Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Sorry I missed my weekly recap last week! I hope you didn’t feel totally in the dark! So this week some of the news will be from two weeks ago. Being sick in the summer is the worst isn’t it?

Here is the tech news I felt fit to tell you about from the last two weeks:

Facebook changing layout of fan pages, removing boxes – This is important if you are the administrator of a Facebook fan page! Facebook is changing the layout of their Facebook pages on August 23rd. If you have your page set up in boxes you need to take that content and move it to custom tabs. If you are the admin of a page, you should see an alert on the top of the page and the option to see what your page will look like when the changes take place (see below). The new width for custom pages will be 520px, which is significantly smaller than before.

Google Wave, Waves Goodbye – Google wave came out last year and while some loved it for its ability to collaborate on big projects, most were just annoyed with this product. Google announced that they are not going to be sinking any more resources into Google wave and it may eventually come down. The product “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” says Google. For more information about the end of Google Wave check out TechCrunch’s post or you can read CNNs post on Why Google Wave’s demise is good news for Facebook.

Facebook makes browsing photos easier – Perhaps taking a page from Google’s revamped image searches, Facebook has redone how they display photos on profiles. In creepier news, they also added ‘face detection‘ to make tagging easier. I have seen this on my home screen of Facebook a few times in the last week and I was surprised. I get what they are trying to do but it has a hint of creepy, if you ask me.

Delta lets you buy airline tickets right from Facebook – As the lines from social media sites and business get blurred, this new feature from Delta shouldn’t be a surprise but it caught many of us off guard. As of this past week you can now purchase airline tickets right from Delta’s Facebook fan page.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta coming our September 15th – Microsoft will launch the public Beta of IE9 on September 15th. Internet Explorer has quickly lost power to other browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Will this new version pull them our of the mud? We will have to wait and see.

Links I liked:

• The numbers don’t lie: Mobile devices overtaking PCs – CNN Money
• Connect Your B2B Customers with Social Media Profiles – socialmediab2b.com
• Are You Sure You Want That Social Media Job? – Brass Tack Thinking
• Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media? – TopRank Blog
• 28 Awesome B2B Social Media Statistics – socialmediab2b.com
• The 4 Hottest Social Media Marketing Trends Explained – Hubspot

Image Source: Google Earth Weather

Time for another Weekly Recap! Pretty spread out this week. No major trends but everyone seems to be plugging away with some new features and trying out some new things. I also added a link to some results from the viral Old Spice video campaign so that you don’t think I have forgotten about topics we talk about in the past.

Here is what I saw happen on the web this week:

YouTube Videos extended to 15 minutes, well except for Russians – This week, YouTube announced that they are increasing the length of YouTube videos to 15 minutes. You used to be able to only have videos 10 minutes long. My first impression was that I didn’t think this was necessary. I haven’t watched a YouTube video and thought, man I wish that was longer. Most YouTube videos are already longer than they need to be. After I thought about it some more, I considered how much online video is competing with television viewing and I bet the extra 5 minutes will be huge for ‘webisodes’. Of course none of this matters at all if you are in Russia, since YouTube has been banned in Russia for having a ‘racist’ video.

Google does the weather and checks in – Google had a few big announcements this week (as usual). One was that now with Google Earth you can get real time weather in the locations you are looking for. So all you wanna-be meteorologists can nerd out to some real time weather! They also mentioned that developers are working on a check-in system like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Facebook rolls out Questions – Have you ever used LinkedIn Answers? Well Facebook is currently rolling out a similar function, called Questions, so that you can ask your Facebook friends for help or their opinion. This could be a great opportunity for businesses if Questions adds hyperlinks in people’s answers or lets you link to their Faceboook fan page, if they have one.

Old Spice sees success from viral campaign – Whether you loved them or hated them, everyone wanted to know if the Old Spice viral videos did anything to move their bottom line. Looks like it did. This is great news to those desperate to tie social media to ROI.

Links I Liked This Week:

• Stop yourself from making egregious e-mail errors – CNN
• Back by popular demand: The Basics of Social Media R.O.I. – BrandBuilder
• B2B Mobile: 5 Questions Every Marketer Should Be Asking (And Answering) – CK’s Blog

Photo credit: nannetteturner

As I was putting together my Weekly Recap this week, I noticed a lot of the updates were about phone upgrades. Every generation has their technological advances that totally creep out the generation before theirs. I think right now we are watching not only the internet drastically changing how we work, but one of our most trusted and valued modes of communication is morphing, too – the phone. The phone was pretty stable for a long run and since the launch of cell phones, there are big new advances happening rapidly; texting, picture messages, voice over IP, video phones, etc. That is enough deep thoughts for me. Here are the biggest news stories I ran across this week in web:

iPhone “deals” with their reception issue – As we mentioned last week, Apple held a press conference last Friday. The boiled down version is there is an antenna problem and they are going to refund anyone who buys an iPhone bumper to help with the reception issues. The iPhone bumper is essentially a fancy rubber band you put around your phone so that you don’t lose a signal when you touch the metal band around the phone. There have been a few other fun alternatives to the bumper like the iPhone bandaid and, my favorite, the new End Call button.

Don’t be alarmed, but we are running out of internet – We are not running out of space, or website addresses but apparently we are running out of IP addresses, according to experts. Your IP addresses essentially tells the internet who and where you are and it is a series of numbers. They just are coming to a point where they are going to run out of numbers. So much like when phone numbers got maxed out we had to add area codes to make the numbers longer, they may have to make IP addresses longer too. Why is it important? I’m not sure but it is interesting that we have so many people accessing the internet now, that we are running out of IP addresses. With other news this week like Facebook announcing that they are up to 5 million users and Foursquare counts it’s 100 million checkins A DAY Microsoft sells 175 million copies of Windows 7 in nine months, I am beginning to think this whole internet thing isn’t a fad.

Skype is changing the game – Skype, the internet calling service, announced that you can not only now use Skype to make calls on your iPhone but you run it in the ‘background’ so you can use other applications at the same time. What does that mean? It means you have more control using Skype to make a call than you do using your cell phone service; you can check the internet, play a game, write a note while you make a call. Skype lets you make free calls to other Skype users and you can make calls to landlines and cell phone with a minimal fee (often less than a cell phone contract). What would cell phones be like without cell phone carriers like AT&T, Sprint etc.? That is where this has the possibility of going.

Yahoo tests out displaying Bing results – In a move we have all known about for awhile, Yahoo has made an agreement with Microsoft to have their search engine, Bing, power Yahoo searches. They started testing it out in organic and paid search by letting Bing power 25% of Yahoo’s search traffic.

Google gives image search a makeover – From the other search corner, Google launched a new Google image search. We like it better. It displays more images and doesn’t take up too much space giving you too much information. To see where the image is from or the context, you just click on the image or hover over it. You can also see results for similar images which I could see being very useful.

Links I liked this week:

• 7 Steps For a Successful Social Media Strategy – Social Media Examiner
• Debunking the Myths of Social Selling for B2B – Socialmediab2b
• Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter Video
• Google Voice Gets Faster For BlackBerry and Android Users

This week the internet was consumed with the shirtless Old Spice actor and iPhone’s continuing drama around the iPhone 4. In case you missed it, here is a quick recap of this week’s biggest news-makers.

Old Spice creates a stink on social media sites – Case study exhaustion beware! Every now and then a marketing initiative comes around and it takes everyone by storm. You watch it all happen and then for me, I hear a click in my head, ‘I am going to hear this case study for the next 5 years, over and over and over… damn’. This week Old Spice did something really interesting. They took the actor from their television campaign and had him make personalized video responses to social media power users. He responded to tweets, comments on YouTube videos and more. The funny responses were clever, came in rapid succession and were mostly targeted at higher profile social media users like Ashton Kutcher, Lucretia Pruitt, Guy Kawasaki, Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) and even a flirty back and forth exchange with Alyssa Milano. To see all the responses you can check out the YouTube channel dedicated to the Old Spice Responses. The marketing effort was clever and won the Old Spice marketers some major pats on the back. Some are of course questioning the ROI of the campaign. No matter what the results, Old Spice had the online world’s attention for 48 hours.

Below is a video response from the Old Spice man to Jason Keath from Social Fresh about his request for an interview.

iPhone 4 press conference – As we have discussed before, the latest iPhone is having some serious problems. The technology darling, Apple, is under fire in a big way, which is new to them. Apple is known for being innovative and is held to a high standard. This debacle has highlighted that Apple and Steve Jobs don’t know what to do in a media crisis. Today, Apple is having a press conference to talk about the iPhone 4. It should be interesting to see what the company has to say and how they plan on fixing the faulty device. Another blow to the iPhone happened when Consumer Reports came out this week and said they could not recommend the new phone because of its known antenna issues. Video below.

Links I liked this week

Gmail allows rich text signatures
Google Tests Multiple Accounts Sign in
B2B Content Marketing Strategy and Practice Is Steaming Full-speed-ahead. Are You Onboard?
12 Favorite and Little Known Tips for LinkedIn