Social Media is still Broadcasting – yep I said it.
Were the same but so different
This is a conversation in response to what Cory Gilbert wrote in his blog regarding Social Media not being any different from broadcast media, especially as we see scale from a few friends to many, such as in the case of a brand who may have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousand followers, fans and subscribers.
Fame and conversation are inversely proportionate. As a fanbase grows the intimacy of the conversation necessarily shrinks because a celebrity must attend to the whole fanbase to maintain it and doing so means broad messages. So it is with brands. This line of thinking is counter-cultural to the ethos of social media in the same way most bulk emails from friends start with, “Sorry for the bulk email but…” No one working in social media seems to want to acknowledge that as it’s growing its taking on more and more characteristics of broadcast media – at least insofar as commercial applications are concerned.
I agree, and would like to add to this thread, - here you go we are having a conversation – Social Media is about broadcasting – what shock horror Mr viral himself just said it.
The core concept for me is that within social media you find many micro networks, groups of a 100 friends or so who do indeed follow and chat with each other.
The key for us as brands and advertisers is not on how to get 1 to 1 with these people, its about how to inject brand communications (broadcast) into these micro groups. How do we get people talking about our brands and adverts, its not about US actually talking to users – well not on mass anyway, obviously that’s impossible even with a social media call center type thing running in the background.
The key is – how do we broadcast commercial messages that are then shared via social networks. AKA and may I introduce - Viral Advertising.
Read Corey's full post here
Facebook Business
Facebook Vs. Myspace will Myspace fight back?
Yes Myspace is dead, but for good? and was it facebook that did it?
Statistics for Facebook, how they are the leaders in the social race and where Myspace.com failed to keep up -
Firstly Facebook.
As we all know Facebook is, at the moment, the biggest social networking site.
But as businesses, do we really understand how 'big' Facebook is, but also how to use it's full potential.
Here are some statistics on Facebook as a whole - there company figures, how there growing internationally and also though technology.
0 As a whole Facebook as over 400 million active users.
0 An average of 50% of the active users log onto facebook everyday.
0 There are more than 5 Billion pieces of content shared each week.
0 1.5 million businesses are active on facebook.
0 Facebook translates into over 70 languages.
0 Out of the 400 million users, 70% are outside the united states.
0 On the whole there are 100 million users accessing facebook though mobile devices.
0 200 mobile operators in 60 countries help to promote Facebooks mobile products, a couple are, apple, orange, 3, t-mobile.
As you can clearly see facebook is by far the dominator of the social industry, some active users of Facebook have said that it is the heart of the internet, as it generates a lot of content rivaling Youtube, Flicker, etc. In my personal opinion it is a great opportunity for businesses (new and old) to get involved in, it is a great way for a business to get noticed, there are 400 million users that are ready to have business integrate with them.
With statistics like that, the question i want to ask is, is facebook ever going to die? what is next for the social giant? or is it nearing the end?, what else is there for this social god to get involved with, they already own the social market and are close contenders in content holding, the next few months will determine Facebooks fate, hopefully they wont crumble like the other social giant myspace did in 2008.
In 2008, the "big" social media giant Myspace fell at the hands of the ever growing facebook. but what was Myspace doing to fall at the hands of the new rookie contender facebook.
Myspace was the biggest social networking site the world had ever seen, no-one had ever seen the internet being used in this way before, there was never a way of connecting millions of people together in one place at one time. Myspace had more than 110 million active users; that doesn't even touch the skin of the amount of facebook users(400 million); but again this was loads in the beginning.
In 2006 1 in 4 americans owned Myspace and in the UK it was as common to have Myspace as to own a dog. Myspace was working in 20 countries worldwide and had a heap of content being uploaded everyday.
So if Myspace had all these good statistics going on, how did they crumble? surely they would have kept going and improving like facebook.
Maybe Myspace was too complicated, with it's theme changes and all it's editing facilities. facebook came along with a new, easy to use profile that had no need for any themes, but was purely a way to socialise with friends . In 2008 myspace eventually died out and was crushed by the new social media giant, facebook.
Myspace failed at the first hurdle in the battle to win social power, maybe because facebook came up with loads of new applications that were unseen by anyone on Myspace, but also after seeing this myspace had no way of creating there own applications and moving with the internet.
A final way Myspace failed to gain the most power was that didn't have enough capital coming in compared to facebook, which at the time was this shiny new social network, which was waiting for advertisers and business to jump on.
Myspace had already been offered all the advertising that was necessary and businesses were just not making money from it anymore. The question that many of us want to know is; is Myspace dead for good or will it return more powerful than ever, for that we will have to wait and see.
AB.
The ying and yang of internet opinion
Will clients become comfortable with fact that you need to create negative and good opinions to start the social media spread?
Lets start with an example. Take the new craze in novelty music videos. We are seeing a raft of big hitting and quite frankly very well produced music and videos receiving in some cases million of youtube views, and generating thousands of iTunes sales. At the same time the creators of the "novelty" viral music videos are building a name for themselves and a loyal online following. The following ensures the next output from the group gets the best chance of success as it can be initially propagated directly at the fan base at virtually no cost.
I would like to talk to the brand that would embrace these trends and either start creating their own styles of viral comedy, or at least wrapping themselves around these new trend setters in some amicable way. I suppose a brand could buy an ad on youtube.com and get placed in an annoying way around the content, but why? Clients could be at the source.
I spoke to the likes of Midnight Beast, and they are already to “managed” to approach with big brand endorsement. They as most new comers do, think that they can sustain a creative product by simply self selling and self promoting, shunning the brand away almost. Good luck to them, but I also think brands have a place in this, and could offer even greater reach to the creators.
I’d like to see brands getting in fast and committing properly to these potential social media stars as they take off. We see them coming, but it's hard to find brands that will move fast enough and commit hard enough, fast enough. Then there is offensive funny content, some brand managers will be put off by the idea of creating any bad opinion. But now I get to my real point - you need some bad opinion to give the good opinions a chance live, for social media is not a place to think about reaching 100% positive opinion. Its more about building a 20% negative opinion to fire and fuel the spread of the 80% positive. 100% anything is not good it's dull, mainstream, and so no one will talk about it. Think Mac and PC.
It’s a balancing act, and you need someone who’s experienced the ying and yang of building and steering Internet opinion 
Tik Tok mashup by Midnight Beast Uk
Great work guys, you're gonna be legends. Enjoy it.
Tagged at 49,008 views and climbing.
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How to embed Facebook Videos in to your blog or web site
Embedding Facebook Videos in your Blog or Website or other Social Network.
As you can see above it's easy to embed Facebook videos into your blog if you use this code below. Simply copy and paste the code into your blog or webpage and change the xxx in the facebook url to that of your video. You can find out your video's "number" by simply going direct to your video on facebook and looking at the address bar ie. http://www.facebook.com/v/207551029123 the number you want is after the v/ as I said, simply replace the xxx in the code below with that number (ie. 207551029123) in your videos direct url, insert this into your webpage or blog and you are done.
FACEBOOK VIDEO EMBED CODE
<object width="400" height="224" >
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.facebook.com/v/xxx" />
<embed src="http://www.facebook.com/v/xxx" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="224">
</embed>
</object>
Enjoy share away 
