Mashable's Summer Tour event

For those who are interested, here's a link to purchase tickets to SummerMash, Mashable's U.S. Summer Tour event, on Thursday, August 5 from 7:00 - 10:00 p.m. at the USA Today headquarters in Mclean, VA. The early bird tickets are sold out, but they still have regular tickets. You can also search #summermash on Twitter.

Fussy Facebookers or Legitimate Complaints--is Facebook doomed like Myspace?

This recent Mashable article shines some light on how users feel about Facebook. The 2010 American Customer Survey gave Facebook a 64/100, a rather abysmal score. However, fear not...Myspace still fared even worse, ranking at the bottom of the pile.

What were the reasons behind the sub-par rating? Well, the incessant changes to the page seem to annoy users. I must say, I agree. Often times, they don't even warn you things are going to change. You just log in one day and POOF things are different and you are left to figure it out. In my opinion, they have made too many changes trying to perfect a system that was already efficient. Of course improvements can always be made, but I preferred the Facebook of a few versions ago. But I digress. Other complaints were privacy concerns (ironic, given the big deal the company has made over changing/improving this), commercialization and advertising. These concerns have also been cited in previous surveys.

I don't find the advertising as annoying, but it is somewhat sad to see that half the page is full of advertisements. The individual ads are annoying sometimes, but I know this tactic has been very helpful for many organizations (as we learned from Lidia's presentation). To give you an idea of a comparison, Google pulled an 80, followed by Bing and Wikipedia at 77, Yahoo a 76 and even YouTube a 73. Twitter wasn't included because of the high use of third-party applications.

What does this mean for the future of Facebook? While still beating out Myspace, does it share a similar doom? Mark Zuckerberg will be giving an interview with Diane Sawyer regarding these privacy concerns on Wednesday...this should be interesting!

http://tinyurl.com/29pd3s2

Google Analytic Links

Hi all - here are the links from my presentation in case you were interested in more detail about Google Analytics and not interested in typing out those links!

Here goes!

- Official Google Analytics Website

- How to use Google Analytics for beginners

- 5 Ways to use Google Analytics to measure your marketing effectiveness

- Five simple and powerful ways to use Google Analytics

- 5 Best ways to use Google Analytics Notes

- 3 Ways to use Google Analytics to analyze your SEO work

New Spice: Study Like a Scholar

This has been making the rounds, but here's a pretty hilarious spoof of the Old Spice commercial that BYU did for their library.

I also read a NPR story today that says that Old Spice has seen a spike in sales (though they're not releasing specifics). I wonder how truly effective the campaign will be. Yesterday we referenced the iconic Got Milk campaign, but, as I learned in my Social Marketing class last semester, that campaign didn't really make any money for the dairy industry.

Trend Twist

Trendistic, (formerly known as Twist) is a pretty quick and simple way to see some stats on your recent activity. For example, one of my employers, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism recently announced the winners of thousand of dollars in grants and awards for innovations in journalism. Exciting! The J-Lab wanted to know what the buzz was, as the story seemed to get a nice pop on twitter, but we had no idea how much of a pop it was. In comes Trendistic.

All I had to do was type "@jlab" into the trend search and we saw an instand graph for all the recent tweets over the past few hours. We could also search for words or other related terms. Great stuff! Check it out!

Barbie's First Tweetup

Allison's recent blog post made me want to look more into what Barbie is doing on social media. Just typing that sounds strange. I found this article that talks about Barbie's first "Tweetup." Barbie, with the help of Council of Fashion Designers of America hosted a showcase. Barbie was featured wearing clothes designed and based on the featured designers styles and creations. Through Barbie's twitter she promoted the event and called for others to come. What is next for Barbie?

http://www.stylelist.com/2010/02/03/barbie-attracts-twitter-followers-with-designers-help/

Barbie uses Social Media too!

Like most young American girls, I once played with Barbie dolls. In fact, my parents' basement used to be Barbie central. My sister and I had just about everything Barbie could ever want including a drive thru McDonald's, an amusement park, a stable, a grocery store, a doctor's office, a day-care center, and several dream homes and cars. All that was fine and dandy for girls growing up in the 80s and 90s, but now in this digital age Barbie needs a way to compete with all the technology gadgets and games that occupy kids' time. So now Mattel has brought "Barbie Video Girl" to life.

What's a Barbie Video Girl you ask? Well Mashable reports that, "Barbie Video Girl doubles as a video camera with LCD screen and comes with video editing software. The doll appears to be designed to get little girls excited about video production, a career path that may not be as geeky as computer engineering, but is still quite modern."

So basically we now have a doll that functions as a video camera. And on top of that Barbie is using Foursquare and Twitter to promote a scavenger-hunt contest starting next week. Participants follow Barbie to get clues and tips for the scavenger-hunt and then check in using Foursquare. Apparently there will be on-site challenges to complete and "street team" on hand to award prizes to the winners.

The thing that puzzles me most about this promotion and the use of social media is how effective it will be. I mean how many young girls (let's say around 10 and younger) are actually using Twitter or Foursquare? My guess is not that many. I seem to recall a study from the PEW Research Center that stated that few teens use Twitter, so I doubt kids even younger have adopted the practice. I know that if I had kids I wouldn't be too keen on letting them have Foursquare or Twitter accounts.

This leaves me to believe that this campaign must be targeting older fans of Barbie (much like the adult fans of Lego), bloggers, and moms of kids that love Barbie. And sure enough Barbie has over 16,000 Twitter followers. So I'm curious how these scavenger-hunts will pay off for the fashion doll of choice. I'm betting a lot of older women are going to be out there clamoring for a free doll. But maybe that's the plan after all?