Here are all of the posts tagged ‘Microsoft’.

We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #15

by Jordan Stone in News on 22 February 2010 at 18:16

It’s time for We Are Social’s Monday Mashup, our pick of some of the web’s finest social media developments.

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PleaseRobMe.com reveals dangers of social networks
If you’re a heavy user of Foursquare and Twitter, you might want to take notice of PleaseRobMe.com. The website made the headlines by highlighting in real-time the whereabouts of people who checked in on Foursquare and shared their location on the web via Twitter. The goal of the three Dutch developers who set up the site was to highlight the dangers of publicly telling others your location on the Internet because it “ leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.”

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

Facebook become America’s second most popular website, beating Yahoo!
Compete.com revealed that Facebook had surpassed Yahoo as America’s second most popular website.  Facebook drew nearly 134 Million unique visitors in January 2010, compared to Yahoo’s 132 Million visitors.

While traffic figures are important, the blog notes that the real story is around user engagement and on this front Facebook wins hands down:

Check out how monthly Attention (time spent on Facebook.com as a percentage of all time spent online each month) ramps over the past year for Facebook, while both Yahoo and Google show a decrease. In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook (compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google).

The recent launch of Google Buzz is no doubt aimed at eating into the amount of time that users spend on Facebook, but time will tell if Google can be successful here.

MySpace real-time search goes live on Google
MySpace announced on their blog that Google search now picks up publicly available updates from MySpace users in real-time.

… when you search for anything on Google, as part of your search results you will see live updates from MySpace users, including news, photos, and blog posts that they have chosen to publically publish. Further, all of these updates will be ranked to reflect the freshest, most relevant results, making it easier to find the latest information on anything you’re searching for on Google, including the music and artists you enjoy most.

MySpace now joins Twitter as one of the services that are now live in Google’s real-time search, announced last year.

Outlook gets social with LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace
Microsoft announced a number of major developments for Outlook, including a public beta of LinkedIn for Outlook and partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace. The highlights of LinkedIn for Outlook include:

  • The ability to connect to your LinkedIn account directly from within your Inbox, and add connections
  • The ability to view status updates and photos from connections next to an e-mail message they have sent
  • The ability to receive automatic updates to Outlook contact information directly from LinkedIn
  • The ability to synchronise mobile contact information with information from LinkedIn

Meanwhile, the Facebook and MySpace partnerships for Outlook 2010 will enable users to more easily connect co-workers and colleagues, as well as friends and family within their Outlook Inbox.

The LinkedIn public beta is available now, and Facebook for Outlook and MySpace for Outlook will be available later this year as the official release of Office 2010 approaches.

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Social Media Does Increase Revenues

by Niki Gomez in News on 27 July 2009 at 17:58

So, here’s the big one, does spending on social media really pay back? A fresh MBA graduate from MIT, Niki Gomez, passing through London and We Are Social on her way to Mumbai, gives her views.

At last, a study quantifies what many of us felt must be true, that social media does translate into increased sales. As Violette mentioned last week, a study by Wetpaint and Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group shows an extremely strong correlation between engaging in different social media and earning higher revenues. The study looks at the engagement of top 100 brands from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands report and ranks them from 1 to 127, based on how they use social media channels. It finds that the top brands with their rankings in brackets are:

  1. Starbucks (127)
  2. Dell (123)
  3. eBay (115)
  4. Google (105)
  5. Microsoft (103)
  6. Thomson Reuters (101)
  7. Nike (100)
  8. Amazon (88)
  9. SAP (86)
  10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

The most engaged brands experienced revenue growth in 2008 of 18% whilst the least engaged brands experienced losses of negative 6% over the same period.

Also interesting is that only arguably half of these are internet companies. The study categorizes the brands, a la Malcolm Gladwell, into mavens, those heavily engaging in 7 or more channels, such as Starbucks and Dell; butterflies, such as American Express and Hyundai who engage with seven channels but with less engagement; selectives who engage in six or less but do some on a deep level such as H&M and Philips; wallflowers like BP and McDonalds who engage with six or less but with a light touch. My question was whether social media pays off because of lower marketing spend, as there is a shift from spending on more traditional channels. However it seems, revenues, actual sales are up on previous years, even boom times!

Their findings conclude that it is not how many social media channels you use, but how deep that engagement is: so being social pays, but it’s the quality rather than quantity of these conversations that seems to triumph yet again. So, please think before you tweet… a good piece of advice for brands and individuals alike.

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He teaches companies to talk to people

by Robin Grant in News on 4 February 2009 at 13:31

Peter Parkes in Internet World

You may remember that Peter spoke at Disruptive Media in Stockholm in early December. During the conference he was interviewed by the Editor of Sweden’s Internet World magazine, and the resulting article hit the presses a couple of weeks ago (original version in Swedish).

He talked about the need for organisations to be open and honest about the way they act and communicate with the people who care about them – whether they be customers, suppliers, shareholders or the general public. Talking to these people on their own turf, whether that be using blogs or other forms of social media, is a good way to start.

I’ve been bugging Peter to blog about this himself for a while, but he’s obviously too modest about his new found fame in Sweden.

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