Is Apple Prepping for a “Places” Product?

Apple has just applied for a new patent indicating the company’s possible interest in the location-based social networking space.

The gadgets giant applied to trademark the word “Places” in both Europe and China. The trademark application is, according to its numeric classifications, related to a wide range of hardware, online social networking, entertainment, media and GPS systems; it’s not related to photos or geotagging.

This particular patent application was first unearthed by Patenty Apple, which noted that the application may or may not have anything to do with Ping, Apple’s social music service linked to iTunes.

Given the plethora of location-aware Apple devices, it’s almost silly to think that Apple wouldn’t be working on products and features in the location space — which, as you’re probably aware, becomes hotter by the day, both in terms of startup innovation and user adoption.

Of course, not every Apple patent application ends up leading to a bona fide Apple product or feature; nevertheless, these documents can be telling when it comes to the company’s ambitions.

Here’s a look at the trademark application itself; let us know in the comments where you think this might be headed:

5 Steps to Create an Integrated Social Content Ladder

Sure, social media takes a lot of time, but probably not as much time as you think. Too many companies and organizations are reinventing the content wheel for every social outpost they maintain. A better approach is to create a content ecosystem that allows you to repurpose and cascade your best information.

 Instead of a series of self-contained initiatives, build yourself a content ladder.

 Here are 5 steps to get there:

 1. Understand Taxonomy

Taxonomy is incredibly important in social media because it's the most direct link between the worlds of social and search marketing. Remember, your most important customers are search engines, and your content ladder needs to maximize your chances for search success

When creating and promoting social content, include specific, relevant keywords and search phrases wherever possible. (This is especially important now that Google and Bing are incorporating social content into real-time search results).

 Find keywords and search phrases to include in these three places:

 Web site Analytics

Look at your keywords report to find phrases that are driving traffic to your site. I recommend using a mixture of your Top 25 phrases and some that are highly relevant to your business, but perhaps aren't sending as much traffic as you'd like at present.

 Social Mention (or a paid social media listening package like Radian6, if you have one)

Go to www.socialmention.com and search for your company or product name (in quotes), and set the pull-down to “all.” You'll then see a search results page that shows a comprehensive list of places you've been mentioned on the social Web.

 Below, you'll see a keywords chart that lists common terms associated with your name in social media. Consider adding some of these to your list if they differ from your analytics results.

Twitter Lists

How your company or product are referred to in consumer-created Twitter lists can yield important taxonomy insights.

Go to your Twitter account, and click on “listed” next to your followers count, and see how the lists that include your Twitter account are named. Consider including some of these phrases to your master keyword list.

Incorporate your phrases into your social content wherever possible, but only when relevant. Nobody appreciates keyword spam on the social Web.

 2. Seek Content Inspiration

Creating successful social media content isn't just status updates. Take your top  keywords (including your company name, product name, etc.) and search for them on Google, Bing, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and SocialMention.

What shows up in these search results? How much photo and video content appears? Content from your competitors? From fans? You'll be amazed at how many content-creation ideas this simple exercise can generate.

3. Understand Your Frequency Ecosystem

The key to a content ladder is organizing your rungs. Your scenario may of course vary, but for illustration purposes let's assume you have a Twitter account, Facebook fan page, blog, and email newsletter.

To create an efficient ladder, you must understand the comparative publishing schedules that you typically employ for each of these outposts. Ordered from most frequent publication to least, let's assume that your program looks like this:

• Twitter (5x/day)
• Facebook (2x/day)
• Blog (3x/week)
• Email (1x/week)

Create your own integrated frequency schedule to better understand how your outposts interrelate.

4. Test & Track

Create a piece of content (remember to include your key phrases), and post it to the first rung in the ladder (Twitter, in this case) Use a tracking system (I prefer bit.ly) to determine how popular that specific piece of content was with your audience.

Remember, however, that many factors influence popularity at the individual content piece level. Don't make assumptions — test them. Vary time of day, day of week, phrasing, link placement, and other options, and thoroughly document your results.

Social media scientist Dan Zarrella has some excellent research on social content best practices.

5. Tweak and Repurpose

The content pieces that are most successful on the first rung of your ladder should be appropriately tweaked and redeployed on the second rung of your ladder (Facebook).

Test and track content success on Facebook using bit.ly (or number of likes and comments), and add the most effective content pieces to the next rung on the ladder. Note that as you move down the ladder, your repurposing will be more complex — a blog post requires substantially more content than a Facebook update in most cases.

If a piece of content is successful on your blog (measured by visits as determined by Web site Analytics), add it to the next rung — your email newsletter.

By understanding how your various social outposts can work together at the content level, you can develop meaningful efficiencies. Also, because a sprinkling of the content included in the lower rungs of your ladder has already proven successful on higher rungs, the relevancy and popularity of your content should increase for most fans/readers/subscribers.

Top Reasons Every College Student Should Be on Twitter

It seems social media has taken over what casual conversation, phone calls and letters used to do—keeping people in the loop with what’s going on in each other’s lives. Nearly everyone has a Facebook page, MySpace account, or Twitter account. Technologically savvy college students use various social media every day to make new friends and keep in touch with old ones. For college scholars, there are many more benefits to using Twitter.

• Better than Google?

Twitter is a resource for any student seeking answers to virtually anything. A student’s Twitter network can number in the thousands and followers have lived their lives and experienced many things. When scholars are in a pickle, invariably there will be someone who has ideas or experiences and can provide pertinent advice to perplexed students.

• Creating a Personal Logo

Personal branding may not be something a new college-bound youth would be thinking about, but it should be. Branding can help create an online presence, but it takes time to do it. More and more employers are using Google as a sort-of background check. Googling a person can bring up nearly everything about him or her—even if it’s not the most flattering information. Using Twitter on a regular basis and in a suitable fashion will ensure Google results that are positive, rather than embarrassing.

• Schmoozing via the Internet

College students need to get out there and meet as many people as possible. Schmoozing, or rubbing shoulders, with the many talented, resourceful, and intelligent people on Twitter can have many positive results. Interactions can lead to new collaborations, opportunities and relationships. Twitter enables members to search by regional and biographical information, helping students become acquainted with professionals in their upcoming career field.

• Training for the Career Marathon

With so much information on Twitter, any student can use it to his or her advantage – especially to help get a job. The amount of information from Twitter resources concerning interview tips, resume advice, job openings, and internships is astronomical and students can tap into it with just a click of the mouse.

• Extra, Extra…Read all About it

College students are on the way to becoming working career professionals. Anyone who is successful in their field is aware of developments and news in their profession. By searching Twitter for resources that contribute the latest information concerning their careers, students can stay on top of the latest,breaking news. During interviews, the applicant “in the know,” is the applicant with the job.

• Like a Web Traffic Road Sign

Students with blogs or personal websites can use Twitter to promote new articles or information published on their sites. Bloggers will tweet a link for new posts via their Twitter account, allowing their entire network to easily access new posts. Anyone who has a Twitter account with an active profile generate traffic to their website when people outside their network like a tweet and visit their profile.

Twitter brings the world to a student’s fingertips. Advice, information, news, and relationships that can carry a student to a positive, prosperous future are just a tweet away.

Tumblr Raises Between $25 Million and $30 Million in Funding

Last week, we reported that Tumblr scored a substantial amount of money from Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital — but we didn’t how much. Today, reports are surfacing that the blogging platform has raised between $25 million and $30 million, with a valuation around $135 million.

Fortune says that Sequoia Capital was the lead investor this round, and speculates that Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures (who in the past raised Tumblr $10 million) both contributed as well. It’s also being said that Sequoia’s Roelof Botha will be joining Tumblr’s board.

TechCrunch spoke with Founder David Karp today, and although he declined to comment on funding, he did share that Tumblr has some new digs in the form of a new New York office, and that they’ve made some hires. Right now they have 16 employees (up from 12), with a staff of 20 projected for the end of this year and a staff of 30 by the early 2011.

As we noted last week, Tumblr also recently hired Derek Gottfrid from The New York Times as director of product, and today TC reports that Rich Tong, a co-founder of Weardrobe, will be coming on as a community director in charge of the fashion community. Karp hopes to focus on the individual communities within Tumblr as a way of distinguishing the service from other platforms, like Facebook.

“[Tumblr wants to be] the best place in the world for the best creative communities,” Karp told TC.

We’ve reached out to Karp for more info on the funding round, as well as its new hires.

We think that hires like this could really further distinguish Tumblr as a unique blogging platform and community. As it stands, Tumblr is an extremely social platform — even serving as inspiration for giants likeWordPress, who recently added quick reblogging and the ability to “like” posts. In addition, it has an extremely creative community, having the distinction of seeing 14 of its blogs score book deals.

(via: mashable.com)

Facebook and MySpace to Make Joint Announcement on Thursday

Facebook and MySpace are set to make an unprecedented join announcement tomorrow, according to an invite sent to Mashable.

“Please join us for an invitation-only announcement by Mike Jones, CEO of Myspace, and Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing, Facebook,” states the invite. The announcement is set to take place tomorrow, November 18, at 12:00 PM PT via webcast.

Our best clue as to what the two companies will announce is that Facebook’s VP for Platform Marketing will be making the joint announcement on behalf of Facebook. If we had to guess, we’d say the announcement will be related to MySpace using the Facebook Platform or Facebook Connect in some way.

MySpace’s recent overhaul of their entire site and UI places the company directly in the entertainment vertical and out of direct competition with Facebook. Now that the company is focusing on content, Facebook Connect and integration make sense as a way as distribution.

Let us know what you think Facebook and MySpace might announce in the comments.

Via mashable.com

Facebook Gives App Developers a Cool New Tool

Facebook has announced a new feature for app developers. Starting today, you’ll be able to create and use “Test User” accounts for testing your Facebook applications.

With the new, API-controlled accounts, you’ll be able to create ample test users without violating the TOS, and Facebook won’t disable the profile for being fake or for being a spam account.

Devs can create one test user, or an application can make up to 50 test accounts. Any test account can be accessed by any developer associated with that application. To create an test user account, just use the Graph API with the application access token.

With the API, you can make friend connections between various test user accounts without having to login as one particular user and manually accept friend requests. This nicety should make testing app actions among groups of friends a lot easier.

Once you’re done with the test accounts, they can be easily deleted.

Also, as Facebook developer relations head Douglas Purdy noted in the comments on Facebook’s blog post on the subject, test users will be helpful to Facebook engineers working on platform stability.

“This feature is absolutely key for us to be able to work on stability and bugs,” he wrote. “Our hope is that this lets folks build automated tests to give us an early warning into any breaking changes we miss… This should help people give us narrowed repro of bugs they encounter in their test suites.”

There are a few limits as to what you can do with a test user. Test accounts can’t interact with real users, and they can’t interact with public content, such as a post on a Page. Test users will only have test privileges for the app, and they can’t be converted to non-test accounts.

Given these improvements in how Facebook handles app testing, the company plans to disable all old test accounts and its developer test network by the end of the year.

What do you think of Facebook’s new test user tools? Will they make developing apps easier for you?

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, "A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg"

How To Get A Facebook Email Account Now

Want your Facebook email account now? Facebook has set up the following page which enables users to upgrade their messaging system immediately.

While Facebook said that users would have to wait to be invited, there is apparently a single page that you can access that will enable you to switch to the new messaging system. So much for waiting! All you need to do is visit http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ and click on the “Go To Messages” button as pictured in the image below. That’s all you need to do!

Will the Visual Design of a Website Play a Major Role in the SEO Campaign?

Till now, one would have heard from all SEO experts worldwide that the design and look of a website doesn’t play any role in the successful SEO campaign. The things that matter the most in any successful SEO campaign are content, page titles, inbound links and many other factors that’s counted in the search engine ranking algorithm. Now for a long time the factors that mattered in increasing the click-through of a search engine listing were Title and Short snippet (Meta Description) of the website. Once your listing gets clicked only then your website’s visual design comes into play and the visitor decides to use or don’t use your services. This was the scenario till now.

Google’s new update that shows Instant Previews of the listings is out of beta and launched for all searchers worldwide. Click here to find out more!

Showing page previews functionality on the search engine listing page have been tested and used for years. Sometime ago Ask.com introduced this functionality giving its searchers a chance to preview the listing page on mouse over. The effect of such functionality was that the website with ugly looking design and look got fewer clicks than others.

Now last year Bing too announced similar preview function which didn’t show the page preview though but it showed the main content of the page, so design didn’t come into play then.

But all this is going to change with Google’s Instant Previews. Google’s Instant Previews doesn’t show page previews just on mouse over but users have to initially click the magnifying lens besides each listing once to preview the website’s full image on mouse over later on for all other listings too. So Google has still kept an option for us to either use this functionality or not.

The effect of Google Instant Previews would be just related to the website’s design and look. It’s just the start and judging this functionality and its effect on SEO campaign would be very early at this stage. But my advice to everyone is to start rethinking about the website design once and analyze it with Instant Previews if it requires to be changed or not.

via (www.sediscussion.com)

Facebook Testing New ‘Mention’ Feature On News Feeds

Facebook has confirmed the new feature saying it’s currently being tested on a small group of users. A Facebook spokesperson writes, “This feature looks for certain phrases in the text of feed stories and combines them into one story if it finds matches. It’s currently being tested with a very small percentage of people.”

It looks like Facebook is able to scan both the text of one of her friend’s status updates, a joke that talk-show host Jimmy Fallon made, and my post where I share an article about Fallon, and understand that we’re both talking about the celebrity. It then says both the friend and I “mentioned Jimmy Fallon,” with the words “Jimmy Fallon” linking to Fallon’s public Page on Facebook.

9 Free eBooks on Social Media

1. Social Media Marketing GPS

Social Media Marketing GPS is based on Twitter interviews with 40 of the smartest people working in social media such as Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog, Ann Handley of Marketing Profs Daily Fix, Scott Monty of the Social Media Marketing Blog, Mack Collier of  MackCollier.com, David Meerman Scott from WebInkNow and many more.

It’s the first business book written on and not about Twitter. Not only that, but the entire book is written in a 140 characters or less, including the questions. The book begins with an explanation of why include social media and moves on to cover ethics, tactics, research, metric, branding, sponsored conversations, blogger relations and even a few case studies.

Download this eBook from Here.

2. Four Hour Sleep Week

The Four Hour Sleep Week is about how Keith Bloemendaal lost his job in 2008 and decided to sacrifice, take action, and become successful. It is a no-holds barred look at how the misconceptions of how it is “easy” to make a living online can steer people in the wrong direction.

The book starts with a closer look at how he transformed from an unemployed father and husband, into a successful internet marketer. What steps he took, and how he did it.

Probloggers like Darren Rowse, David Risley, Daniel Scocco, Nathan Hangen and a few others also helped contribute to this book by revealing what they had to do to build their online businesses.

Download this eBook from Hot Blog Tips.

3. 101 Ways You’re Killing Your Blog

101 Ways You’re Killing Your Blog! is an eBook by Tristan Higbee, author of the popular blog, Blogging Bookshelf. Higbee has also written a similar and also incredibly helpful eBook called 101 Ways to Combat Blogger’s Block.

101 Way’s You’re Killing Your Blog! identifies the best and worst practices in building a blog. It’s a kind of Holy Grail of the Do’s and Don’ts of blogging. It’s a very insightful and easy-to-read document filled with 100 plus useful tips based on Higbee’s personal experiences as well as his accumulated knowledge over his 7 years of living and working in the blogosphere.

Download this eBook from Blogging Bookshelf.

4. Communicate Better With Social Media Marketing

Communicate Better With Social Media Marketing by AuthorityDomains.com is intended to help you develop the right strategy, discover the best sites for your industry and use them to get the results you want. The eBook utilizes a hypothetical approach all while giving readers an excellent fundamental understanding of how Social Media can be used to benefit a business today. Topics covered include:

• Building long-lasting relationships with your customers
• Driving qualified traffic to your site
• Test marketing a new idea and obtaining feedback from the public
• Controlling reputation and improving ROI
• Becoming more influential in your field

Download eBook from Authority Domains.

5. From Stats to Strats

From Stats to Strats is an eBook by Danny Brown’s popular Bonsai Interactive Marketing company. This short and easy-to-follow eBook shares some of the more useful statistics of the 5 most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Blogging), as well as the many ways you can use this information to build a social media strategy into your other marketing efforts.

Download eBook from Danny Brown.

6. Fishing Where the Fish Are: Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle

Fishing Where the Fish Are: Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle is an eBook by the famous Chris Brogan.

Social media offers tools like blogging, podcasts, and social networks as ways to reach into this buying cycle. Social Media does not work alone and is tied into your traditional marketing plans. This eBook is a brief summary of six different approaches to using social media to influence these transactions.

Also featured in this book are well-known peeps like Scott  Monty, Frank Eliason, Christopher S. Penn and more.

Download this eBook from Chris Brogan.

7. Social Media for B2B: It’s Not As Different As You Think

Social Media for B2B: It’s Not As Different As you Think is one of many eBooks by Radian6.

This eBook explains why the processes for social media program development for B2B and B2C organizations are not as different as most people think. The book walks through some of the aspects of B2B and B2C business that have a direct impact on social media program execution, those bits that might very well be different.

The similarities and stick points of social media strategy development for B2B companies, the tactics as well as general examples to show that social media for B2B and B2C are really quite similar, have intelligently been pin pointed.

Download this eBook from Radian6.

8. The Art of Corporate Blogging

The Art of Corporate Blogging is another of Radian6′s monthly eBooks.

If you’re interested to start blogging for your business, or already are and aren’t seeing the results you want, then this eBook is perfect for you. It covers everything from figuring out exactly why you want to start a corporate blog to handling some of the challenges you might face after it’s up and running.

There’s also an entire section dedicated to setting goals and objectives and selecting the right metrics to properly measure your blog’s progress.

Download this eBook from Radian6.

9. Let’s Talk: Social Media for Small Businesses V.2

When used properly, social media can be an effective tool to help your business reach untapped, potential customers and stay connected to the ones you already have. In this updated version of Duct Tape Marketing’s eBook, Let’s Talk: Social Media for Small Business, author John Jantsch, distills the concept of social media into bite-sized concepts.

This eBook will help you better understand how social networking tools can generate new business and more.

Download this eBook from Duct Tape Marketing.