How to Perform a Social Audit [INFOGRAPHIC]

When thinking about social media strategy creation, where should a marketer start? One important component to be included should be a social media audit, where you survey the social landscape to find your customers, industry thought leaders and competitors on social spaces.

Through some analysis, a marketer is able to glean what works and what doesn’t based on the performance of competitor’s pages. By understanding how the audience responds to different types of content and calls-to-action, you can set your own channels up for success at the out-sight.

Don’t know how to perform an audit? Don’t worry, we have you covered. Check out our How to Perform a Social Audit infographic below.

Social Audit Infographic Awareness Inc

We’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/how-to-perform-a-social-audit-infographic/

No New Apple Television Products Coming in 2012 as Content Negotiations Stall Once Again

Bloomberg reports that Apple will not be releasing a new "TV product" this year as difficult negotiations with media companies have slowed Apple's plans. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Apple is working a new set-top box offering access to live and on-demand television content, but a timeframe for a release of the product was not given at that time. Apple has also been said to be working on its own television set, but apparently neither product will be making an appearance in the relatively near future.
Apple is vying with the likes of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to make TVs the digital hub of people’s lives in an industry projected to reach $200 billion worldwide by 2017. Whoever wins must first strike deals with media companies or cable providers who have little incentive to cede valuable revenue streams. The result: Apple won’t be releasing a new TV product this year, as analysts had predicted, said a person familiar with the company’s plans.
Negotiations between Apple and the media companies have reportedly stumbled over the software interface for any new television product from Apple, with cable companies wanting to have control over the software. The two sides are also at loggerheads over whether Apple would sell a new set-top box directly to consumers or if the device would be distributed by the cable companies.

The report also offers a rehashing of The Wall Street Journal's details on what the new set-top box would offer:

Since the middle of the last decade, Apple’s engineers have been working on a more advanced product to allow viewers to quickly find shows and movies, blending both live and recorded material, the people said. It would recommend content based on interests and work seamlessly with Apple’s family of other devices. An iPhone or iPad would double as a remote control, the people said.
Apple has reportedly been talking with cable companies since the original Apple TV's debut in 2007, but talks have repeatedly stalled over numerous issues. More recently, Apple is said to have focused on companies willing to offer Apple live content for streaming, with Time Warner Cable apparently being the major cable company most receptive to Apple's proposals.
Apple is furthest along negotiating with Time Warner Cable Inc., said the people familiar with the talks. Yet even if Time Warner Cable agrees to a deal with Apple, it wouldn’t represent a radical change for customers, who would still pay their monthly cable bill.

Apple may be looking to Time Warner Cable to be its first partner in a similar way that AT&T Inc. helped bring the iPhone to market, one person said.

Beyond live content, Apple is also said to be pursuing substantial offerings of on-demand content, but media companies are wary of losing control of their content and the channel bundles offered through cable providers.


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from MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors - Front Page http://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/06/no-new-apple-television-products-coming-i...

Vidmind wants to become the one-stop-shop for virtual cable operators

Israel-based video startup Vidmind is coming out of stealth mode at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam Thursday with an offer that seems to geared squarely at those mythical virtual cable operators we’ve all been waiting for.

Vidmind offers operators a white-label Android-based over-the-top box as well as apps for phones and tablets and a web UI, all of which can be custom-branded and used to stream linear and on-demand content to consumers. It also promises to provide operators with the complete backend and cloud infrastructure to run the service. In other words: A complete out of-the-box solution to sign up cord cutters and people in search for cheaper, more interactive TV alternatives.

But who would buy into this kind of service? Internet providers looking to expand into the TV business for example, or smaller local cable operators who want to concentrate on selling Internet services instead of investing a lot of money into future-proofing their TV infrastructure. And anyone who’d want to compete with big guys like Cox and Comcast on their home turf, without having any physical cables in the ground or satellites in the sky.

There’s been a lot of talk about the possibility of someone launching this kind of virtual cable operator – a company that transmits all of its programming over the Internet. There’s been some movement in this space, with Dish targeting expats with its Dishworld service, and companies like Skitter experimenting with broadcast streams on Roku and other platforms – but we’ve yet to see a big virtual operator target the entire U.S. market.

Vidmind demonstrates that the tech piece of the puzzle is pretty much solved. Getting the content to actually get people to subscribe could be much harder.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/vidmind-whitelabel-android-tv/?utm_source=feedburner&...

Twitter Tells You How to Follow the NFL This Season


The 2012 NFL season is finally underway, and Twitter wants to give you some pointers on how to follow along.

In a Wednesday evening post on Twitter's official blog, sports and entertainment head Omid Ashtari introduced tweeters and football fans alike to the microblogging network's official "Get started" page for keeping up with the NFL. Ashtari's blog post recaps some notable tweets by NFL players this offseason, and offers a few tips for users.

The "Get started" page itself (screenshot above and link here) may strike seasoned tweeters as extremely basic, but it's a perfect primer for new Twitter users who also happen to be NFL fans. It explains how to search for topics of inter…
Continue reading...

More About: Sports, Twitter, nfl

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/09/05/twitter-nfl/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=...

Current status: API v1.1

Today, we're excited to release the next version of the Twitter API, version 1.1. A few weeks ago, we outlined many of the v1.1 changes, and with today's release, we've also updated the Developer Rules of the Road (see a summary of the most important policies here) and Developer Display Requirements. To learn about all of the changes, be sure to see the Overview of Version 1.1.

read more

from Twitter Developers blogs https://dev.twitter.com/blog/current-status-api-v1.1

Five Social Media Lessons from the NFL

It’s here! It’s finally here! No, it’s not Christmas in September – although the excitement is right up there… Today is the day football (the American variety) returns to TV! Tonight, the NFL kicks off the 2012-2013 season with the Dallas Cowboys taking on the New York Giants, and already there’s pigskin passion in the air! So to channel this gridiron giddiness and football fervor into something productive, here are five social media lessons gleaned from the NFL!

Stories Sell: Tim Tebow was definitely not the best quarterback of the 2011-2012 season, and yet the Denver Broncos play-maker was one of the most talked-about players. Why – because Tim Tebow – as an underdog, and as a unique player within the NFL – had a story worth telling. Much like sports, in social media, sometimes you don’t have to be the best, you just need to have a winning story.

Play to Your Strengths: There’s a reason the New England Patriots have been one of the top teams year after year – they play to their strengths. With a coach who can continuously keep the competition on their toes, and a field general who can knock any opponent back on their heels, the Patriots have a strong framework on which to build. When it comes to planning your social media programs, identifying your company’s strengths is pivotal. Whether it’s producing great content, getting your audience involved, or bringing in new people and perspectives – whatever your company does best should be the foundation of your social strategy.

Value over Hype: This offseason, the Miami Dolphins were excited to acquire Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson. In training camp, Johnson was proving to be every bit the stand-out receiver the Dolphins expected, and Miami’s offensive outlook for the season was looking promising. However, Johnson’s behavior off the field greatly diminished the value he could offer to the team and so despite the hype and expectations, the Dolphins cut Chad Johnson. In the social sphere, new tools and popular trends may hold a lot of promise as well, but if the value to your company is questionable it’s best to play it safe and keep any potential risks off the field.

Never Quit: To get to the NFC Championship last year, the San Francisco 49ers pulled off a clutch, fourth quarter rally to upset the heavily favored New Orleans Saints. With nine seconds left on the clock, quarterback Alex Smith closed out the contest with a game-winning touchdown pass to Vernon Davis. On a day to day basis, your customers may be depending on you to come through for them in key moments – no matter how much time is left in the day. As difficult as it may be, you need to always be ready for that last second drive to surprise and delight on the social media stage.

Keep Your Fans Engaged: Home field advantage doesn’t come from the stadium; it comes from the fans. The adrenaline boost alone from a cheering crowd can push a player or a team to an almost supernatural level of play. In 2011, Comcast Sports Network Philadelphia teamed up with the Philadelphia Eagles to get fans as involved and engaged online as they were on game-days. Using a SnapApp sweepstakes app, CSN Philadelphia and the Eagles drove 25% more likes in five days alone, and drummed up 64% more mailing list sign-ups. These results – which you can view in more detail here – proved to be a win for CSN, the Eagles, and Eagles fans alike!

The beauty of sport is how it translates so well to life. The battles, hardships and challenges overcome by a team on a field can serve as valuable lessons for teams playing their games elsewhere in offices, board rooms, or online. Do you have any lessons you’ve learned through sport that apply to professional life? Feel free to share your stories with us in the comments below.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/five-social-media-lessons-from-the-nfl/

Being open: The source of Twitter’s power, and its Achilles heel

As we’ve mentioned before in our coverage of Twitter’s ongoing evolution, the company is struggling to find a way of transforming itself from being a kind of real-time information utility into a media entity that generates revenue from things like advertising — and the clash between those two visions of what Twitter stands for continues to send ripple effects throughout the social-media sphere. In a post about the implications of these changes, Union Square Ventures partner and Twitter investor Fred Wilson suggests that one of the company’s big problems is that it was too open to begin with, and now has to find a way to close things down. But can Twitter do this without losing a crucial part of what made it such a phenomenal success in the first place? That’s the question currently hovering over the company’s future.

In a recent post on my love-hate relationship with Twitter, I discussed how much I appreciate what the network has been able to provide in terms of being a real-time, open and distributed platform for publishing — and what an important role I think that has played in making us more informed about things like the Arab Spring revolutions, for example, thanks to the crowdsourced journalism of people like Andy Carvin of National Public Radio. But I also said that I hate the fact that Twitter is closing down third-party access by other platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, and that its desire to control more of its network seems to suggest that being open and having a good business are mutually exclusive.

Can you be truly open and still build a business?

Wilson, an early backer of Twitter — and someone who has also written a number of posts in defense of the open approach to community-building and the importance of being free — said that he believes being open and building a business can go together. But he added an important caveat: Being open, the Union Square VC said, is something that should come later and be done gradually, not right out of the gate the way Twitter did it. As Wilson puts it in his post:

“It is better to open up slowly, cautiously, and carefully rather than start out wide open and then close up every time an existential threat appears on the horizon… [Twitter] started out completely open, which allowed anyone to build a third party client, grab a huge percentage of Twitter users, and then threaten to take them away from Twitter. That’s not a sustainable relationship.”

This is Twitter’s dilemma in a nutshell: As we and others have pointed out a number of times, virtually all of the network’s power and growth has come from outside the company itself, in a way that is unlike almost any other significant social network. As Sarah Lacy notes in a post about Twitter’s unlikely success, every one of the important elements of the service — from the @ mention feature to the hashtag, and even the retweet — was developed by users, not the company itself. And now those same features are the ones the company is desperately trying to monetize to justify its financial market value.

In many ways, you could argue that even Twitter itself didn’t realize what the network was capable of until these things started to emerge — and I think they only emerged because the company decided to be as open as possible right from the beginning. It had a fully open API that third-party developers could use to do whatever they wanted, right down to creating a Twitter client that essentially competed with the service. As this problem became more and more obvious, the company started acquiring (and in some cases shutting down) other apps and services, and it has been stepping that behavior up recently.

Twitter is trying to turn back the clock

Doing this is probably a financial necessity in many ways — especially since Twitter is trying to justify all the money that it has taken from VCs over the years, as Hunter Walk of YouTube has pointed out — and so it is likely inevitable. And it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that Twitter shuts out third parties altogether, or clamps down on its network to the exclusion of all others: the company’s co-founder and chief product visionary, Jack Dorsey, said in a recent interview that he sees this process as “shepherding” the ecosystem towards a specific goal rather than shutting it down.

But what if the shepherd is herding the flock towards a cliff, or just fattening them up for slaughter? Mike McCue, co-founder of Flipboard — and a former member of the board of directors at Twitter until he resigned last month — told the Telegraph that he is concerned that Twitter is closing down too much and that it risks losing some of the power it used to have. As he puts it:

“Twitter can be incredibly valuable as an open communications mechanism but, if you close too many things down too quickly… you could easily do a lot of damage to that ecosystem. Twitter was created as an open platform, an open communications ecosystem, and I hope it can stay that way. You have to be really careful not to let money get in the way of that.”

So if Fred Wilson is right and Twitter made a mistake by being too open in the beginning, its current evolution is an attempt to turn back the clock or rewrite history — in other words, it is trying to find a way to undo some or all of the things that made it so powerful and fast-growing in the first place, while still hanging on to the value that being open created, so that it can monetize it. Facebook is also trying to monetize a user base that is built on free content, but it started closed and has become (somewhat) more open over time, which is a completely different challenge.

What Twitter is trying to do is a little like Wikipedia — something that has huge social value but is not a very good business — suddenly shutting down or controlling access to its content and inserting ads into everything. Is such a radical transformation even possible, or will the pressure be too great and cause cracks that rip the network apart in the process, or destroy its original value? We are about to find out.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and See-ming Lee


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/09/05/being-open-the-source-of-twitters-power-and-its-...

When it comes to startups timing really is everything

Arista's Andy Bechtolsheim at GigaOM RoadMap 2011A few months ago, I was chatting with Andy Bechtolsheim, who is perhaps one of the smartest people in Silicon Valley (as his Sun Microsystems co-founders such as Vinod Khosla would attest). The conversation, which started out very technical in nature, turned into a philosophical discussion, mostly about how much of a role intangibles and timing play in startups. Of course, Andy should know. As an angel investor in startups like Google and co-founder of companies like Sun and Arista Networks, Bechtolsheim has seen that timing is often the key difference between startup success and ignominy.

When it comes to startups, a lot is made of a startup and its founders, the market opportunities, its advisers and the team. Of course, there is chest thumping around investors and the dollars raised. Yes, those are important issues, but let’s not forget about the role of timing. I was reminded of Andy’s comments when I read Benoit Felten’s post about the demise of Onlive. While there are  a multitude of reasons, including architectural problems, it seems that the lack of ultra-broadband is one of the main reasons why a service like Onlive (a cloud gaming service) found no traction.

Benoit pointed out that in 2003, there were a lot interesting online video startups, but they couldn’t get traction because broadband lacked oomph. Of course, a few years later when network speeds were up, YouTube was born and took the world by storm. History might be repeating itself, Benoit argues. I couldn’t help but agree, and said as much in a conversation with Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang. I believe that Onlive came five years too soon. Why?

Future is not the past 

For starters, our definition of desktop software and desktop applications is going to change. It is not hard to imagine that what desktop games are today might not exist in five years, or that they could be an entirely new class of products? After all, the technologies that are the building blocks of our technology experiences are going through a sea change.

In the near future, if one reads the chip industry’s tea leaves, a personal compute client like the iPad will have twice or perhaps even four times the power of a contemporary laptop. With all the growth coming from those portable clients, it makes perfect sense for companies like Qualcomm to plow all their resources into developing mobile processing units with immense power and graphics ability.

The emergence of cloud is changing the software and what we expect from it. Furthermore, the presence of sensors in our compute devices could start to influence our online experiences, including games themselves. Why shouldn’t the Need for Speed change locations or graphics based on geo-location?

The Gigabit future

But more importantly in five years we can hope to have much faster pipes — both wired and wireless. The 1 Gbps experiments currently being conducted by Google in Kansas City and the 1 Gbps municipal network in Chattanooga, Tennessee are well positioned for these high-bandwidth applications. Benoit puts it well when he writes:

The sad thing is that when the tipping point for good quality broadband is reached, it will seem obvious looking back that this was a meaningful service concept, one users would be willing to pay for if they have good enough broadband (and are at least casual gamers, obviously). Just like there were many YouTube lookalikes before YouTube who all died for lack of decent broadband. [Fiber Evolution]

It is not just YouTube. Skype, which celebrated its 9th birthday recently, won mostly because it came at the right time. People were buying broadband and needed applications. Skype fit the job description and benefitted from it. Not many people remember Kozmo, a much-loved Internet delivery service that was a spectacular bust. A decade later we have companies like Postmates working on a similar concept.

Thanks to the growth of social media and mobile devices, a company like Postmates is able to find customers faster. The company, which launched its Get it Now app in May 2012, has seen a steady monthly increase (of about 43 percent) in its usage, The New York Times reports, and is processing about $100,000 worth of deliveries every month. Bastian Lehmann, the Postmates chief executive officer and a co-founder, told the Times that “With the penetration of smartphones, the world has changed, as has the ability to purchase through a mobile device.”

In five years, Onlive sadly will be forgotten — an idea caught in a timetrap, reinforcing the notion that when it comes to startups, timing is everything.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/09/04/onlives-troubles-and-why-timing-really-is-everyt...