Social Media Expert?

The holidays are over and here we are, Social Media Experts, coming back to conquer communities with our clients' products.

Unfortunately, some of our clients dare to ask questions like "what qualifies us to do the social media marketing for them?",  "What we know, that they don't?".
Here is an example. You are about to watch a homemade video on social media experts. Warning - it is not flattering! On the other hand, it is genuine. Enjoy!

What Google+ Does Better Than Other Social Networks

Today I've found an interesting question in my G+ stream. Pete Cashmore from Mashable asked what Google+ does better than other social networks?
The versatility of the answer is amazing, from the stream, through uploading gifs, Hangouts, privacy control, meeting new people to "everything".

LinkedIn Ads Platform Review

If you have a business that provides services to other business, you will find that advertising on facebook isn't so simple for you. You will create a campaign and an ad, which is the fun part of advertising. When you get to the targeting, you'll find a problem. Let's assume that your main target is small businesses in your country. How can you filter such group of people in facebook? If you want, for example, restaurant owners to see your advertisement, it's not enough to state "restaurant" or "food" as an interest. It will bring your message to the people that eat in restaurants and only few of them will be the restaurant owners.

So, you have to be creative and try to think about other B2B services that may be present in facebook.

On Riots and Social Networks

When the UK authorities found out that the protestors have used social networks to organize themselves, the question whether to monitor those telecommunication channels or not has risen. It reminded me of the good old logic question:
Merry's father has five daughters: Nana, Nena, Nina, Nona. What is the name of the fifth daughter?

If Google had to get an investment for Google+

Notice: DF's Social Corner is the official blog of Yedalab. Please follow Yedalab on facebook

Today I've found on Google+ lot of excitement - a small group of users got the chance to try Google+ Games!
The reactions are mixed - from "oh, no, that's why I've left facebook" to "it's great, don't worry, there will be a separate stream for games and it won't bother if you don't like social gaming".
Anyway, the feeling that Google aims to build facebook+ got even stronger than it was before.

The Cycle of Viral Marketing

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You are invited to follow Yedalab on facebook

When your application meets the news feed

After we've been talking about good posting in How helpful is good posting in increasing the number of fans? post, let's take a look on the new statistics section in the application insights, which was added recently by facebook.

News Feed

The news feed section provides you an important information about your application's posts.
The following statistics are available:

3 observations on Google+ buzz

Google+ is with us a little bit more than one month, but it feels like forever. One of the reasons is over 10M blog pages talking about it.
After the initial excitement, I would like to share with you 3 more rational observations.

How helpful is good posting in increasing the number of fans?

You've prepared a beautiful business page on facebook. You've used your advertisement budget and now you have few tens or hundreds or thousands of fans, depending on the investment. What's next?

According to the latest research made by comScore, your fans friends are on average a 34-times-larger audience than the fans alone.


How to reach them?

In order to expose your page to the fans friends, you need an active involvement of your fans on your page. It means that you have to give them a reason to like your posts, comment on them or even post their own content on your wall.

What is privacy in social networks?

We already have discussed the Google+ emphasis of the privacy, as the main advantage of the latest Google's social network over facebook.
Today I've got a little bit confused: Google has deleted number of Google+ account, claiming the violation of their real name policy. Does the concept of privacy include our names? What are the boundaries of privacy?

Is facebook the one being threatened by Google+?

Google has done it again - it has created a huge buzz around Google+ by using the formula that made gmail one of the largest email services providers. Google+ is being released to a limited audience. It's invitation based, everybody is talking about it and the curiosity reached new heights. Early adopters praise the new social network and forecast facebook's fall.

When I finally got the invitation to Google+, I was excited. A few days later I could no longer ignore the feeling that Google+ provides the functionality of... Twitter and LinkedIn. Another thing worth noticing - during that whole period facebook's tab was proudly open in my browser next to the Google+'s one.

Tips for surviving the facebook design changes

While everybody's talking about Google+, there are people that still enjoy facebook.
Unfortunately, recently, an advanced usage of facebook is getting harder and harder.

A lot of design changes were going on lately. I've prepared a list of tips for you, maybe it'll help you to avoid the frustration I have experienced in the last month or more.

Google+ vs. Facebook - the motivation

This article is originally published at soshable.com


On July 1st Google released it's 4th social network project. After the failures of Orkut, Google Wave and Google Buzz, Google presented the new promising social platform - Google+.
During the last few days, hundreds of articles describing Google+ were published. I won't describe here the functionality of the new social network, since I haven't experienced it personally. All my knowledge
about it derives from the demo available on the Google site and the reviews mentioned above.
Instead, I'll discuss here the motivation behind Google's decision to significantly enter the social network world, whatever it costs.

Google is still the biggest search engine in the world

Let's start with a reminder – the main Google service is it's web search, not social network. It is impossible to deny that Google has a great search engine. Still, in order to keep the title of "King of Searches", Google must strengthen a number of weaknesses.

Do You Know Your Friends?

Recently, there was lot of interest in Dunbar's number.
Prof. Dunbar from Oxford University claims that one is capable to manage up to approximately 150 stable social connections. When you reach your personal limit, every additional friendship is either doomed or comes instead one of the existing relationships.

Social network applications company Yedalab (of which I'm one of the founders) released a new facebook application "Do You Know Your Friends". It comes to check the simplest aspect of the friendship - can you recognize your friends by looking at their profile pictures? After 16 profile pictures, the application shows to the user the misidentified friends and the recognition success rate. Users can also see how they have done relative to the general facebook average.
Although the application was just released, we can already get the first impressions about people knowing their facebook friends. It turns out that we are able to recognize 3 out of 4 friend's profile pictures. The situation is not so positive for all users. If you have less than 250 friends, you'll probably recognize 4 out of 5 your friends. On the other hand, if you have more than 500 friends, recognizing 2 out of 3 friends will be considered as success.

It only takes a few minutes to test yourself, but, in some cases, it takes much longer to decide what to do with the result.

You can test yourself here: http://apps.facebook.com/douknowurfrnds/index.php

3 essential points for entrepreneurs

After consistent efforts to avoid it, yesterday I finally saw the Social Network movie. Don't ask me why I've resisted it for such a long time, I guess I was afraid to find out bad things about Mark Zuckerberg, whose work I highly respect, and I had to prepare myself for it. The recent news about the Winklevoss brothers court adventures convinced me to see the movie.

Anyway, let's discuss 3 essential points that you can find between the lines of the movie. Spoiler – I still have a lot of respect to Mr. Zuckerberg's work.

1. Personal involvement

The anomaly in the story is that the Winklevoss brothers got the money. There is a common believe in the entrepreneurship world that at the same moment you're working on something new, there are, at least, 3 other crews in the world that work on exactly the same thing. There are almost no exclusive ideas, there are only new ways to transform the idea to the real thing.
Let's get it straight, I'm not claiming that stealing ideas is OK, because it is not. I'm saying that the way from the general idea to the specific implementation is so long, that often it is hard to find too many elements of the original idea in the final product.

If you are giving to someone else to implement your ideas, while you're busy doing other things, don't expect to get something back. Even if you have enough money to invest in a startup company, you must be actively involved. Unless you have expensive dad's lawyers that will achieve 65M dollars for you.

Personal involvement is crucial for taking a part in a success of startup company.

2. Dedication

In the first stage of a startup company, you must dedicate yourself to it. It sounds simple, you're dedicating yourself to many things in your life – job, family, hobby… Here is the difference – you must dedicate yourself only to the company. 24/7, at least! You wake up thinking about it, you're going to sleep with it. You drink it, you eat it, you breathe it. Still, be prepared to find out that it isn't enough. Successful entrepreneurs sacrifice a lot. You must create a supporting environment in your private life, otherwise you may find yourself successful, but alone.

There are no accidental millionaires and billionaires, there are only people that were willing to sacrifice their lives to the implementation of the idea.

3. Think Platform

Obviously, facebook is not a social network application. It's not even a social network service. It is a social network platform. You can think about it also asa  social network operating system with a bonus – well over 500M active users.

I'm sure you've heard the expression "Think Big" many times, but it doesn't reveal the essence. "Thinking platform" will allow you to quickly respond to the user's needs that arise from the use of your product. At the beginning, ideas are a set of cool features that answers the need you've recognized. Try to understand what is common to those features and try to figure out how to implement the building blocks that implicate the features. At the end of the day, each feature is only one case of the use of the platform.

Here is an example. My facebook friends are located around the world. When I want to chat with one of them, I never know what his local time is. Certainly, 2AM isn't the best time to talk about business, while 2PM isn't appropriate time to talk about the movie I saw yesterday. So, I have a brilliant idea to show the friend's time in the chat window (I know, Skype already does it and it is, indeed, a great feature). "Think platform" means to implement the time feature in such a way that adding in the future the local weather won't require writing a code, than only configuring the system. It can be achieved by implementation of a system where time, weather, exchange rates etc. are only cases of the general ability to bring local information from one place to another. Such approach may take a little bit more time in a short-term, but it saves a lot in a mid- and long-term.

"Think Big" is "Think Platform". Prepare yourself for future requests, so when they come, you can respond quickly.

Summary 

We have discussed here 3 essential points required a success. There are more factors for startup success – focusing on one idea, facing problems in the real time without compromise and even luck, but without the active involvement, the dedication and thinking platform, the odds for success are extremely low.

3 important aspects of social gaming

The Social Gaming genre brought to the world very different gaming experience from what we were used to.
Let's see which 3 elements had the main influence in this gaming revolution:

1. Slow pace

In the "old world", the one before social gaming, the most successful games were highly addictive in the straight and powerful way. If you remember the Tetris-mania, surely you recall all those people playing Tetris for hours. You couldn't communicate with them during the game, they were totally into it. Even Minesweeper, the game that comes with MS Windows OS, is such. I've got under 100 seconds on the hard level. It took me weeks of everyday practice. Up today, I spent more than 1000 hours playing the game.

Social Gaming is completely different. You are limited in the time you can spend playing. In most of the games there is energy or equivalent that doesn't allow you to play more than 30-45 minutes at once. Than you have to wait. And you have to come back. It doesn't mean that social games aren't addictive - they are! But in another, much slower pace.

Of course, there is no problem to speed up the things. It will cost you just a few dollars.

This great idea have 2 consequences: you're coming back frequently and you have enough time to miss the game. You are not "having enough" of the game quickly, people plays social games like FarmVille for years!


2. Creativity


Or I shall say "the sense of creativity"?

The aim of most of social games is to build something. It can be a farm, city, mafia, garden, village or any other complex structure. Since not everybody have enough talent for arts, there are ready made building blocks. It turns the social games to sort of virtual do-it-yourself playing field. You feel creative, you choose where to put the house and where the store should be. There is also a game plot. You have tasks. So, the building blocks are prepared, you are well directed what to do, but still, the sense of creativity is there.

The main challenge here is to keep the balance between the freedom of player to be creative and directions that will keep the player on the track.

Let's take for example two similar games: FrontierVille by Zynga and Wild West Town by ClipWire Games. Both games are dealing with the Wild West, but FrontierVille has close to 14M monthly active users, while Wild West Town has just a little bit more thant 1M. There are lot of reasons for the difference, one of the main is Zynga's strength and huge amount of active users playing their other games. Nevertheless, there is another important factor. Wild West Town has a nice, but very demanding story. If you suddenly felt creative during the game and you have done something that is not part of the given tasks, you may find yourself doing it again in a while, in order to fulfill a new task that just arrived. It is frustrating and players don't like it.

So, give your players an opportunity to feel creative, but don't leave them alone to lose themselves in your game.


3. Playing with your friends

Of course, you will say, those are social games. You're right! But, the emphasis here is the word with, which is opposite to the word against your friends. You're helping each other, you can't finish your tasks without their help. Another important aspect is that places where your friends have an obvious effect to the outcome of your play are under your control. So, you're still the one that exploits your own creativity from the point 2, but you can't advance without help of your friends.

In this situation, you're sharing. It is the name of the game in the social world - sharing, and you are willingly doing it again and again.


Summary

There is no magic formula to make a successful social game. At least, when you're preparing your social game, you can make sure that the aspects we discussed here are there. They will make you closer to the success.