OXFORD WORD OF THE YEAR 2009: UNFRIEND
The standard of the English language has been manipulated into ways unimaginable. But among these, a rather unusual word has made its way to the Oxford dictionary, as highlighted by OUP Blog.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Other technological words of interest added to the dictionary this year include Hashtag and Sexting.

DECLARATION OF SUCCESS BY SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETERS
As depicted in E-Marketer, social networking within the past 3 years, have shown significant growth in terms of usage and function in the business marketing concepts. In these modern times, it’s practically the best way to market anything, be it online or direct.

Social networking and blogging have seen the most growth in adoption, while other technologies have flattened or even declined in use, including wikis and online video. Twitter usage, of course, has caught on quickly – more than one-half of businesses reported tweeting in 2009. This was the first year respondents were polled about Twitter.

One impressive change over time was in the percentage of Inc. 500 companies that did not use any form of social media. It dropped precipitously from 43% in 2007 to just 9% in 2009.

The Center for Marketing Research also noted that the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US, is outpacing the larger, more traditional companies in the Fortune 500 in many social media activities. Is the rush to adoption bringing marketing success? Respondents overwhelmingly believed it was. The companies polled were mostly measuring hits, comments, leads or sales as primary indicators.

So it should be no surprise that Pepsi have; for the first time in 23 years
cancelled their SuperBowl ads in favor of social-media marketing.

THE DEFINITION OF SOCIAL MEDIA R.O.I.
This brings us back to The Brand Builder, who takes another stab at expressing his views on the ROI of Social-Media:

It’s easy to do, especially since sometimes, what you invest into something isn’t necessarily $$$. Perhaps you invested sweat. Perhaps you invested time. Perhaps you invested emotions. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that when the currency is variable, how you measure the “I” in ROI becomes variable as well. For lack of a better term, you start to refer to any kind of positive outcome as “ROI” even when you shouldn’t. It’s an easy habit to fall into, and if you aren’t careful, your definition of ROI can begin to get a little fuzzy. So I get it: I understand why this is confusing to so many folks, especially when it gets thrown into the world of Social Media.

INSURE.COM SELLS FOR US$16 MILLION
Tech Crunch and Domain News highlighted the largest reported domain name sale of the year to date:

Now trading under the names of Life Quotes and Consumer Insurance Guide, the former Insure.com will retain almost all of its existing customers and business, meaning the value of the sale is almost solely for the domain name. Phil Perillo, CFO, remarked, “This transaction, which calls for a $15 million cash payment now and a $1.0 million payment in 365 days, significantly increases our shareholders’ equity and stockpile of cash. As a result of this asset sale, the Company now has approximately $24 million of cash and investments, no debt, stockholders’ equity of $31.4 million and a book value of approximately $4.98 per share.”

O’REILLY’S DISCUSSION ON ICANN WITHOUT RESTRAINTS
In one of O’Reilly Radar’s articles, Andy Oram made a complete discussion regarding ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers) without restraints, that has made several difficult circumstances online.

• It was created hastily and arbitrarily without roots in the communities.
• Its concept of stakeholders is boundless, potentially involving anyone who uses the Internet or gets information that has passed at some point over the Internet.
• Its reach is global, and its decisions are affected by issues of language and culture.

Those in charge of ICANN have compounded these intrinsic problems with poor decisions and bad leadership. But ICANN is currently undergoing one of its regular reorganizations.

AN UPDATE ON THE OPEN TLD
The new GTLD Program proposed by ICANN is growing momentum, with a new Draft of Expression of Interest / Pre-Registrations Model, which is a direct result of community recommendations for such an undertaking – with more information available on the iCANN site.

Highlights of the draft EOI / Pre-registration model includes:

• Participation in the Expression of Interest is mandatory for eligibility to submitting an application for a TLD in the first round
• A deposit of US$55,000 is required for participation in the Expression of Interest, which will be used as a credit against the final US$185,00 evaluation fee

One of the hottest issues arising from these preliminary plans is that they may be limiting the new TLDs to a minimum of 3 characters, where you can view the entire EOI Draft Model PDF online.

Connecting to the whole world on a daily basis is a tough job to maintain, and despite the recent attacks against Twitter, which have been documented in two articles by TechCrunch, they and the general public supporting them have done a good job moving forward and expressing a new side of their lives.

COMBINING MICROSOFT MAPS, SILVERLIGHT AND TWITTER
By using some of the technology acquired through Microsoft, written information on a map can now be written live. And Earthware featured an article that described some of the benefits and uses for such applications on the net.

We (Earthware) have been working on a demo which uses Microsoft’s latest mapping technology to integrate mapping with twitter to allow people to tweet their message and location and plot these on a map to show thoughts and details on a specific topic/event, for an international company, or for global issues. Here is a demo app we created that was used by Microsoft in the launch event for their new mapping product. It shows you the kind of things you can do with animation and mapping.

INTEGRATING TWITTER WITH HOME APPLIANCES
Jennifer Van Grove highlighted in her Mashable article about some cool uses from Tweet Street.

Sockington is one of the most popular cats on Twitter, and currently weighs in at over 480,000 followers. That’s an astounding number given the fact that there’s no science or magic behind Sockington’s online persona — it’s just Jason Scott doing the tweeting on behalf of his cat.

The Washing Machine Hack, created by Ryan Rose (you can follow his laundry @PiMPY3WASH ), adds a network port, BS2 Stamp, 9volt power inverter, and limit switch (detects wash mode) to a Maytag washer to create an automatic way of getting notified that your laundry is done. Now this is useful.

From the inexplicably popular Sockington the cat to the technologically impressive baby kick sensor, plant water level detector, and power monitor, we’ve found a few terrific examples of Twitter with a twist.

• Pets all-a-Twitter: Pets and social media go hand in hand. Cute as Hell is viral, iPhone apps for pet lovers abound, and there’s a smattering of pet related sites all barking for your attention.
• Wish Washers: The Washing Machine Hack @PiMPY3WASH navigates the washing machine activity and lets you know when the clothes are done.
• Communicating with Plants: The Botanicalls kit uses your Ethernet connection to tap into the health of your plant.
• Monitoring Power Usage: Tweet-a-Watt tracks the power usage in every room of the home via Twitter.
• Fresh From Oven Twittering: BakerTweet can tell the world that something "hot and fresh" has just come out of the oven, literally.
• Tooting & Tweeting: The Twittering Office Chair detects the natural gas of human flatulence, yes – farts and posts an update about it.
• Baby Movements: Kickbee is a device created with vibration sensors and strapped to a pregnant woman’s belly to monitor and post each movement or kick in the form of instant Tweets.

TWODDLER: THE BABY TOY THAT TWITTERS
Seems like almost everything needs to be tweeted about, in a way the world has become more "nosey" with the invention of Twitter…but there are some good uses, including devices integrated through Twitter, and Twoddler is one feature that monitors the activity of the baby within the crib and tweets about it, as discussed in Adam Ostrow’s Mashable article.

“The software captures sensor data from the activity center and tries to select a predefined text that is related to that sensor data. We are extending the system so it becomes easier to relate certain patterns of sensor readings with a set of strings. At this point, it’s unclear whether or not the device will make it to market, but the team did win 5000 euros for their prototype at a developer competition earlier this year. While it’s unlikely to ever replace the baby monitoring tools that parents depend on, we certainly could see some use for it when your baby is with the sitter and you want to keep in touch, so to speak.

TWEETING IN KLINGON LANGUAGE
Seems like Twitter has influenced even the fictional universe. In this case, Star Trek fans have the opportunity to tweet in the Klingon language using various Klingon phrases online.

Game publisher Cryptic has created a way to allow you to express your innermost thoughts and feelings in Klingon. Head over  to TweetKlingon.com.  There you can  install an app that allows you to post items to your Twitter account in the language of Kahless. You can translate from English or choose from a variety of useful phrases. The app is part of Cryptic’s promotion of its upcoming Star Trek Online MMORPG, which launches on Feb. 2, 2010.

Being an online global leader of information on the web demands constant change and adaptation to the ever evolving world of information technology. Google is pretty consistent in this matter, as they continue to reach new heights. We will now highlight some of the latest Google headlines of late.

GOOGLE VENTURES INTO DNS BUSINESS & THE INFLUENCE OF OPEN DNS ON THE WORLD
Tech Crunch featured an article by Michael Arrington, concerning one of the latest business ventures of Google in a bid to enhance its revenue potential ratings and increase in data information. A complete response to this new approach by OpenDNS was featured here.

The benefits to users are a theoretically faster and more stable browsing experience, and some additional security against malware type sites. The benefit to Google – tons more data, and some potential revenue. The service competes directly with Sequoia and Greylock backed OpenDNS, a four year old service that has had tremendous usage and revenue growth.

Speaking of which, Open DNS is a global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider. Instructions for its use is found here. Features of this remarkable resolution service includes:

• Ultra-reliable, globally-distributed network .
• Industry-leading Web content filtering .
• Easy to use for families, schools, and businesses of all sizes.

GOOGLE LAUNCHES ITS OWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
Efficiency is the name of the game for Google, and what better way to serve the online community better than to introduce a simple programming language that caters to all the necessities for online information services, as described in a Mashable article by Ben Parr.

One of the core philosophies of Google, and one of the reasons it has been so successful, is efficiency. It’s about both being as efficient as possible when serving search results and processing data and creating product that push the limits of efficiency for the user (as an example, Google’s trying to make communication more efficient with Google Wave).

CONNECTING CITIZENS AND JOURNALISTS THROUGH YOUTUBE DIRECT
Google have made customizing web-applications based upon the Youtube platform even easier.

Every day, people with video cameras are changing the ways we get our news. We see it during elections. We see it during earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters. We see it on our freeways, in our schools and in our public spaces. Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience .

Though we built YouTube Direct to help news organizations expand their coverage and connect directly with their audiences, the application is designed to meet any organization’s goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community. Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call-out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.

Already, we’ve seen ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston using YouTube Direct. We look forward to seeing many more organizations to do the same.

GOOGLE REDEFINES GPS NAVIGATION THROUGH NEW MAPS FOR ANDROID 2.0
Michael Arrington highlighted in his TechCrunch article the wonderful features of a new GPS navigation application from Google specially programmed for the new Android 2.0 GPS system.

For the most part Google is taking a backseat and letting their partners get most of the attention . But Droid is the first Android phone to run Android 2.0, and Google Maps Navigation is clearly the early trophy app for those devices. Google Maps already has 50 million active users across various mobile phones, says Google. But what users have today isn’t even close to the new Navigation product. First off, it’s connected, which puts it ahead of all but a tiny percentage of in-car navigation systems which have no Internet connectivity ( Dash is a notable exception).

SAMUEL L. JACKSON RIDES THE GOOGLE WAVE
To understand new technologies, it always helps to see it in action, and as Adam Ostrow described in his Mashable article, seeing Google Wave in action through the use of Samuel L. Jackson quotes can have hilarious results, Pulp Fiction style! Enjoy!

Still looking for a use case for Google Wave (or an invite for that matter?). Look no further than this brilliant mashup combining Samuel L. Jackson quotes with a demonstration of Google Wave functionality, including chat, wikis, and embedded videos, games, and maps. The video appears to have been created by Joe Sabia of Whirled Interactive . Be forewarned, it uses lots of adult language, so should be viewed with headphones on if you’re at the office. But, you probably could have already guessed that.

GOOGLE WAVE SANDBOX NOW OPEN FOR FEDERATION
In an article featured in Read Write Web, Google tested earlier versions of Wave with a small number of developers on the Wave sandbox and this server will now become the platform for testing interoperability between different Wave servers.

Developers who want to run their own Wave server can find all the necessary information for setting up a Wave Federation Prototype Server in these documents. The server is written in Java and should run on Windows, OSX and Linux-based machines. In the documentation, the Wave team explains how to run the server as an extension to the open source OpenFire XMPP server, though any XEP-00114 compatible XMPP server should be able to talk to the Wave server.

Patience is a virtue, it’s one of the most famous quotes of all time. And by taking this powerful philosophical quote and putting it into good use, great things can be achieved. Such is the case with the technological aspect of Malaysia. From purchasing one of the world’s most famous social network service, to plans of new cyber technology buildings, Malaysia is looking forward to a steady future by fully utilizing the technologies made available to us.

MALAYSIAN LOCAL COMPANY MOL BUYS OVER FRIENDSTER
In a recent article featured in KLews, one local company has bought over the social network giant “Friendster”. According to the article, MOL Global Pte Ltd, is a newly-formed entity spawned from the recent MOL AccessPortal Bhd acquisition of California-based Friendster Inc. The merger of the two companies is aimed at creating Asia’s largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network.

The offices of both MOL and Friendster around the world, including the Friendster headquarters in Mountain View, California, will be retained, said Bangah. “In countries where both companies operate, such as Singapore and the Philippines, we will combine the staff and resources,” he added. Friendster’s rivals include the popular Facebook and MySpace social networking sites, as well as local sites JomSocial and Ruumz.

NEW FUND "CRADLED" TO HELP TECHNOPRENEURS TO MARKET
In an article featured in The Star Online, pre-seed funding organization Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd is now offering to finance technopreneurs who are prepared to commercialize their products.

“There is a gap now between the pre-seed and commercialisation stages, so this latest fund is a bridge to that divide,” Cradle chief executive officer Nazrin Hassan told In.Tech. With it, he said, technopreneurs will have access to funding all the way from conception to commercialisation

Cradle said the commecialisation funding would also help technopreneurs survive in the marketplace during the critical one- to three-year period that they are vulnerable as a new business venture. It prides itself on having the highest commercialisation rate (48%) among grants in the country. It hopes the new fund will lead to even bigger success stories among local technopreneurs.

THREE NEW MSC MALAYSIA CYBERCENTRES TO BE DEVELOPED AROUND KLANG VALLEY AND KL
According to The Star Online, three new locations in the Klang Valley will be developed into MSC Malaysia cybercentres: the Persoft Tower in Petaling Jaya, as well as GTower and Bangsar South City in Kuala Lumpur, to coincide with this year’s ICM, which is MSC Malaysia 2.0: Contributing to Malaysia’s New Economical Model.

Datuk Badlisham Ghazali, chief executive officer of the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), said the new locations are to provide more variety and choice to companies and organisations looking to be part of the MSC Malaysia initiative. There are 10 cybercentres in the Klang Valley now — among them are the Kuala Lumpur City Centre, Cyberjaya, KL Sentral and Mid Valley City. There are six cybercities in the states of Kedah, Penang, Malacca, Perak, Johor and Pahang.

With one of Twitter’s co-founders (Biz Stone) coming to Malaysia tomorrow (16th of November), we felt it an appropriate time to publish some updates on the platform:

THE API NAME SQUATTING ENIGMA FACED BY TWITTER
Getting the negative press out of the way first, Nic Cubrilovic wrote an article in Tech Crunch, concerning one of the latest headaches faced by the Twitter department – poor organization and planning around its third party developer platform regarding the API name squatting organization of trademarked and non-trademarked users.

When Tweets are published there is an additional layer of information below the main message that says when the message was posted, and how it was posted. Here’s an example message: Michael Arrington just posted from the Seesmic Twitter web app. If you click on “Seesmic” in that Tweet it takes you to Seesmic.com.

But there’s a problem. Twitter’s API allows developers to register any application name, and Twitter messages posted from that third party application will show that name and will link to anything the developer wants. Only names that contain “twitter” or “tweet” are filtered out. Everything else is fair game.

Robert Robb from TweetBorder emailed us about this, and show this test Twitter message that was posted from “Windows.” He also registered the Microsoft name but deleted it to avoid any legal trouble.

MICROSOFT CONTRIBUTES TO TWITTER
In an independent Flotzam post, a new Windows application called The Archvisist was introduced and described in detail.

The Archivist allows you to start a search and will get as many results as it can on the initial search.  If you leave The Archivist open, it will update with the latest results every 10 minutes.  You can also close The Archivist and open it later. The Archivist will save the tweets and get all the tweets it can since that search.

The Archivist will display a chart that shows the number of tweets per day for a given search, so that you can quickly assess traffic for a given search. For more comprehensive data analysis, The Archivist lets you export Tweets to Excel. It also natively saves tweets in an XML format, which could also be parsed  for deeper data analysis and research.

CAN FRESH FUNDING FROM HOLLYWOOD RE-DEFINE TWITTER ADVERTISING…?

Has Ad.ly, with its focus on high-profile advertising partners and celeb Twitter users with a large number of followers, cracked the nut of Twitter advertising? Impossible to say without seeing some numbers, but it appears to be striking a chord or two.

Not that Ad.ly is the only one trying to capitalize on Twitter’s growth and celebrities’ massive audience. SponsoredTweets (from IZEA) does much of the same, and then there’s ExecTweets , a cooperation between Microsoft and Federated Media. Others, like Be-A-Magpie and Twittad , have their sights set on the long tail of Twitter.

Whilst on the topic of Twitter advertising, the Telegraph UK ran an almost mind-boggling article recently that claimed uSocial offered Twitter US$ 500,000 to place a banner ad at the top of their homepage for 24 hours:

“While $500,000 may seem like a large amount to invest in one banner for one day, we believe that the investment will be more than worth it,” said Leon Hill, chief executive of uSocial. Despite uSocial’s extravagant offer, technology watchers are sceptical that Twitter would choose that company as its debut online advertiser. The marketing company works on behalf of clients to target Twitter users who have posted messages on a topic that relates to the client’s business. It then sends a message to those Twitter users suggesting they follow their client’s account, a practice that some Twitter users view as spam.

And let’s not forget all the hype about Twitter Lists, for which Mashable published an extremely in-depth FAQ.

EFFECTIVE TWITTER BACKGROUNDS: EXAMPLES AND CURRENT PRACTICES
Saud Khan featured in his article in Smashing Magazine; a huge collection of examples and practices for Twitter backgrounds, as well as detailed explainations how they can be effectively applied.

Merge Background With Timeline / Sidebar: This is probably the least used technique among all tips and techniques discussed here. By merging your background graphics with timeline and/or sidebar, you can create a unique layout with a very distinctive look and form.

Reveal More With The Page Peel Effect: Your profile picture (it can be an avatar, logo or photo) is your main identity on Twitter; it will be displayed next to every tweet that you send out to your followers. For instance, you can use a background image that is somehow related to your profile picture and thus convey more information about yourself or your brand. In other words, you can use this classic approach of creating design around your logo or brand identity to communicate information in a more effective way.

Add A Header Bar : Adding a header bar could be used for creating unique look for your profile page, but it can also be used to separate Twitter logo and top menu (which contain links to user’s profile) from the rest of your page.

Less Is More: Andre Gide once said that “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better”. Here are few illustrations of how minimalism can be used to its full effect:

Put Information In A Memorable Way Composition is the plan, placement or arrangement of the elements. You can arrange elements on your background in a unique and memorable, showcasing information that is important to you and your readers. This techniques allows you to create an environment, show your personality and provide additional information.

Here is the complete list of Effective Twitter Backgrounds & Practices.

When technology is mentioned, especially when we mention it – social-media is usually the thing that comes to mind, but the virtual world is steadily advancing itself in various ways, ways that we cannot afford to let go unnoticed, and so we have decided to feature some of the most important headlines from the virtual-scene:

SECOND LIFE AND ITS POTENTIAL IN SCHOOLS AND ENTERPRISES
Dana Oshiro wrote in a Read Write Web article concerning the influence and potential that the virtual giant Second Life has in the education system of schools; something especially important as children grow more reliant on technology.

ReadWriteWeb has already written about data visualization capabilities in sites like Second Life. Due to a fledgling economy, many suggested that these institutionally-branded education initiatives may also become popular. Nevertheless, apart from this recent endorsement by the University of Texas, mainstream educators still don’t have the green light to teach in virtual worlds. Many argue that video teleconferencing and instant messaging have replaced the need for virtual world interaction. However, neither of these offer the same immersive experience.

Read Write Web also wrote an interesting article regarding the introduction of private Second Life worlds being sold to enterprises that they can host behind their own firewalls for conducting virtual meetings and other collaborative events.

Second Life is introducing a behind the firewall service for enterprise customers, another sign that the very definition of collaboration is changing as more companies seek ways to do their work in virtual environments. The Second Life Enterprise environment provides users an added layer of security and the ability to scale an avatar community. Servers are installed in a company’s data center, providing the 3D experience. The service can support up to 800 concurrent avatars. Second Life is made up of regions. Second Life Enterprise has the capacity for eight regions that also run concurrently.

VIRTUAL PROTESTS ERUPT IN YOVILLE
Rick O’neill wrote in All Facebook concerning the use of virtual society power, when a protest was staged in one of Facebook’s largest virtual worlds; YoVille – against a major change which modifies the way users earn virtual currency.

The position of the users was that less money was being generated per user per hour. Most likely Zynga implemented this new place as a way to stave off inflation but sudden changes that are intended to impact the money supply can result in user backlash. Whatever the rationale behind the protests is, it appears that they are most likely much ado about nothing. So far one site which is collecting signatures for a protest has only 67 signatures.

However, perhaps one of the hottest topics in the virtual-worlds as of late has been Augmented Reality – finally stripping Second Life from it’s dominating position as the hottest virtual topic, so we wanted to highlight the following headlines:

NEW YORK WORLD TRADE CENTRE TOWERS IN AUGMENTED REALITY
Tech Crunch featured an article by Lukas Zinnagl concerning the latest augmented virtual reality feature on the iPhone that enabled the World Trade Centre in New York to be "virtually rebuilt".

The effect was made possible by upgrading Wikitude’s Android App to 3D and it’s newly released iPhone app, out today ( here from iTunes in the US only ). From now on anyone in New York, using an AR enabled mobile phone, has the ability to see a virtual World Trade Center through the phone’s display. Wikitude demo shows how a “Memorial of light” at Ground Zero could be the next-generation of ‘virtual’ memorials. View a full video demonstration of this after the jump .

JOHN MAYER RELEASES AUGMENTED REALITY MUSIC VIDEO
Not every musical artist knows how to fully utilize the technology of today for their benefit. However, John Mayer did just that when he introduced a new chapter in musical and technological history, by becoming the first artist to release an augmented reality music video, as featured in a Jennifer Van Grove article in Mashable.

The music video for “Heartbreak Warfare,” from the upcoming Battle Studies album, is now featured on John Mayer’s website. After the Flash player loads, viewers can activate their webcam and hold up a printed or mobile version of the Battle Studies icon to their webcam, which, if aligned correctly, will prompt the video to begin playing with you as an extra in the background.

It’s clear that social-media has reached a saturation point in our popular culture, but it’s surprising that so many businesses, especially SMEs still find it hard to commit to full-time social-media marketing strategies. The good news is that with each week, more big brands continues adopt new and exciting social-media marketing strategies, which allows us to provide more examples and case studies for those that are still on the fence.

FORD SPENDING 25% OF MARKETING AVENUE ON DIGITAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA
David Kiley wrote a Business Week article describing an effort by world renowned car brand Ford, investing 25% of its marketing avenue on digital and social media, to reach out to potential customers around the world.

Perhaps Ford’s biggest single bet on digital and social media has been the Fiesta Movement, a program that began in 2008, 18 months before the cars will actually arrive in dealerships. Ford gave 100 European Fiestas to people to drive and live with. The results of the blogging, Facebook-ing, YouTub-ing and Tweeting by those people, plus the echoing of those messages by the blogosphere, followers, etc. has been an eye opener. Consider this: The awareness level of Fiesta, a car that is not even in the U.S. yet (though it has been a fixture in Europe for years), is 37% among Generation Y, according to Ford-commissioned surveys. That is about equal to the awareness level of Fusion and Flex, models that have received, especially in the case of Fusion, hundreds of millions of dollars in traditional media spend. “The Fiesta movement has changed the way the whole company views media planning and buying,” Farley said at the conference.

Here we have one of Ford’s online video storytelling, featuring the Ford Mustang muscle car.

Gary Dilts, senior vice president of J.D. Power’s global automotive practice, who is former sales chief at Chrysler, says he would have thought any company “crazy for starting such a marketing program 18 months ahead of showroom launch.” But, Dilts added, “I think the Fiesta campaign, and the other digital video Ford is running is already a case study for any marketer in or out of the auto industry.” Up to now, Monty’s responsibility as Ford’s social media chief has been concentrated on North America. But he is gearing up to take his job globally, coordinating social media practices among Ford’s global operating units, all of which, under CEO Alan Mulally and Farley, are much more answerable to Michigan headquarters than in the past.

COCA-COLA CAMPAIGN SENDS 3 BLOGGERS AROUND WORLD
Forbes featured an article by Emily Fredrix, soft drink giant Coca-Cola is launching a new social media push that will send three bloggers to over 200 countries to uncover what makes people happy in as part of its "Open Happiness" campaign.

The effort, dubbed “Expedition 206,” marks another venture by a big-name brand to delve deep into social media. Such efforts, which include blogging, posting updates on Twitter and adding videos to YouTube, can generate talk by consumers and sales, companies hope.

The around-the-world journey is ambitious, involving stays of just a day or two in each of 206 countries, all where Coca-Cola ( KO – news – people ) is sold. The three people – who will be chosen in an online vote starting Wednesday – will spend the entire year traveling. Coke will pay their travel expenses and pay them a salary. It wouldn’t disclose the cost of the venture.

COCA COLA’S URL SHORTENER
And coke’s efforts do not stop there. Mashable featured an article by Adam Ostrow, describing the new steps taken by soft drink giant Coca-Cola, in creating a URL shortener of their own for the convenience of twittering and flexibility – as this allows them to maintain their own branding, something that we envision more companies will likely do in 2010. Speaking of which, we have our own URL Shortening Service that allows us to brand the framed links – UR1 – where we have some very interesting plans laid out for its future…

URL shorteners are a dime a dozen, and some industry onlookers actually believe they are bad for the Web. But in reality, if you’re sharing links on a service like Twitter, you need one, at least for the moment. So how do you choose? Some services offer detailed analytics (like bit.ly), while others offer schemes that can get you more traffic ( DiggBar and StumbleUpon’s Su.pr for example). Coke moving to its own shortener is a big deal in this little corner of the Internet. While for most people, tinyurl, bit.ly, or any other third-party service will continue to be more than sufficient, big brands and celebs certainly have an opportunity to benefit by launching their own shortener. With the relative ease with which it can be done, expect Coke to be far from the last major name to go this route.

BIG BUSINESSES HIRE TWEETERS
The Times and Democrat highlighted a Heather Lalley, describing a new marketing strategy by big businesses – hiring Tweeters that enable them to expand the business to greater horizons around the world, using various social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Multinational corporations, such as Ford Motor Co. and Coca-Cola Co., are beginning to use social media to increase positive sentiment, build customer rapport and correct misinformation, says Adam Brown, Coca-Cola’s Atlanta-based director of social media.

“Having the world’s most-recognized brand, we feel like there’s an obligation or a responsibility when people are talking about us, we have a duty to respond,” Brown says.

STARWOOD LAUNCHES TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND IPHONE APPS FOR LOYALTY PROGRAM
Starwood have launched applications for many of the major social media platforms; such as Twitter, Facebook and iPhone, to enhance its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) loyalty program, as featured in an article by Mary Elizabeth Hurn in DM News.

The social media tools, which can also be downloaded by non-members, include SPG TripShare, a Facebook photo application developed with Buddy Media . Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, explained that Starwood’s goal is to create loyalty among and retention of current customers, “but getting new members is always great.” The apps can be accessed at www.spg.com/stayconnected. SPG also launched a travel tips “mash-up” using Twitter and Google Maps. SPG Insider enables travelers to Tweet about restaurants, bars and entertainment destinations around the world from their Twitter application of choice. The app then uploads the tip and places it on the map using longitude and latitude coordinates.

TWEETING PLANES
In an extremely interesting article from Mashable by Pete Cashmore, we find that now, even commercial jets are making waves by applying the benefit of Twitter for its passengers.

Admittedly, it’s not the plane itself doing the Tweeting: it’s the airline. Lufthansa has set up a new service named MySkyStatus that automatically posts the current position of your flight to Twitter or Facebook so your friends can follow your travels (and your friends living in those cities can look up! ). .

Typical status updates read “flying over San Francisco Intl, California 94030, USA on United Airlines” or “flying over Grantsville, UT 84029, USA on United Airlines”. It seems the system posts the flight’s position around once per hour, pulling info from a database of flight information.

EARNING FANS VERSUS BUYING EYEBALLS
An interesting discussion about the use of social media and its potential ROI in comparison to the old days and what we can expect from new engaged audiences took place in Marta’s article featured on the Espresso blog:

Instead of relying on traditional advertising to introduce their feminine hygiene products to teenage girls (who represent a massive pool of prospective life-long customers) or wasting money “selling” to them, P&G created BeingGirl.com , an online community where teenage girls can “Learn and share about growing up and puberty while having fun playing girl games and listening to the latest teen music”. Instead of bombarding their target audience with ads or pouring dollars and resources into “campaigns,” P&G is investing in conversations; in context that supports the growing library of content (both user- and professionally-generated) around the issues that their target audience cares about. The challenge in moving from traditional to new marketing is in weaning oneself off of the addiction to “buying eyeballs” instead of “earning fans.

RAKING IN THE MILLIONS USING SOCIAL MARKETING
The Bonafide Marketing Genius Strikes Again; explaining that tweeting to promote a low graded movie was all it took to rake in millions at the movie box office. If this does not prove the value of social-media, is there really anything left to say…?

Remember the Blair Witch Project? Rumored to be “the most profitable movie in US history”, Blair Witch cost $38,000 to make and raked in $48 Million in its first weekend thanks to an expertly orchestrated buzz campaign in the pre-Facebook era (or was it just plain dumb luck? Thoughts?) And so the clever folks at Dreamworks (or whomever they hired to promote the film? Anyone know?) have done turned their artillery on hungry-for-good-horror fans across the social web to promote Paranormal Activity, another low-budget film ($11,000) that screened in just 160 theaters last weekend… and grossed $7 million.

As Facebook continues to grow (with over 300 million users; 50% of which log-in on a daily basis), we’re dedicated to keeping you up-to-date with some of the feature and activities that continue to allow it to grow:

TAG FRIENDS IN STATUS AND POSTS
Tom Occhino featured an article regarding new features allowing you to tag users.

People often update their status to reflect their thoughts and feelings, or to mention things they feel like sharing. Sometimes that includes referencing friends, groups or even events they are attending — for instance, posting “Grabbing lunch with Meredith Chin” or “I’m heading to Starbucks Coffee Company — anyone want some coffee by any chance?”.

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

LAUNCHING OF NEW GROUPS LAYOUT
In an article from All Facebook, we hear about layouts for groups now being identical to Facebook Pages.

For the longest time there has been a discussion as to which product was better to use for organizing groups of users. There have been pros and cons of both and at this point there is very little remaining to differentiate one from the other. While Facebook has suggested that Pages are for people to organize around companies and individuals, the two products have been meshing together overtime.

FACEBOOK NOW RUNNING OVER 30,000 SERVERS
Having a lot of users would need a lot of servers. As reported by All Facebook FB is now running over 30 thousand servers to power their network.

This information came from a presentation delivered by Jeff Rothschild, Facebook’s VP of Technology, at the Center for Networked Systems . With so much growth over the past two years, the company has been forced to invest heavily in infrastructure. There have been large capital investments in infrastructure at Faceboook over the past couple years. The company previously borrowed $100 million to fund server expansion, and with around 20,000 new servers, it’s clear that a decent portion (if not all) of that loan has now been allocated.

FARMVILLE SURGES PAST 60 MILLION MONTHLY USERS
All Facebook highlighted in an article that Facebook’s largest application Farmville is thriving continuously.

FarmVille has become an icon on the platform as no other application has come close to matching its massive user base. It has almost doubled the second largest application, Causes, in terms of monthly active users and has tripled the Facebook iPhone application in terms of daily active users. The second most popular, non-Facebook developed, application based on daily active users happens to be Café World which has just under 7 million daily active users.

The results have been nothing short of astonishing. If Zynga keeps at this pace, the company could soon come close to matching Facebook’s own revenue, at least until Facebook releases their payment platform and opens the gift shop to developers. Playfish has also proven to be a stellar company which not only creates top tier games but also has a great revenue model.

ONLINE GAME LEGENDARY CIVILIZATION IS COMING TO FACEBOOK
Mashable featured a Stan Schroeder article, showing yet another breakthrough about to take place on Facebook, stating that the online game Civilization will be coming to Facebook soon in the form of Civilization Network.

Originally released back in 1991, Civilization is a turn based strategy game so fun and addictive that players kept playing its various iterations for decades. Sometime in 2010, we’ll also be able to play it on Facebook

Whilst on the subject of Facebook, we also threw together our own application this week, a simple tool that mimics TweetDeck by allowing people to manage their Twitter accounts and search trends all from within Facebook – we’ve called it No Twitter Limits – let us know what you think…

With The Nielsen Company reporting that internet users have increased the time they spent on social networks by a substantial margin in August 2009 from just 6% to 17% and advertising spending on the top social networking and blogging sites more than doubling from $49 million in August 2008 to about $108 million in August 2009; everyone is looking for that miracle formula that will clearly define a Return on Investment that can be expected by adopting social-media, but unfortunately, it is just not that simple. If it were, ad-agencies and PR firms would have figured it out long ago.

While it is tempting to believe that there is a single, simple equation or calculator that can clearly define the Return on Investment that can be offered by social-media, it does not exist, especially when the goals and objectives of adopting social-media can differ for each company and brand – where one looks at lowering turn-over by having more engaged employees and another wants to influence the market that they occupy. Quantifying the Return on Investment by visitors and traffic severely limits the potential of social-media and how it can affect one’s bottom-line.

In order to ascertain any returns on investment, you have to take timelines into consideration – measuring the start and end of a specific campaign in relation to changes in sales and other metrics, and it’s the other metrics that really stand-out with social-media. The ability to engage an audience and targeted demographics in conversation, to measure the results of those conversations and refine products, ideas and other marketing messages. Listening to staff, developing capabilities and encouraging personal growth in those that work with you – this is new territory, and it’s governed by social-media…

LAUNCHING SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES
We begin with a special article featured in Ross Dawson’s blog, showcasing the launch of the Social Media Strategy Framework that should provide vital basic understanding as to how social media functions in the world we know.

The Framework begins by LEARNING (Use social media yourself, Study relevant case studies, Educate senior executives, Hear from practitioners and Explore the latest trends), from where it then follows two streams of ENGAGEMENT (where we can listen, converse, measure and refine) and STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT (where we can prioritize, establish governance and define), all ultimately leading to the imperative to DEVELOP CAPABILITIES, which will in-turn allow us to return to LEARNING, where we can start the cycle again.

It’s no wonder people are asking for an ROI with facts and figures such as these:

300 MILLION AND ON
In a recent Facebook article by Mark Zuckerberg, social network giant Facebook are registered with 300 million people on a global scale. And it doesn’t stop there, it has been revealed that Facebook is aiming to reach out to EVERYONE! That’s right…every living person on the planet. On how that can be achieved, only time and strategy will tell.

PLANNED 2010 INCREASE IN SOCIAL MEDIA, SEO AND VIRTUAL EVENTS BY MARKETERS
Marketing Charts featured an article about a research by Unisfair, that explains the numerous strategies marketers are prepared to use in order to increase their outreach to social media in 2010.

MACY NOW DIRECT THEIR ADVERTISEMENTS TO SOCIAL-MEDIA PROFILES
As explained in an article by Nick O’Neil in All Facebook, Macy’s is the latest brand to promote their Facebook Page through display advertising campaigns around the web. The strategy appears to be working. Over the past month, the Macy’s Facebook page has grown from 28,000 to 67,000 fans.

Another interesting aspect of the company’s new promotion is that they are giving one meal to Feeding America for every Twitter follower that they obtain. By promoting this campaign through Facebook it seems weird that the company would direct people to become a fan on Facebook before following them on Twitter. Despite the confusing strategy by the company, what’s more important is the apparent shift from promoting the company’s own website to sites that they can directly engage users on.

AMERICAN FOOTBALL TEAM NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS USES FACEBOOK AS PRIMARY ONLINE PRESENCE
When it comes to fan power, sports can make a sure bet of being the first to be given great attention into promoting that influence. And as described in an article in Inside Facebook, New England Patriots teamed up with Buddy Media to give primary source of online content for their fans.

Several of the features in the Fan Zone still link back to the Patriots’ official Web site , but the new Facebook page is intended to be their primary online portal for fans. Both the team and Buddy Media acknowledge that it’s much easier to bring together fans through Facebook, where followers of the team are already congregating. “It’s still very difficult to pull people into other gated communities. We think leveraging against Facebook is a no-brainer. The audience they have and their data speaks for itself,” said Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow, whose company also handles social media for sports-related clients like Reebok and Sports Illustrated.

Which brings us back to the ROI and Bogus Social-Media Experts:

Olivier Blanchard created an interesting article in The Brand Builder concerning the misuse of social media and the many frauds who use it without fully understanding its benefits and consequences.

Here’s a flash of obvious: When most of us don’t know how to do something, we typically know that we don’t know how to do it. Yet this line of logic (and basic sense of professional ethics) seems to escape a disturbingly large group of people who evidently have latched-on to Social Media as an easy meal ticket  – one to be earned, in many cases, on the backs of people and companies who don’t know any better.

This stuff isn’t just going to go away on its own. It’s great to see some folks in the Social Media management community speak out against this kind of BS, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Below is another example of social media nonsense passing for expertise. I don’t want to make any assumptions about anyone’s motives in this specific case, so to be fair, it’s probable that whomever put this together genuinely thought that the thinking behind the equation and methodology was sound. There is no reason to think that anyone at Digital Royalty was trying to make a quick buck off unsuspecting clients when they developed this. (My guess is that they mean well.) But the fact remains that the people behind this thing don’t understand either Social Media or program measurement well enough to teach either, which is downright mind boggling.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF ROI (RETURN ON INVESTMENT) FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
Jason Falls wrote an article in Social Media Explorer, regarding the discussion on how ROI for social media.

What Katie evangelized a bit in her session was that the conversation (comments on your content) was the best measure of a level of engagement. Avinash Kaushik says much of the same in his discussions on web analytics. This isn’t an end-around the need for ROI, it’s the answer. Or at least a big part of the answer.

When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? If they say, “to make money,” then they will fail because currency in the social web is found in both relationships and content. If they say, “to grow our business,” they’re just saying, “to make money,” in a nicer way. If they say, “to participate in the conversation,” which is the more appropriate reason to be involved in the social web, then why on earth would they not measure success by the value of the conversations they have? This is why every session on measuring ROI in social media is a waste of time. None of the measurement experts are going to make that point and that point alone because without throwing page views and unique visitors and number of subscribers and sentiment and tone, they have nothing to offer.

THE BONAFIDE MARKETING GENIUS VIEWS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
In these two videos posted on Posterous by the Marketing Genius, we can witness the impact social media has had on humanity and the many sectors of marketing frontiers.

However way we see it, social media has changed the face of communication and information as we know it. We may or may not know what comes next to take its place, but like all things, it evolves…