Archive for April, 2011

March Migration Madness. Zuck gave away half of Facebook? And It was a Twitter heavy news week, though not all good news for the micro-blogging company.

Tomorrow is Foursquare Day, because 4 squared is 16 and that means 4/16, or something like that.

Beer vendor in Seattle uses Twitter to deliver brews to thirsty Mariners fans. Fenway next please?

Did Zuck really give away half of Facebook?

While you were following basketball, birders off the world were following a different bracket, our partner’s at The Cornel Lab of Ornithology March Migration Madness got 31,876 likes on Facebook. Just wow.

How to measure mutual Facebook fans.

BTW, Facebook is now being used by a majority of Americans.

Fortune Magazine says Twitter has problems.

New Virgin America terminal in San Francisco is check-in friendly. Thoughtful integration of the physical and digital.

If you know the Facebook page you want to measure your fans against, log into Facebook as an Admin of your page and click “Create an Ad”. Then simply select the targeting settings as seen below (only people who are fans of [your page]), and enter the page you’d like to measure against in the “Likes & Interests” field. As you can see in the example below, my client’s page has roughly 14,280 fans in common with Whole Foods Market. (Note that these results should be close but are not exact).

If you’d like to see some of the top Facebook pages that your fans like, log into Facebook as an Admin of your page, navigate to your page and click the “Use Facebook As [your page]” button. Next, just navigate to any other random Facebook page and in the top right corner you’ll see a “Recommended Pages” box with a list of some of the top pages that your fans ‘like’. (Note that Facebook only shows the top results here and that you can refresh the page to see different result).

Every week we aggregate some of the most interesting tech and marketing stories. This week, there’s a spy at Twitter, bad news for the Daily and how you can make your own Gifs.

Corporate espionage hits Twitter.  Is Google to blame?

London startup aims to make commuting fun with technology.

Nieman Lab paints grim picture of the Daily, also reveals difficulty of tracking data for apps.

Google’s new tools for nonprofits. Check it out.

Twitter considers Facebook-like brand pages.

No More Benchmarks in Google, Reid Benson vents.

Hedge fund to use Twitter sentiment to drive investment strategy. Seem dubious.

Giftastic. New iPhone app lets you make your own gifs with your pics.

Keep in mind that the Google for Nonprofits program provides tools, and resources (i.e. online tutorials and help guides) to help you take advantage of these tools, but these are not services that Google will implement for you. In order to take full advantage of these tools its extremely important to take the time to learn how to use them in order to properly build out and manage your digital campaigns.

Before it was removed the Benchmarking feature (see below) allowed users to compare the performance of their website to sites of similar size within a selected industry (e.g. Hotel Sites). As clients inevitably ask for context for their website metrics, including the perennial question “how are we doing against the competition”, I’ve found benchmarking to be one of the most important metrics my clients want to see.

It’s been over a month now and I’m still waiting to receive and review these “evolved” email reports. Many practical questions remain. In which industry will Google categorize my clients? Will I be able to compare to other industries as well?

Perhaps the biggest question really concerns Google itself. Since when did the foremost leader in web applications (reference: Google AdWords, Google Website Optimizer, Google Analytics, etc.) decide that it would be a good idea to “evolve” a product by sending periodic emails?

It’s the end of the week so it’s time to review the week’s tech/nonprofit stories. This week, Google tries to go social…again, the best use of Foursquare in advertising, and yes, Barack Obama does have his own computer.

CS NMS’s own Andrew Daley will be a panelist at the Radian 6 Social 2011 User Conference.

Google gets social with +1. Maybe this will work better than buzz.

Make your Facebook Profile a Fan Page. Perfect for small businesses that originally set up their Facebook presence as a “profile” but don’t want to get capped at 5,000 friends and also want the insights that come with a page. You can now switch.

Excellent use of Foursquare to advertise – and taste test – dog food.

YouTube and Google announce Good Work contest for filmmakers and nonprofits.

Five must-have skills for nonprofit social media managers.

Japanese Mobile Company provides phones and waives all fees for quake orphans.

The obligatory April Fools link: Gmail Motion. Heh.

And just in case you were wondering. Barack Obama does, in fact, have his own computer.