Facebook Building a Location Tracking App

February 6th, 2013

There are reports that Facebook is building a mobile app that will track a user’s location, even if the app is not open. The justification is so Facebook friends can easily find each other when they are nearby. The app might also allow people near each other to recognize that they have some shared interests and hence might be good Facebook friends. The app is rumored to debut in March. There has not been any confirmation of the project from Facebook, although Zuckerberg has said that mobile apps are now the priority for Facebook development teams.

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Photo by: Johan Larsson

The social media marketing agency should tread carefully with this application. If there is no opt in feature (other than downloading), then it may anger privacy enthusiasts more than it is worth. It would be nice, however, for stores to have an ability to see who is in their stores or even nearby and then link up to those people. The amount of data collected from this app would be significant and useful because knowing where people actually go instead of where they would like to go is a significant difference. Before tapping into or contributing to this data the social media marketing agency should watch and see how the privacy concern is treated, especially as Facebook’s credibility about privacy concerns is waning.

Facebook Is Said to Create Mobile Location-Tracking App

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Posted in Facebook, Mobile, Mobile applications | No Comments »

Google Links AdWords Express to Google+

February 5th, 2013

A recent update has been noticed for Google’s AdWords Express. An advertisement now appears on Google+ to bring people into the circle of a brand. One of the features of the new advertising units is to promote a brand’s local Google page as the landing page. Besides the new integration with Google+ there are some other new features to AdWords Express.

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Photo by methodshop.com

This is all an attempt to revamp AdWords express to appeal to brands new to advertising. It seems unlikely a digital marketing agency would consult this new advertising feature; in fact, it seems to be Google’s attempt to keep brands from consulting an agency for outside assistance. The digital marketing agency then needs to keep track on the program to better compete against it. The social media agency could counter the ease of the new service by bundling its services together and touting a service which creates a homepage and then uses as an advertising platform as a superior product to AdWords Express which does not require the advertiser to have a web page.

Google Promoting AdWords Express In Google+ As Way “To Get More Followers”

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Posted in Digital Marketing, advertising, google | No Comments »

Facebook Now Has More Mobile users Than PC Users

January 31st, 2013

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, announced on Wednesday that for 2012 Q4 Facebook had more daily users on mobile devices than there were users on PCs. Not only were the numbers very large but mobile advertising accounted for over 23% of Facebook’s revenue for the same quarter.

Photo Credit: Anthony Quintano

This news has two enthusiastic impacts for the social media agency. The first is the increasing profitability of mobile advertising. Part of the reason it is so profitable is because of how effective those ads are. Facebook ads were already some of the most effective ads, but on mobile devices they are even more so. Another benefit of this mobile trend is the increasing simplicity of using the social network. More and more mobile devices are being used for social networking and social networking is taking up more and more timeshare of a person’s time on a mobile device. The digital media agency is living in the beginning of a boon time for its missions.

Facebook: Mobile Daily Users Exceed PC Users

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Posted in Facebook, Mobile, Smartphone, advertising | No Comments »

Similar Web Measurement Service Is Now Love

January 30th, 2013

Similar Web had been known for making a suite of browser plugins that would recommend similar pages to users. It was a useful service but now a round of venture funding has been completed that will make it more important to the digital media firm. The new service is a web ranking and measurement tool, much like Alexa. The goal is topple to Alexa and provide more than one authority for web measurement and ranking.

Photo Credit: Cambodia4Kids.org

Part of the excitement for the new service is because Alexa is losing some of its authority to certain groups. For the digital media agency that agrees with this assessment of Alexa, then this is great news. Unlike Alexa this new service will offer more than just rankings. Users will be able to look into specific metrics (traffic sources, organic rankings, search rankings, etc..) to see how web sites compare to one another. This will be helpful for the agency that is trying to determine authorities in certain areas as well as measure performance for clients.

SimilarGroup raises 2.5 million to take on Alexa’s (often terrible) Web Rankings With its New SimilarWeb Service.

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Monitoring and Measuring Social Media, new tools | No Comments »

Amazon To Develop A Siri-like Alternative

January 28th, 2013

Amazon recently purchased Ivona, which is a company that specializes in text-to-speech functionality. The technology is already somewhat at play in Amazon’s Kindles. For now the functionality is the opposite of Apple’s Siri aimed at the vision impaired Kindle user. However, those functions were part of the Kindle family already, so then, why is Amazon only now purchasing the company? The speculation is that this marks Amazon’s first foray into developing Siri-like functionality by allowing the Kindle to be used in a hands free environment.

Photo by ILRI

This will be an interesting development for the social media agency. Many social media agencies do not consider the Kindle family as a tablet. While some of them do have tablet functionality the name Kindle seems to stymie development or incorporation into their campaigns. Creating a hands-free environment will help vault the e-reader into the tablet realm even if it is merely a lack of understanding on the user’s part.

Opening up the range of tablets, especially a non-iOS based tablet will help brands diversify and create new creative content for campaigns. Many people use Kindles as e-readers and opening up those experiences to a hands free interaction will help make the e-reading experience a richer environment.

Is This Kindle’s Siri? Amazon Buys Speech-Recognition Firm Ivona

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Posted in Amazon, Mobile, tablets | No Comments »

Facebook Testing Another Timeline Layout

January 24th, 2013

Last month a new Timeline design was discovered to be in testing. Now there are new screenshots of a new design also being tested. This design reduces the Timeline to a single column. That column is on the user’s left side of the screen and the right hand column is then replaced with Open Graph activity (friends, apps used, etc.) the big concern Facebook seems to be addressing with this layout is about loading the current Timeline. The posts move around as more and more timeline content loads.

Facebook takes notes

Photo by Sarah.Marshall

Even though these two designs are only being tested, it is encouraging for the social media agency. This shows that Facebook is taking the complaint, even though it may seem frivolous to some, seriously and trying to make changes to accommodate those criticisms. This is a good sign if anyone questioned Facebook’s dedication to its users. This will also help the Michigan social media agency because it makes the Timeline page of a brand much more accessible. That is important since that is where the organic likes come from, on that page. It is also important to keep users on a brand’s page as the past content loads to create maximum exposure.

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Posted in Business Social Networking, Customer Serivce, Facebook, new tools | No Comments »

Federal Trade Commission Lets Google Off the Hook

January 24th, 2013

In a much-anticipated announcement the Federal Trade Commission has decided not to pursue action against Google. The FTC had brought on some high-powered names for the potential action. There were many signs that pointed to a complaint being filed which would have then forced Google to change its practices and how it serves advertising to users.

Photo Credit: Puatron

The FTC’s decision was made on the grounds of the difficulty of showing consumer harm. Even though publishers are increasingly upset about Google’s moves into publishing (the purchase of Zagat and combining it with Google Maps is the move that best exemplifies this move) showing harm on the consumer is where the FTC made its decision.

Whether or not this was the correct call will be the purview of history and policy makers. For now the digital marketing agency can breath a little easier as any FTC action would have resulted in some dampening of Google’s powerful resources for small businesses. The large brands would have recovered easily, but it is the small businesses that can use Google’s engine to help close the competitive gap.

As Google Evolves To Satisfy User Demands,  Others are Necessarily Marginalized

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Posted in Internet News, Technology, google | No Comments »

US Leaning on EU Over New Privacy legislation

January 21st, 2013

The European Union is in the midst of working out new legislation that would govern internet interactions. At risk is legislation that makes it harder to collect data on internet users. This action would make targeted advertising more difficult as well as collecting data for the social networks that is useful determining user preferences.

Photo Credit: YanniKouts

Even though the legislation will only effect businesses operating in Europe it will have implications for businesses in the US. If legislation there is more stringent, then it will help solidify resistance over here, making it easier for similar restrictions to pass through US Congress. The European legislation also governs US firms operating over there. By creating a two-tiered system it may simply be cheaper to just conform to EU policy and operate in the US without fully maximizing potential. That operation would then change the norm here and eventually have an effect on US policy.

As of now the US Chamber of Commerce has not responded to the EU deliberation. Facebook has been very active lobbying against these efforts as well as the US government. This is a trending story that needs to be followed closely as it will have significant effects on operations in the US for all digital agencies.

US Government Still Leaning On Europe To Dilute Data Protection Reform Proposals

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Posted in Business Social Networking | No Comments »

iOS Still Dominates the Market

January 17th, 2013

Over the past few weeks it was leaked that Apple stopped production orders on iPhone 5 after slower sales than expected. Many investors panicked and sent Apple stock falling. Chitika reports that despite weak demand for the iPhone 5 (Chitika does not confirm that demand is weak) iOS still dominates web based traffic on mobile devices.

Photo Credit: Methodshop

There is one possible error, it is important to stress that this is only a possible source of error, in the Chitika report. The company was looking at advertising impressions from its servers. It then assumes that advertising impressions are congruent with website views. While this is probably a safe assumption to be made, it is still an assumption. But for the purposes of the digital marketing agency it is a good working assumption, because the agency is concerned with ad impressions.

Almost two thirds of all impressions delivered to a mobile device are sent to an iOS device. The digital marketing agency needs to take this into account. Few of those are accessing Google+ if they are accessing a social network. Those ads also need to be optimized for iOS devices. This is easier than for Android devices because Apple devices lack the fragmentation issues of the Android universe. In fact, if ad optimization occurs without accounting for fragmentation, then the digital media agency ought to optimize for iOS devices.

Report: iOS Continues To Dominate Web Traffic

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Posted in Mobile, Technology, apple | No Comments »

Facebook Graph Searching Is Still Worthwhile

January 16th, 2013

Facebook is now touting Graph Search, which allows the user to search its social graph. For now it is not as robust as was expected, because results are heavily dependent on advertising and are limited to searching for people, places and interests. However, nobody is predicting this is the final stage for an ability to search Facebook’s large data pool. In fact at the press conference, Zuckerberg says it could be a business some day but for now it is merely an enhanced user experience.

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One of the touted differences between this search function and what Google offers is an ability to search for answers and not just for links to the answers. The results seem to be similar to Sponsored Results, which was an earlier deployed advertising unit that returned Pages where the answer to the question might be found. Even though critics blast Sponsored Results for not returning relevant results, the ads were still quite effective offering click through rates ranging from .7% to over 4%.

Even with the lower end of those results analysts are optimistic for further advertising units that tap into the social graph. New ad units will improve on those results. The anticipation is that Facebook will eventually roll out a full fledge search function and even if it captures only 10% of the market, that will be an astonishing volume. The social media agency would be wise to begin using these new advertising units even if the only gain is an early learning about how Facebook treats its social graph.

Facebook Graph Search Puts Spotlight on Sponsored Results

Photo by owenwbrown

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Facebook, advertising | No Comments »

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