Resort Combines Facebook Places, Gowalla, Nike+ for Social Media Skiing - Resort Social Media Marketing Company

Colorado-based Vail Resorts is launching a new location-based social media service at its many mountain destinations--some of which are the largest in the U.S. Called EpicMix, the service acts as a cross between Nike+ and Gowalla, and enables users to check-in on the slopes through Facebook Places to earn pins and rewards for various skiing accomplishments, view the location of friends and family on the mountain, and track ski routes and vertical feet traveled. Vail's EpicMix is an innovative use of social media, showing that it's not just a tool confined to big cities or national companies, but has a more intimate application too on a hyper-local level.

Using an RFID chip embedded into lift passes, a skier's journey is captured through every scan it receives on the mountain. No smartphones are required--check-ins are automatic and can be accessed at anytime online or through EpicMix's mobile app for the iPhone, Android, and other devices.

via fastcompany.com

Looking to plug social media into your resort's online or offline marketing strategy? Contact us today for a free 30 minute resort social media marketing consultation today here: http://stirsolutions.com/consultation Read about our social media marketing services here: http://stirsolutions.com/social-media

Posted via email from Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

Facebook Places: The Real Target Is Yelp. (What's The Best Social Network Target for Your Business?)

Most of the attention paid to Facebook Places, the new location feature that the social network launched on Thursday, has focused either on the privacy implications of the service or on the impact it could have on location-based startups such as Foursquare (which some have said they expect to be "crushed" by the new feature). Facebook's real focus with this launch, however, isn't individual users or even Foursquare: Instead, it sees Places as a way into the local business and local advertising markets, and the company with the target painted on its back is Yelp.

via businessweek.com

Google Places, Facebook Places, Foursquare Location Layers & Mayors. Having trouble keeping up? Will Yelp have to partner with Gowalla or another smaller check-in startup to stay ahead of the million-business-pages-strong Facebook checkin tsunami? What is your business doing to get listed in all of the social network places? Why should you even consider spending your valuable time or marketing dollars on something like this Facebook Places or Yelp or Foursquare advertising or promotion? Drop me a note at brent[at]stirgroup.com and I'd be happy to answer your questions or setp a time for a free phone consultation to discuss your business and whether getting on the Facebook / Yelp / Foursquare / Gowalla check-in marketing train is right for your business, products or services.

Posted via email from Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

New: Facebook Places - Facebook introduces check-in feature similar to Foursquare, Gowalla

Social-networking giant Facebook has entered the check-in world.

Facebook executives on Wednesday announced the launch of Facebook Places, which -- similar to services such as Foursquare and Gowalla -- will allow people to use the GPS on their mobile phones to let friends know exactly where they are.

Facebook Places is available immediately in the United States through the latest version of Facebook's iPhone app and, for other advanced mobile phones, through the company's site for advanced mobile devices, executives announced at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

via cnn.com

Posted via email from Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

Google Me: Facebook-Killer or Another Johnny-Come-Lately?

Digg founder Kevin Rose posted a tweet over the weekend saying: "Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon "Google Me", very credible source."

I'm not sure what the function of typing "umm" into a tweet is, but if true this rumor could prove, umm, earth-shaking.

via pcworld.com

Posted via email from Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

Facebook envy? Amazon.com patents social networking system

Is Amazon.com trying to be the new Facebook? You might think so after reading the e-commerce giant's new patent for a "social networking system."

The U.S. patent, granted June 15, "provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users" and "automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts."

via techflash.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

Facebook Firehose Comes to Bing - Bing Social Media Marketing & Real Time Search Results

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Bing search engine announced today the launch of a new social portal that will produce real-time results from both Facebook and Twitter. The site, which will be live later today, will be found at bing.com/social and will be "the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose," according to Microsoft.

Bing has featured a Twitter portal for social search, and by adding Facebook results the search engine is stepping up its real-time search game to include results from both services. The Facebook results include both information from public pages, as well as popular shared links from users with appropriate privacy settings for public sharing. Bing also helps you quickly scan the social links by including an excerpt from the link in context within the results.

via readwriteweb.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Bing Social Search - Experimenting

brentpurves How long will it take for this Twitter post to show up in the new Bing Social Search Results? #bing http://ow.ly/1XoQP 2 minutes ago via HootSuite

via twitter.com

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Bing search engine announced today the launch of a new social portal that will produce real-time results from both Facebook and Twitter. The site, which will be live later today, will be found at bing.com/social and will be "the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose," according to Microsoft.

Bing has featured a Twitter portal for social search, and by adding Facebook results the search engine is stepping up its real-time search game to include results from both services. The Facebook results include both information from public pages, as well as popular shared links from users with appropriate privacy settings for public sharing. Bing also helps you quickly scan the social links by including an excerpt from the link in context within the results.

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Social Media Ad Spending Lags - Social Media Advertising - Facebook, Twitter, iPhone

Social media use is exploding, but ad spending in the sector continues to be a blip on the radar for most brands.

  Razorfish, one of the largest digital ad spenders, compiled data on its 2009 digital ad spending. It found that social media display advertising made up just 3 percent of its clients' budgets. Non-display in social media accounted for another 1 percent. The figures pale in comparison to the time spent online. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users spent 11 percent of their time online in 2011 on social media sites.

via brandweek.com

Need help navigating the world of advertising in social media? Drop me at note at brent[at]stirsolutions.com and we can setup a free 30 minute social media marketing consultation

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Constant Contact Acquires NutshellMail to Move into Social Media Marketing

E-mail marketing giant Constant Contact has acquired NutshellMail, a service that lets businesses track and post updates to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn via e-mail.

via mashable.com

It's a mashed up world where pretty much everything will be social media enabled -- so much so that we'll soon stop calling it social media because most sites and tools online will come socialmediafied by default.

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Bing Adds Facebook, Twitter Sharing To Shopping

There are a number of “social shopping” sites and, of course, numerous product or shopping-related blogs. Among the most visible in the first category are Kaboodle, ThisNext/Stylehive and Polyvore. They offer tools and features that allow people to share, compare and vote on products. The mainstream shopping comparison engines such as Shopping.com or PriceGrabber don’t fully enter into this realm, although Shopping.com is giving away an iPad if you become a “fan” on Facebook:

via searchengineland.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Microsoft Announces Social Aggregator - (Facebook, Twitter, Bing etc)

Lili Cheng, General Manager of Microsoft's Fuse Labs, announced the debut of Spindex, the company's stab at a dynamic social media aggregation tool.

Aimed at bringing together the varied strands of a personal web at each point of a user's online experience, Spindex is currently only available in a tech preview.

via readwriteweb.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Broadcast TV And Web Media Sites Winning In Online Video, Twitter Users Most Engaged

In a joint report put out today by Brightcove and Tubemogul (embedded below), the non-YouTube sites seeing the most success with online video are those of the broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels. Newspaper sites are lagging when it comes to both total video views and growth.

In terms of how people are finding these videos, a little more than half (51.75 percent) are navigating directly from the publisher’s main site. Following that, Google search is the next biggest source of video-viewing traffic (38.92 percent), followed by Yahoo (5.58 percent), Bing (2.29 percent) and Facebook barely registers (with only 0.40 percent). Twitter is even smaller, but people who find videos are more engaged than any of these other sources of traffic, on average watching videos longer across different media categories.

via techcrunch.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Consumer Reports: Half of Social Network Users are "Oversharing," on Facebook, Twitter, Endangering Privacy

Those who "overshare" online - posting personal information like full names, children's names, home addresses and details about when they're away from home - are "especially vulnerable," notes the report.

To counteract these dangers, Consumer Reports made the following seven suggestions of things you should stop doing on Facebook:

1. Using a weak password
2. Listing a full birth date
3. Overlooking privacy controls
4. Posting a child's name in a caption
5. Mentioning being away from home
6. Letting yourself be found by a search engine
7. Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised

via readwriteweb.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Why Is a Russian Billionaire Gobbling Up the Internet? - Business - The Atlantic

In just five years, a Russian venture capital firm has amassed quite a portfolio of the Internet's hottest companies.

Digital Sky Technologies said this week it is taking the ICQ instant messaging service off of AOL's hands for $187.5 million, but it isn't the first time the small, four-partner firm has made social media headlines. Last May, DST bought a $300 million stake in Facebook. The company was also the key investor when social game maker Zynga raised $180 million in December and social coupon site Groupon raised $135 million this month.

via theatlantic.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Facebook: Into the Open Graph - The Day the Internet Went Social - Social Internet Marketing

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't shy away from grand promises. At the release of Facebook's ill-fated Beacon content-sharing platform in November 2007, he called it a once-in-a-century shift in media. Last week, he made another grand pronouncement, this time when introducing Open Graph, Facebook's audacious plan to serve as the de facto social operating system for the Internet. The new system, he said, is "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the Web.

via brandweek.com

Need help cutting through the clutter with social networks and social media marketing? Contact the social media marketing experts at 11 Marketing today http://www.11Marketing.com or email brent [at] stirgroup.com for a free social media marketing consultation

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Location-Based Ads a Goldmine, Says Survey - 50% of Users Take Action - Mobile location-based advertising

Although the privacy issues surrounding Facebook's new, opt-out only data sharing policies are making people uncomfortable, one area where folks are apparently happy to have their private data shared is on their mobile phones. And by private data, we mean exact GPS coordinates. Coordinates that are shared with software developers, ad networks and location-based service providers in return for free location-based mobile applications and geo-targeted ads.

In fact, one in four U.S. adults use mobile location-based services

via readwriteweb.com

Need assistance setting up a location-based advertising campaign? Contact mobile Internet marketing consultant Brent Purves in Vancouver Canada at http://www.BrentPurves.com or brent [at] stirgroup.com http://www.StirGroup.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Measuring The Value Of Social Media Advertising - Facebook Advertising

Nielsen found that the first type of ads on average generated a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent among users who saw them compared with a control group with similar demographics or characteristics who didn’t.

According to Nielsen, that increase in advertising recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were ‘fans’, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ newsfeeds.

via techcrunch.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Privacy issues? Google engineers leaving Facebook in droves - Facebook Deactivation

The main issue is that there are concerns that Facebook, by default, now opts you in to allowing third party sites like Yelp to ‘personalise’ your experience, and there are questions about how much information is given away.

The result is that lots of geeks are considering leaving Facebook, and perhaps even more interestingly, veritable droves of Google software engineers are among them.

via eu.techcrunch.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Facebook May Not Be Skynet, but It Is Getting Smarter, and That's Bad for Google - Facebook Marketing Strategies

This is all a very big deal if it's successful. Bigger than you think. And It makes Facebook a direct competitor to Google. Facebook has managed to succeed where Google has failed -- turning your social behavior into actionable intelligence. Google's major attempts at insights into web-wide consumer behavior (Orkut, FriendConnect, Checkout, Buzz) have not had anything close to the success that the Facebook platform has had.

via adage.com

Need help developing and implementing facebook marketing campaign including Facebook marketing strategy, Facebook page development, custom Facebook landing pages, facebook video, facebook app design or facebook pay per click or cpm ad campaigns? Contact Brent Purves at Stir Communications Group today at brent [at] stirgroup.com http://www.BrentPurves.com http://www.StirGroup.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile

“What’s next in social media?” It’s among the most popular questions out there. But while most folks currently answer with “location-based services” (i.e. Foursquare (), Gowalla ()) or “group purchasing” (i.e. Groupon, Twongo, Living Social), the real battle may be between Facebook () and Google ().

The fight between these two Internet giants to become your default social profile has been brewing for a long time, and the prize is an enormous potential revenue stream. Let’s take a closer look.

via mashable.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves