Social Networking | Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation

Yahoo! MyBlogLog Service Updates - Worth The Wait? July 14, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : social networking , 2 comments

Yahoo! MyBlogLog has included a couple of updates since the last time I took a close look at the service.

For one, sorting through “followers” and considering reciprocal “friend adding” is easier because you can filter through the list of friends in a pretty speedy fashion (especially if you have a hundred or more pending followers).

mybloglog pending

A number of weeks ago, MyBlogLog community manager Miss Tilly mentioned the introducing of a Connector widget.

It looks like (more…)

Is Facebook The New Phantom Menace? July 2, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : social networking , add a comment

There was some buzz last week as the managing partner of Facebook application developer Tyler Projects, Leonard Lin, had his Facebook account suspended.

In a post on Facebook, Leonard reproduced the suspension notice:

Hi Leonard,

As you may know, one of your posts in a Facebook group was removed because it was considered to be an advertisement or spam (specifically, an advertisement for an external application). Content that promotes a product, service, or group is always removed from the site. Your account was suspended for these reasons.

However, after a review of your situation, we have decided to allow you a second chance on the site and have since reactivated your account. In order to prevent this from happening in the future, please refrain from posting any such material and remove all outstanding content that violates our Terms of Use. For more information on conduct prohibited by Facebook, please read our Terms of Use, which can be accessed through the “terms” link at the bottom of any Facebook page.

Thanks for your understanding,

Brett
User Operations
Facebook

–

This doubtless caused on uproar on Tyler’s facebook application BattleStations where Leonard is active in game development and on the discussion boards (as well as being the public face of BattleStations).

His “infraction”?

Posting a link (accompanying a movie review) to a trailer for “Wanted” on a discussion board.

Apparently, Facebook is getting pretty serious with it’s ‘walled garden’ concept - that you should do all your stuff within the Facebook.com domain.

If you haven’t had a chance to look at the Facebook “terms of service” that Brett was refering to, click on the “Terms” link at the bottom of each Facebook page.

A number of the terms look pretty nefarious. (more…)

Twitter Metrics Are A Complete Waste Of Time June 27, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : social networking , 1 comment so far

I had a twitter conversation with TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden about the launch of WebProNews’ new Twitter directory/indexing service Twellow.com.

twellow

Great things about Twellow:

Categorizes twitter streams by vertical/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news
Groups related twitterers together

It’s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter’s current state of development - analytics don’t mean much more than a brute force “followers” number.

The higher the number of followers, the higher you’ll rank in the results, with the net effect that Robert Scoble is ranked first with 28,000 followers, followed by Jake Marsh with 12,000, in the blogging category.

The results are limited by the enrollment of your twitter feed into the system for benchmarking and indexing.

But I’m having serious doubts about using followers as the determining criteria.

Could social networks be (more…)

Will John Reese’s Marketing Tactics Break Twitter? June 20, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : social networking , 11 comments

There’s a little brouhaha brewing on the blogosphere with bloggers Duncan Riley and the folks over at Mashable calling out John Reese for advocating Twitter as a branding/promotion mechanism to aid their marketing efforts.

And John has posted a response at his income.com blog.

So what do the bloggers think about Jason Calancanis’ twitter posts that he has 9,000 twitter followers?

Is he “gaming” twitter?

I would think that since Jason’s post is appearing in their “related posts” widget, it’s an implicit show of support for the post.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re following thousands of your followers, I’m pretty sure you’re not reading EVERY update.

And if you’re not reading EVERY update, isn’t that insincere to follow them in the first place?

But back to John Reese “breaking” twitter.

Blaming John for the abuse of twitter is like saying handguns are responsible for killing people.

Last time I checked, people were responsible for killing people. Twitter is just a tool.

On another point, I think John is wrong when he calls the 2 bloggers “journalists”.

Journalists reporting news create content based on facts and attempt to present a balanced perspective.

At best, the reply pieces are opinion/editorial pieces, which give you license to go outside editorial objectively and present a wholly subjective view.

I’m not the greatest fan of John’s other project, BlogRush, as you might tell from my previous posts. It’s just a tool, a piece of technology, not any kind of miracle cure by any stretch of the imagination.

I don’t think John’s tactics are going to break twitter, but there’s certainly a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being sowed on the blogosphere.

Will Your Social Marketing Efforts Ripen And Product Fruit? June 12, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : social networking , 3 comments

Social marketing has quite an organic flavor to it and the garden analogy applies well.

If tended well, your social marketing efforts can take off virally and yield a bountiful harvest with social goodwill being generated, credibility being established and the positive buzz grows at a quantum rate - everything having to do with having provided value to the community and becoming a key member of the community.

spring flowers

But like an good gardener, if you don’t watch over your garden - whether it’s a blog, forum or content website, it can be overgrown with undesirable weeds - spam, massively out-of-topic discussions and trolls.

The Chinese/Japanese art of bonsai culminates in miniature trees cultivated to aesthetic perfection - these same principles apply to (more…)

MyBlogLog API To Open The Door To Social Network Spamming? March 15, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : social networking , 3 comments

Just thinking aloud…

I was looking at MyBlogLog product manager Ian Kennedy’s post on the recently launched MyBlogLog API.

[also contains video and links to the tech specs of the API].

One feature of the API is that it is “the only API that I know of that allows you to look-up a person’s identifier across social networks”

Does that mean a spam marketer using the MBL API can scrape all your social network IDs and populate your twitter streams, MyBlogLog message feed, and spam comment on your Flickr photos and blogs?

If the process can be automated, or the captchas can be overcome fairly easily (I’ve heard of a number of programmers who’ve been able to optimize OCR algorithmns on even massively distorted captchas…)

So if the spam barrage hits you on your web 2.0 accounts,

That would be pretty terrible, unless there’s a verification process involved in authenticating the ID of the person initiating the search…

So let’s keep our fingers crossed that enough safeguard are put into place, so that email “mass marketing” doesn’t become “web 2.0 mass marketing”….

For more on permission marketing, check out the Friday Podcast featuring Aweber education marketing manager Justin Premick.