What “Places” does is allow users to check-in at geographical locations. This displays a user’s physical location on Facebook. Since this is a function that is utilized when people are on the go, the function is available within mobile applications (right now, on the iPhone app or touch.facebook.com if a user’s mobile phone supports geolocation and HTML5).

Why would people want others to know where they are? Much of the activity (as it relates to business) is based on incentives offered to users. If a business wants users to publicly say they are at its physical business location, give users something in return.

Either way, this function is quite popular, especially when businesses leverage it by offering user’s incentives to check-in at the business location. Most recently, see “Gap Offers 25% Discount for Foursquare Checkins” at http://bit.ly/a2sssR. “Places” will also show user friends who are near.

Official Businesses can claim locations as official business locations as well. So, with “Places,” campaigns could be built that encourage people to go to specific geographic locations.

Developers: Do not fear. Facebook is also released an API for the service on 8/20 that allows applications to scrape public data such as check-ins from users and their friends. Initially, the API for “Places” is read-only, which means the data can be seen, but not modified or added to.

“Places” is currently being rolled-out in the US and will take a few days to be implemented with all user profiles.

What are your thoughts? How will this affect the location-based platforms that currently exist? Will Facebook eventually own this market?

People are already being judged by their online persona for jobs they apply for. I am sure that in any field, now, people are being searched for online before being hired, even when a job will not be relevant to online personas.

However, switching gears just slightly, we also have to remember that this “relationship” stuff will not have as much of an impact in the future as it does currently. People talk about the online relationships now because that’s all they know when it comes to social media. Are the relationships important? Yes, am I am a big proponent of building relationships, but the relationships only goes so far.

When marketing with social media, sometimes the relationships are important, and sometimes they are not. At the end of the day, its about the bottom line.

To play devil’s advocate, if I can show an increase in the bottom line through a social media platform, and I did not do any relationship building, does the relationship really matter?

The relationships are more important now because it’s a way to provide unobtrusive messaging. What happens when one-way channels become so targeted that they are unobtrusive? The relationship will not matter as much then, but the bottom line will still increase.

Activity on social platforms (as it should on any platform) relates back to the objectives of the business. Does the business want brand awareness, lead generation, to grow a community, revenue generation, or something else? Each of these objectives is important in its own right. But when you get to the point where you have an objective of generating revenue, you have to be able to do that too, and be able to show it.

Remember: Objectives > Goals > Strategies > Tactics > Analysis.

What do you think? Will the importance of online personas increase in the coming years, or will it decrease due to a focus on more important business objectives?

In order to vote for a session, you must have an account on the SxSWi site. Setting up an account takes approximately 20 seconds, for everyone keeping score at home.

Once you log in to the site, go to each session page. At the top of each session page, please click the Thumbs Up button  (or the thumbs down button if the session information makes you feel like you ate too many dinner mints at that wedding reception last night – they taste like crap, but you can eat ‘em till you puke!). The Thumbs Up button will turn green once the vote is captured.

Please vote for the following panels on the SxSWi site:

Leveraging Mobile Marketing Methods In My Strategy

Presenter(s): Brandon Prebynski, FKQ Advertising + Marketing (@prebynski)

How To Get A Job Using Social Media

Presenter(s): Sarah Austin, Pop17 (@pop17), Ryan Paugh, Brazen Careerist (@paughginney), Joel Cheeseman, Jobing.com (@cheezhead), Esteban Contreras, Samsung (@socialnerdia), Brandon Prebynski, FKQ Advertising + Marketing (@prebynski)

The Truth About Landing the Book Publishing Deal

Presenter(s): Kyle Lacy, BrandSwag (@kyleplacy), Brandon Prebynski, FKQ Advertising + Marketing (@prebynski)

Go Brand Yourself! Creating a Unique Personal Brand

Presenter(s): Kyle Lacy, BrandSwag (@kyleplacy), Brandon Prebynski, FKQ Advertising + Marketing (@prebynski)

SXSW® Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders, the incredible new SXSW Trade Show and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer. The most energetic, inspiring and creative event of the year takes place March 11-15, 2010 in Austin, Texas.

Currently about 2500 session proposals are on the site. Holy Panel Picker, Batman! That’s a lot of proposals! (As they say, please vote early, and vote often!)

For those who will be presenting on these panels, thank you for your ideas and effort so far. For those who may attend these sessions at the event, I’m looking forward to seeing you there! If you happen to think these sessions are the cat’s meow, and you vote positively for any of them, I thank you. If you vote negatively, I thank you for taking the time to take a quick gander at them.

Are you going to SxSWi 2011? Do you have a session I can vote for? Please let me know! I’d love to attend your session and possibly meet up for a bite to eat (or a whole plate of food).

At the D8 event, Zuckerberg was being asked some uncomfortable questions about privacy on Facebook by Kara Wisher and Walt Mossberg. His poise was obviously tainted.

This is when the host suggested he take off his signature hoodie. Zuckerberg was reluctant at first. After the subject went back to talking about Facebook, Zuckerberg then brought the conversation back to his hoodie by saying, “…maybe I should take it off.”

He did so. This is when it got interesting. The insignia inside the hoodie reveals what Zuckerberg refers to as the company mission. In the middle of the design is the number 2010. I’ll assume this means the year.

In 6 months, that mission will be outdated. Would that mean that the mission changes every year? Almost.

But why did the hoodie incident occur?

1. Zuckerberg probably wanted to move the conversation as far as possible from Facebook privacy.
2. I think the hoodie removal was planned… adding to the mystique of the “elite” Facebook culture. Watch for sales of these to start popping up on eBay. You know you want one.

As noted on Mashable:

The mission has definitely transformed over the years. In 2004, it was simply “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges.” In 2007, it was this:

“Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections.”

In 2008, it became a tool that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” In 2009, pieces of the current mission began to surface. Here was Facebook’s mission in 2009:

“Facebook gives people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

Caroline McCarthy on CNet said, “The company has maintained a collegiate vibe throughout its history, even long after it had moved from Harvard undergraduate dorms to the tony office digs of downtown Palo Alto. Fratty camaraderie breeds in-jokes. Facebook has very talented designers on staff. They made custom hoodies with – ooh, so clever! – a mission-statement design on the inside of the sweatshirt that was normally cloaked from public view. End of story. The world keeps spinning.”

As noted on MarketWatch:

Sweat literally dripped from his face as he mostly avoided giving specific answers about the backlash stemming from the popular social network’s recent privacy changes that caused ire among users.

Zuckerberg also dodged questions about how the backlash stemming from another recent privacy uproar affected him personally. See Tech Tales column on Facebook’s recent issues.

The “Quit Facebook Day” event that was supposed to have taken place on Monday seems to be a bust. I believe 34,000 (check my stats) people were a member of the associated Facebook group. There have been little to no reports of those users actually quitting Facebook, though.

The first article mentioned notes that some users have left the site due to the privacy changes within Facebook. On a similar note, there has been user backlash to every change Facebook has made. But, the site continues to grow. Interestingly enough, when these backlashes have occurred in the past, Facebook has reported higher traffic on the site.

“According to Hitwise, it’s all added up to a 3% increase in visits last week accounting for nearly 9% of all U.S. visits. The tweet from Hitwise reads ‘Amid hub-bub, @Facebook.com visits up 3% last week vs. prev week & receiving 8.59% of all US visits. Up 8% for May-to-date vs. April.’”

Site visits increased. But, it’s also important to note that we do not know why people went to the site during those times. Users may have been concerned about privacy and are modifying their privacy settings, deleting accounts, or actually creating accounts simply because of all the buzz about the site

As a note, the Facebook changes deal with a default setting that is set to public (where user information can be shared with 3rd parties) rather than private. Users are able to manually turn this option off.

Comparing Facebook to the industry, Facebook is not alone. They are sharing more information with their partner sites. Google also shares information about consumers with their partner sites and advertisers. See the article “Google to Profile Web Use for Targeted Advertising“.

Although the type of information is different between Facebook and Google (user profile information vs. browsing and search habits), both have made user data transferable to other sites. Google uses email addresses/login ID’s and IP addresses to identify users. User habits are tracked. Google keeps user habit data for a designated time period (18 months I believe). After that time period, the data stays in their system, but is disassociated with personally identifiable information.

If a user is not logged in to any Google site, Google does not relate the data to an email address. The data used by Facebook partners is different in that the data is user-generated content (all the profile fields on a Facebook page).

Will this latest user backlash affect the landscape of Facebook in the industry? Doubtful; opinion in the industry exists on both sides of the issue.

Facebook did respond to the most recent privacy change respond by implementing revamped controls. Facebook is attempting to become a standard on the web for user information. With the change and the Facebook open-graph, user data can be propagated to any site that integrates the platform. This change does make it easier for user data to be implemented into web pages.

Facebook will likely not release stats about the number of people they lost from the buzz surrounding this issue, but it would be interesting to see site stats from this change compared to prior changes.

In the immediate future, it’s doubtful that the use and demographics of the site will change much. In the distant long-term, if users have an alternate option, they may go there, but the size of the site and its growing integration throughout the web is not something that will disappear overnight.

“Only time will tell in a situation like this, but we’ve seen little if any response from Facebook to indicate that it sees these 5,000 users, or the silent others, as little more than casualties of war in its bid to reorganize the Web.”

Bonus Video

I was not an advocate of “Quit Facebook Day,” but SeanieMic‘s parody about the event “I’m Quitting You, Facebook” made me chuckle, if even just briefly. There is also information within the video that I don’t necessarily consider accurate, but it’s all in good fun! As a note, I don’t think SeanieMic quit Facebook either, but was more or less just poking fun at the whole fiasco. Disclaimer: SeanieMic is a friend of mine. Bonus points to anyone who finds my cameo.

While the popularity of Facebook and Twitter may be about the same, it is also mentioned that users on Twitter may be what we classify “early adopters.” This means that there is a lot more room for the site to grow.

“Forty-two percent of monthly Twitter users say they use the service to learn about products and services, and 41 percent use it to post their own opinions about products, while 31 percent seek others’ opinions.” This is a good sign for businesses.

So, the site can grow, but how? For Twitter to grow, the platform will have to be thought about in a different manner by businesses. Businesses look at it right now from an unfamiliar territory. Hence, they look at it like the majority of consumers look at it… “a web site where people are sending about random messages that don’t really mean anything,” or something similar to that. I’m sure you have heard multiple forms of a similar comment before.

“…and 63 percent access social networking from a mobile phone…” This is a start. As I started to say, think differently about Twitter. What functionality does it provide? It provides a platform where simple messages can be sent to one or multiple users at any given time to and from any device it is programmed to work with. We could integrate simple messaging capabilities into any device or software that we want pretty darn easily. Twitter allows programmers to build their own functionality off of what it offers.

Think about messaging in more of a practical sense, outside of Twitter. Where does messaging live where the process of sending and receiving messages could be made more efficient or more useful? Everywhere; both for purposes that currently exist and for new purposes that do not exist yet. This includes human-to-human messaging as well as machine-to-machine and h-to-m or m-to-h.

Maybe it won’t be Twitter. Maybe it will be a function of some other social network. But once the integration of one of these platforms as a messaging channel starts to be integrated more into our daily lives and less as a novelty website, that is when we will see it take off.

There are 1.73 billion internet users worldwide (September 2009). Of those users, 418,029,796 are in Europe, 67,371,700 are in Africa, 20,970,490 are in Oceania and Australia, 179,031,479 are in Latin America and the Caribbean, 252,908,000 are in North America, and 738,257,230 are in Asia.

With 1.4 billion email users worldwide, 90 trillion emails were sent on the internet in 2009, with an average of 247 billion being sent per day.  The majority of those were spam; 200 billion. That’s 81% of emails that were spam.

In December 2009, 234 million websites existed and 126 million blogs existed (according to BlogPulse).

On social network sites, 84% of them had more women than men. Twitter had 27.3 million messages, or tweets, sent per day in November 2009. Ashton Kutcher is no joke. His Twitter account, @aplusk, had 4.25 million followers, and he was the most followed Twitter user. Speaking of social networks, Facebook served 20 billion page views per month; that’s more than 6 million page views per minute and 37.4 trillion page views in a year.

Taking a look at social network page views per month, Facebook lead with 260 billion. Next was MySpace with 24 billion, followed by Twitter with 4.4 billion and LinkedIn with 1.9 billion. How many servers does Facebook need? 30,000. And they are growing. When the video was produced, 350 million people were on Facebook. I believe that number is currently past 400 million.

Taking a look at image content, 2.5 billion photos were upload each month to Facebook and 4 billion photos were hosted by Flickr (as of October 2009). At the current rate, 30 billion photos will be uploaded to Facebook per year.

The YouTube video platform served 1 billion videos per day; 12.2 billion videos were viewed per month in the U.S. (as of November 2009). Hulu had 924 million video views per month in the U.S. (as of November 2009). The average internet user watches 182 videos per month is the U.S. In the U.S., 82% of internet users view videos online.

Spam is an issue. How much of an issue? 148,000 new zombie computers are created per day. These are computers that are used in botnets for sending spam and performing spam-related tasks.

Speaking of unwanted content, 2.6 million malicious code threats existed at the start of 2009. This includes digital content like viruses and Trojans.

The launch dates of major social network sites show us the evolution on social networking. In 1995, Classmates.com and Craigslist appeared on the scene. 1997 saw the launch of SixDegrees.com and AsianAvenue. In 1998, Care2 and Xanga were born. 1999 graced us with the presence of LiveJournal, and BlackPlanet. The turn of the century, 2000, gave us miGente and mixi in Japan. Six Degrees closed. In 2001, cyworld, Ryze, StumbleUpon, and Meetup.com appeared on the scene. The trend continued in 2002 when we saw the launch of Friendster, Fotolog, Plaxo, and MyLife (formerly Reunion). Even more networks were launched in 2003 with Skyblog, Couchsurfing, MySpace, Tribe.net, Last.FM, Hi5, LinkedIn, Open BC / Xing, Netlog (Europe), and MyHeritage. In 2004, appearing on the scene were Flickr, Piczo, Mixi, Facebook (to Elit Universities), Dodgeball, Care2’s SNS relaunch, Orkut, Dogster, Multiply, aSmallWorld, Catser, Hyves, Yelp, Taringa (Argentina), and Basecamp.  In 2005, launching were YouTube, Facebook (high school networks), Xanga’s SNS relaunch, Yahoo! 360, Cyworld (China) Ning, Bebo, the relaunch of AsianAvenue and BlackPlanet, Gather.com, and Renren (China). 2006 saw Facebook’s corporate network, Cyworld in the U.S., MyChurch, QQ, Windows Live Spaces, Facebook’s launch to everone, Twitter, Café Mom, Nasza-Klasa (Poland), Odnoklassniki (Russia), and Vkontakte (Russia). In 2007, Tumblr and Ravelry entered the scene. In 2008, Kaixin001 (China), Yammer, and Plurk were launched. The location-based Foursquare and Gowalla were revealed in 2009. In 2010, Google launched its Google Buzz service.

Quoting statistics in the article:

• 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers — this was up from 22.5% in 2009.
• Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1% — this was up from 6.5% in 2009. Most of this growth was in the uptick in smartphone usage.

When it comes to mobile marketing, one question continues to come to mind: Which type of mobile technology will be the most successful for mobile marketing? Yes, tactics do always depend on goals, but will one method be welcomed more by consumers?

The methods I am thinking of include:

1) Mobile Text Messaging
2) Mobile Multimedia Messaging
3) SmartPhone Applications
4) Mobile Browser Content

My personal sentiment is that Application Content will win out of the method that is implemented most for marketing purposes. This is not to say that the other methods are not powerful. I just think users are more apt to participate if they are provided an experience rather than just information. Applications allow for more of an experience than SMS, MMS, and static browser content.

What do you think?

That’s interesting. Of all people who to trust, why wouldn’t friends fall into the “credible” category?

I am interested in knowing how the study defines “friends and peers.” Does this mean people who somebody actually knows personally, or just somebody who is interested in the same topic as they? Of course, I do not trust my friend who is a chef when he gives me advice about how to fix my plumbing. In that case, I would likely trust the collective advice of plumbers.

I will note, however, that before I purchase anything online, I always look at reviews of the product/service before I buy. No, I do not consider the writers of those reviews to be my friends or peers. They are strangers, but when many strangers provide parallel information, it becomes trustworthy.

Something else to examine here is whether or not the “friends and peers” have positioned themselves to be trustworthy about the various topics at hand. People may trust me for web site advice (because I have positioned myself as a “web guy”), but they will not trust me if I attempt to convince them why the world will end in 2012 (for the record, I do not consider myself an expert with theology, and I do not think the world will end in 2012).

Let’s be honest, most of us know when somebody is full of it. If you think somebody is trying to swindle you, they very well may be.

“My cow just died, and I don’t want your bull.” – Unknown

What type of connection do you think justifies an online “friendship”? Do you trust your friends as the relationship relates to social media?

With this article, there are some gaps to be considered. However, I will continue to trust credible reviews of products and services. Long live the power of community!

• Access to your Twitter feed on Yahoo: On Yahoo Mail, Sports, the homepage and other Yahoo properties, you will be able to check the most recent tweets of your friends.
• Ability to update status from Yahoo: Yahoo will become a Twitter client, allowing you to update your status from multiple locations on Yahoo. We’re not sure if this is going to be through widgets or another method.
• Yahoo Search and media integration: Public Twitter updates will be integrated throughout Yahoo Search, News, Finance and Entertainment, among other properties.

Why would Yahoo partner with Twitter?

In my opinion, Yahoo wants to be more of a player in the social space, especially with content results in search. I think the most important aspect to this partnership is the search and media integration.

If Twitter updates are integrated throughout the search, news, finance, and entertainment areas, real-time updates from Twitter could allow people access to more up-to-date information about their search interest.

As Yahoo has so adamantly stated in the past, Yahoo is much more than a search company. Yahoo wants people to know that their services offer far more than search results. This may be somewhat of a rebuttal to the fact that they are losing the search engine wars, but nonetheless, Yahoo does offer more services than just search results (but so do other search engines).

Yahoo just recently partnered with Bing, too.

This partnership comes only weeks after Yahoo announced that they would partner with Bing in order to deliver search results on the Yahoo site. As I understand it, the search results on Yahoo will now be powered by the Bing search engine.

Could this be detrimental to the Yahoo brand? Their own services are diminishing. They now seem to be depending on other services (that are their competition) for their own. Yes, they are icing the cake with additional innovations on top of Bing services. Yahoo has stated in recent years that they are not just a “search” company. Maybe they will use this move to highlight their other services.

The positive side to this is that this move seems to be more end-user-centric. “…search marketers may indeed get more traffic for those conversions that they love in small portions.” This could increase their credibility in the industry.

Why would Yahoo partner with Bing? Another reason could be that Bing has access to more real-time data that is able to be fed to their site than other search engines. As you may or may not know, social web sites throttle the amount of information that third-party sites are able to pull.

Real-time search will be a big player in the field of online search. It’s beginning to gain traction and will only become more important as time progresses and new functionality and applications are innovated. So, if Yahoo did not have permission from a social site (Twitter, for example) to pull as much information from Twitter’s servers as Bing did, it would be beneficial for Yahoo to partner with a service that does have the ability to pull and display more real-time information (Bing, for example).

Yahoo Search = Bing + Twitter

Could this combination be the magic beans that Yahoo has been searching for that will bring their brand back to the top of the industry?