Social networking

While most of you were out enjoying the sun and cooking up some BBQ over the Memorial Day weekend, 3 million of us geek-y types were busy LOLing (laughing out loud) over Weezer’s new video, “Pork & Beans“. (Weezer is the band that sang the Buddy Holly song..forever ago. Now you are up to date)

So you are probably asking yourself, why would over 3 million people tune into a YouTube video instead of enjoying the first days of summer heat? Weezer, who have long been toted as a geek rock band, did the geekiest thing possible and created a new video featuring a montage of the biggest hits of YouTube of the year. Miss South Carolina, Chocolate Rain, and The Dramatic Gopher , plus many more, made their musical video debut.

The brilliance behind the silliness is that Weezer, knows its demographic: Geeky-types. Using YouTube they cleverly put themselves directly in front of their audience. And within a short period were able to amass over 3 million hits. To put things into perspective, let’s take a look at the ‘old days‘, when bands would debut their latest videos on MTV and hope that their audience would tune in to see them. Unfortunately, with television, there is no ’sharing element’ beyond, “Hey did you see that new Weezer video on MTV?”. Now, using video sharing sites, music videos are able to be viewed and shared with friends and embedded across websites in a matter of hours.

Just how nerdy are you? Watch the video and count the number of YouTube Hits you have seen.

My count was: 11 out of 22. So I”m 50% nerdy..that’s about right..

Morgan Stanley has just revealed last month’s Internet Trends Report which has some very intriguing statistics regarding Social Networking sites.

Here are some of the highlights from the 72 page document:

• 6 out of the TOP 10 Most visited sites on the Internet ARE Social Networking sites. YouTube, Facebook, Hi5, Live.com, MySpace and Wikipedia all made the list.
• 5 out of the 6 didn’t even make the list in 2005. Within 3 years our internet experience has been drastically changed by the introduction of social media, networking and sharing sites.
• in 2008 YouTube has surpassed Google and Yahoo in number of Page Views
• Facebook has grown by 305% - largely in part to it’s ’stickiness’, open application platform, and recent open invitation strategy.
• Top 5 Facebook Applications are: Superwall, Top Friends, FunWall, SuperPoke and Movies.
• Top 5 Searches according to Google Zeitegist: iPhone, Badoo, Facebook, Daily Motion & Webkinz.
• Amazon.com is still the Largest Online Retailer
• Internet Advertising spend is up 26% making it the biggest advertising mover.
• 80% of Internet Users deem the internet as an important source of information, where as radio and newspaper only received 63% importance.

View the full Morgan Stanley Internet Trend Report:

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Last week, I wrote a blog post about Twitter, the fast growing microblogging platform that allows users to blog 140 character ‘tweets’ to their closest friends, followers and yes, even strangers. Twitter, although, originally created to keep up with what your friends are up to, has quickly become an easy way for companies to monitor their reputation online.

Zappos.com, one of the largest online shoe merchants, known for its outstanding customer service and amazingly large selection of shoes (personal experience) has recently taken to Twitter. They have set up a Twitter feed page on their site which follows online mentions about the company and ‘tweets’ made by their employees.

Zappos.com has been the online sweetheart of many bloggers.  With amazing customer service stories like, I Heart Zappos, this one and one more, it’s hard to NOT love them.  Zappos.com did not set out to win over bloggers, they set out to win over their customers…and some of them just so happened to be bloggers. With one flower bouquet, Zappos.com managed to win over thousands of bloggers and fans.  According to Yahoo Site Explorerr the “I Heart Zappos” post currently has close to 2,000 inbound links! Talk about free publicity!

As a company committed to customer service, it is a smart move for Zappos to embrace Twitter. Following their company’s brand online will help them pro-actively remedy any negative mentions online and humanize the company by  following their employee’s tweets.

Zillow, Trulia, Facebook, LinkedIn? These are all just passing fads, right? What could they POSSIBLY mean to an old school business like mine?

Find out why you should ditch the skepticism and start using social media to your business’ advantage in this week’s edition of SEO Audio.

SEO Audio: Episode 19