We’ve known Facebook is serious about photos: Heck, it dropped a cool $1 billion on Instagram, the immensely popular mobile photo sharing app. What we didn’t know, however, is that Facebook was essentially building its own version of a stand-alone mobile photo sharing application, ostensibly to compete with Instagram before it took over the mobile photo sharing world completely. How do I know that? Because Facebook will launch the product this afternoon in Apple’s App Store. It’s called Facebook Camera, and it’s essentially Instagram redux. One, it’s a standalone Facebook application, separate from the Facebook app proper, much like the company’s Facebook Messages app. Facebook Photos product manager Dirk Stoop told me in an interview this morning, it’s an instant portal to one of Facebook’s ... Continue reading →
By Shea Bennett on May 24, 2012 8:00 AM Did you know that social media users who receive excellent service from their favourite brands go on to spend, on average, 21 percent more than non-social customers? Conversely, 83 percent of socially savvy consumers have walked away from a purchase in the past year after having a negative support experience with brand, compared to just 49 percent of everybody else *. These and other findings were unveiled in a recent study by American Express, and this information has now been packaged together in this infographic by REV Media Marketing. * Politely known as “Luddites”. (Source: REV Media Marketing. Success key via Shutterstock.) Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in ... Continue reading →
Research In Motion Ltd. may have lost its dominance in the global smartphone market, but its instant-messaging service is still widely popular around the world.Now even that strong suit is threatening to weaken as world-wide sales of BlackBerrys falter and RIM softens efforts to leverage the messaging tool. Teenagers still embrace BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, for its quick and free instant messaging, and its easy-to-use contact list of friends. Security professionals—police, firefighters and ambulance drivers—have come to rely on it as one of the most dependable forms of electronic communications. There are more than 55 million BBM users today, up more than tenfold from the 5.3 million users in January 2009, according to RIM. In that same time frame, RIM's share of the U.S. smartphone ... Continue reading →
When you set up a new website it can be tempting to bolt on every single social sharing button in existence – after all, you want to maximise traffic and exposure, and what better way to do this than by letting your visitors share your content any and everywhere? This sounds like a good idea, but it’s actually a mistake. Not only do dozens of share buttons risk making you look a little desperate, but by giving your visitors too many options you can actually trigger choice paralysis – with so many possibilities available to them the decision becomes overly-complicated and, frustrated, they often end up choosing none. By giving them less choice, you’re actually far more likely to get the outcome you desire. Moreover, ... Continue reading →
When it recovers from the cataclysmic clusterfuck that was its IPO, Facebook will gather its team, round up its new friends from Instagram and Glancee, and ask the $100 billion question: What the hell is it going to do about mobile? The company admitted the mobile shortcoming in its S-1 filing, made a late amendment to emphasize that mobile is even more of a problem than it first pointed out, and is now being sued for quietly adjusting revenue expectations on the eve of the IPO based on the realization that mobile – really! – is a serious fucking problem. In the time since I wrote about the big shift from Web 2.0 to the Age of Mobile, the discussion around the mobile threat to ... Continue reading →
Axis replaces the standard search results page with a horizontal, scrollable list of thumbnails. iPad version shown. (Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET) Yahoo is announcing tonight that it's getting into the browser business with its new Axis browser. There are versions for iPad and iPhone, and plug-ins for the desktop browsers Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari. The design goal, according to Ethan Batraski, head of product for the Search Innovation Group at Yahoo, is to eliminate the middle step in the usual Web search process: Enter a query, see the results, go to a page. With Axis, you're supposed to be able to go directly from query to page, skipping the step of surfing a sea of links. The implication that Axis entirely bypasses the ... Continue reading →
Over 32,000 tweets-per-minute were sent on Twitter this weekend, as Chelsea triumphed dramatically over Bayern Munich during the Champions League Final. Twitter was all a-buzz on Saturday as the two football teams faced off for one of the most coveted trophies in the sport. Users sent 32,097 tweets-per-minute at the peak of the game. Brand Watch explored when users were tweeting most during the match, and came to the conclusion that Twitter is becoming increasingly important for live TV events: half of all the tweets about the game were sent while it was being played live. Take a look at the volume of tweets sent each minute between 7PM and midnight on Saturday: That first big spike in tweet volume occurred when Chelsea striker Didier ... Continue reading →