.

The passengers directed a spontaneous round of applause at the luggage belt, and each had a heart-warming tale about Spanair, which markets itself as "La de Todos" or "Everyone's Airline", to tell their loved ones at Christmas.

Watch the reaction of the passengers in the video...

60 seconds on Facebook

Sixty seconds is longer than we think.

For instance in just one minute 2,137 pounds of popcorn will be eaten, 954 camera phones will be sold, and 750,000 gallons of water will tumble over Niagara Falls.

According to Time Magazine this is what happens every 60 seconds on Facebook...

 

1000+ new Facebook fans in only 3 days!!

Do you want to increase the number of your Facebook (or Twitter) fans?? Then buy them!!

More and more sites are popping up and they all promise to increase your Likers number according to the package you choose. 

The method used is simple; these websites will manually send out suggestions/invitations to their users to "like" your page. 

Some people will like your page, some will not. They are not forced to follow your page - they have to agree and accept the fan page suggestion to like your page.  And it is as simple as that really.

There are several packages available depending on whether you need “targeted” or "non-targeted” likers, and how many you would like to have of course. If you’re looking at buying 500 fans it will cost you about $75 while for 25,000 fans you will need to pay about $1,700. Basically for a few cents you can buy a fan!

This is great news, isn’t it?

I DON’T THINK SO! You’re totally missing the point of social media.

First of all I think fans should be earned, not purchased.

Second I’d rather have 100 genuine fans who I can exchange thoughts and opinions with rather than having 1,000 “dead” ones. Go for quality, not quantity.

Third, you might increase traffic to your page (but in that case why not using a traffic generator site as they are free??) but not interest. So you might end up with 1,000 fans and 0 conversation…bit pointless.

There are probably other good reasons why you should not buy fans. Social media, Facebook in particular, is all about creating and managing a community. It takes time, dedication, professionalism and passion.