A few days after the official launch of ‘Stribe’, a new web tool to give websites a five-minute social make-over, its creators talk about the importance of social traffic on the web.

Launched on Tuesday after 6 months of private beta testing, ‘Stribe’ opens its social network platform to everyone, making social sharing easier for websites and enabling them to generate more traffic.

The new tool allows any website or blog to create a branded and customised social network in 5 minutes – with only one line of code.

Kamel Zeroual, CEO and co-founder of Stribe, is extremely excited about the launch, and highlighted the importance of generating social traffic for websites.

“Traffic acquisition can be time consuming, manual and not easy to deal with, even for professionals and bloggers. Stribe now helps websites to connect with social media and with other websites sharing the same interests to get more traffic,” he said.

Bigger communities = more valuable websites

With Stribe’s five-minute registration and configuration process, any website can easily add a social element. The features allow visitors to ask questions, connect with each other, express their opinions and join a community of websites around shared interests.

This means more relevant content for visitors and new business opportunities for websites.

“We have designed viral mechanisms to let websites invite and connect with each other. The bigger the community, the more valuable each website becomes”, Gaël Delalleau, Stribe’s CTO and co-founder explained.

Kamel Zeroual and Gaël Delalleau at LeWeb 2009 conference.

“In addition, all generated content will be indexed to improve SEO and drive more traffic to ‘stribed’ websites”, he said.

More than 10,000 websites were involved in Stribe’s beta testing stage. The official launch introduces an additional feature to the product.

The new feature allows websites to better connect with each other. Sites with similar interests can look for communities, join them or create their own to link with others and boost their visibility.

Promising start

Stribe was founded two years ago by Kamel Zeroual and Gaël Delalleau. According to TechCrunch, the company is based both in Paris and San Francisco.

Stribe’s business model is based on selling premium modules with analytics such as the Stribe Back-Office, which provides all key metrics on the site’s community.

The company has made a promising start – it was listed as a finalist at TechCrunch50 2009, the annual conference featuring the most important start-ups of the year. It’s also won the start-up competition at last year’s LeWeb conference in Paris.

The expectations are set high, now it’s up to Stribe to show it can live up to them. The potential is certainly there – a tool allowing websites to connect with each other with minimum fuss represents an opportunity not to be missed for small sites looking to boost their visibility.

Case study

How to ‘Stribe’ your site and what’s in it for you

After installing, Stribe toolbar is completely customisable. You can change the logo, description, colours as well as the background to mach your site.

Stribe can be included as a widget in your sidebar, or as a standalone social bar on the top of the page.

Users can log in using their Facebook or Twitter login details and are keept up-to-date with message and chat notifications from all of the Stribe communities they’ve joined.

‘Stribing’ your website gets you:

* Customisable profiles including user-specific photos, status updates and community information

* User modules to show who is online, and let users chat and send messages

* A Newsfeed where users can create new topics and share with the community

* Facebook and Twitter Connect to let any visitor of a website sign in and join the community

* Badges to reward most active users and websites

* RSS sharing to distribute and provide more news for visitors

* Widget size to make integration easier

* Meta social network to look for communities, join them or create your own to link with others to boost your visibility.

* Stribe in White Label: webmasters can now customize their Stribe.

Most of these features are free. There are additional premium modules that require payment, such as the back office functionality that allows websites to track key metrics of social activity and manage an online community.

To read more and sign up visit Stribe website

Feature article

A few days after the official launch of ‘Stribe’, its creators talk about the importance of social traffic on the web. Read more…

Guest

The New York Times made a feature of Facebook’s privacy policy in an extensive review of how, when, and where you can make your private stuff private on the world’s largest social network. It turns out that Facebook’s privacy policy is now so complicated that it’s longer than the Constitution of the United States. Take a look at the infographic (which doesn’t quite explain how to hide those pictures of last weekend from your mum) here.

by Pete Hindle

Pete is a guest contributor of New Media Monthly. He’s a North East based researcher/artist/thinker/designer/programmer. Read more about Pete in his blog.

The announcement came at a management strategy meeting in Tokyo on 19th November and the new service, temporarily dubbed “Sony Online Service” is planning to take on Apple’s iTunes store (who presently dominates with over 70% of the global digital music market).

The manner in which, Sony plans on undertake this is that the service plans to bridge premium content with social networking, allowing user generated content onto personal online accounts.

Having “digital lockers” and space to share videos and photos would bring a unique edge, and adding in the possibility of third-party apps in the mix it certainly would boost the opportunity for new mobile and camera products.

One thing to consider however is this isn’t the first time Sony has taken on iTunes. Sony’s first foray into digital content was the Sony Connect store, which was launched in 2005. The problem with Sony Connect was its creators assumed everyone would jump onto the closed system bandwagon. The system had the ATRAC DRM codec for its music content and we all know how that worked out. The store closed down after three years.

After that, there was the UMG-Sony collaboration of Total Music in 2007. Total Music was a subscription between device manufacturers and service providers (like Comes With Music), which users didn’t buy into and it shut down in February.

The problem is, it doesn’t look like Sony is attempting this even on its third shot, as one of the major reasons for creating the service is to support the hardware. A BusinessWeek article reported, “Analysts say that creating software to sell an array of online services and content is Sony’s best hope of improving its fortunes.”Sony has been too focused on hardware,” says Tokai Tokyo Research Center analyst Osamu Hirose. “It has to focus on networked products [and] delivering digital entertainment to consumers”.

According to the same article, executive vice-president for networked products and services Kazuo Hirai says the service would be based on Sony’s PlayStation Network, and hinted at the possibility of it starting off as a part of it; “There’s some debate as to whether all PlayStation Network users would migrate to the new service,” Hirai said. “We would target quite a few of them.”

via Sony Online Service: The Next iTunes Killer? By Cassandra Callais

Advertising, marketing and promoting company uSocial (usocial.net) said it was targeting social networking sites because of their huge advertising potential.

“Facebook is an extremely effective marketing tool,” Leon Hill, uSocial CEO, said in a statement.

“The simple fact is that with a large following on Facebook, you have an instant and targeted group of people you can contact and promote whatever it is you want to promote,” he added.

“The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in.

The company offers packages for Facebook, the world’s No 1 social networking site, that start at 1,000 friends up to 10,000 friends at costs ranging from US$177 to US$1,167 (NZ$260 to NZ$1710).

“All we do is send them a welcome message or friend request from the client. If they decide to go ahead and add that person as a friend or a fan then they will; if not, then they won’t,” Hill told Australian media.

Facebook is now the world’s fourth-most visited website.

The company, which counts venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, Microsoft and Russian internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies among its investors, has more than 250 million registered users.

But uSocial’s packages are not without controversy.

According to some Australian websites, Twitter tried to shut uSocial down, accusing it of spamming members, while the Los Angeles Times reported that Digg.com, a website where people vote for their top news stories or websites, has also tried to shut down uSocial because it sells votes.

The issue of copyright has dogged YouTube since its launch

YouTube has lifted a block on users viewing official music videos after the website reached an agreement with songwriters’ group PRS for Music.

In March, the service blocked thousands of music videos to UK users after failing to reach agreement over fees.

YouTube, owned by Google, is paying an undisclosed lump sum to PRS, backdated until January and lasting until 2012.

Adam Shaw from PRS for Music told the BBC that he was pleased that an agreement had finally been reached.

“We have 60,000 song-writer and composer members and many of them don’t earn very much money at all – 90% of them earn less than £5,000 a year,” he said.

“The money we receive is really their living.”

Sanctioned

YouTube’s decision in March theoretically blocked all premium music video content – owned by record labels – in the UK.

However, many fan videos and official videos continued to be available on the site, including some sanctioned by the record labels themselves.

For example, EMI-owned Parlophone recently became the site’s most popular UK channel of the year, with 240 million hits, despite the ban.

However, YouTube said the “tens of thousands” of videos which had disappeared “will come back over the next few days”.

“The music videos are an extremely popular part of YouTube and this deal doesn’t only cover the music videos but also music included in TV programmes like the X Factor and also for the inclusion of music in user videos as well,” YouTube’s Patrick Walker told the BBC.

The deal will also mean that new material will appear on YouTube as the site signs partnerships with other record labels and guest editors introduce their favourite videos.

‘Outraged’

In the UK, PRS for Music acts on behalf of member publishers as a collecting society for licensing fees relating to the use of music.

At the start of the row Mr Walker told the BBC that PRS was seeking a rise in fees “many, many factors” higher than the previous agreement.

He said the two were “so far apart” that YouTube had no choice but to remove content while negotiations continued.

At the time, Steve Porter, head of PRS, said he was “outraged… shocked and disappointed” by the decision.

He said the move “punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent”.

The Music Publishers Association (MPA) joined PRS in urging Google to rethink, while Lord Carter, who was the UK’s minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, also waded into the debate.

Giving evidence before the Business Select Committee, the minister said he suspected a degree of “commercial posturing on the part of both parties” but said the row was indicative of a wider issue.

YouTube is the world’s most popular online video site but has been under increased pressure to generate more revenue since its purchase by Google for $1.65bn (then £875m) in 2006.

Services such as Pandora.com, MySpace UK and Imeem have also had issues securing licensing deals in the UK in the past 12 months.

Cross posted from news.bbc.co.uk

Many marketers now comfortable with social media and the power of online product reviews have also started to lose their timidity about approaching bloggers.

In fact, some women bloggers report marketers may be becoming overeager.

Ketchum, conducting a survey of registrants for July’s annual BlogHer conference—billed as the largest gathering of female bloggers in North America—found that nearly one-half of respondents were contacted by PR professionals weekly. A further 30% got such messages on a daily basis.

Some of that contact, however, appears to be unwanted. Respondents to the Ketchum study indicated that marketers were not doing the necessary research when looking to stir up online word-of-mouth about their products.

One tip: Women would like marketers to read and understand their blogs before making contact, to make sure they are a good fit with the product or service being marketed. Some bloggers reported hearing about offers that were not even available in their location.

Also, despite the “mommy blogger” buzz, not all female bloggers fit that category.

ShesConnected found that more than one-half of US female social network users polled in spring 2009 had started their own blog.

eMarketer stats

“The incidence of starting a blog was exceedingly high, likely a reflection of the education level and social media involvement of these core users,” according to the report.

March 2009 data from BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners indicated that 8 million women in the US publish a blog.

eMrketer stats

The same study also found that 31% of women who read or posted to blogs did so to “provide advice and recommendations.”

Women bloggers are more than willing to help marketers out—when it makes sense to do so. About 40% of Ketchum respondents said they had provided marketers with information collected on their blogs, and 53% said they would consider doing so if asked.

“Our research at Ketchum shows that women want marketers to understand them, and the female blogger audience is saying the same thing, loud and clear,” said Kelley Skoloda of Ketchum in a statement. As with all social media, it is crucial for marketers’ blog outreach efforts to be a good fit for everyone involved: the brand, the blogger and the audience.

Cross posted from www.emarketer.com

Blogging has become a major social media marketing phenomenon over the years—so much so that even the US Federal Trade Commission is considering rules for bloggers to follow when working with marketers. Worldwide research from Text 100 shows just how close that relationship has become.

Nearly nine in 10 US bloggers told Text 100 they welcomed contact from PR firms or corporations with information, comments or suggestions. E-mail was bloggers’ preferred means of contact, especially in the US.

eMarketer

All of the US bloggers surveyed by Text 100 had been contacted by marketers in the past six months. Majorities in Europe and Asia-Pacific said the same, at 86% and 70%, respectively.

eMarketerstats

Contact was generally frequent: 96% of respondents in the US reported being contacted by PR firms at least weekly.

Bloggers are big on transparency when it comes to marketer involvement. Between 85% and 89% of US bloggers agreed that they should acknowledge when a post has been written in return for some sort of compensation. Response rates were somewhat lower in Europe and Asia-Pacific, but a majority of bloggers worldwide believed in acknowledging sponsor involvement.

eMarketer stats

Text 100 suggests one way for marketers to get blog buzz is to use “social media releases” rather than traditional press releases. Bloggers do not want to copy and paste the same article that will appear in every major news outlet—they would prefer a “deconstructed” release so they can find the angle most appropriate to their unique readership.

For more information on how marketers and bloggers can get along, see “Marketers Court Female Bloggers.”

Cross posted from www.emarketer.com

The social media marketing bandwagon is filling up, according to the “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report” from Equation Research. The survey of US brand marketers found the majority already using social media.

Some marketers were planning on adding social media activities over the next year, including 15% of respondents in businesses with fewer than 50 employees and 24% of those whose companies had at least 500 workers. But most brand marketers interested in social media were already using it.

The most popular social media channels for brand and agency marketers were Facebook, Twitter, online videos and blogs—each used by more than one-half of respondents.

Respondents reported many common barriers to social media adoption. Among brand marketers, 37% did not know enough about social media to begin, and another 37% said there was no good way to measure its effectiveness. Agency marketers reiterated those concerns, and were also likely to say that social media was not proven or tested as a marketing strategy (31%). Funding was also a problem for about one-quarter of brand and agency respondents.

Despite reporting trouble with measurement, marketers do track various social media metrics. More than six in 10 brand and agency respondents reported tracking Website hits—rudimentary, perhaps, but a start. Marketers also monitored feedback, links and mentions on other sites, and sales.

Just 14% of brand marketers and 12% of agency marketers reported not measuring social media efforts at all.

“With different tools and tactics in wide use, measurement is understandably dispersed,” wrote the report authors. “Yet there is an acceptance that both hard and soft measures need to come to bear in order to assess success.”

Cross posted from www.emarketer.com

Facebook

Facebook will give users greater control over information given to third-party applications following pressure from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Specific changes include an update on Facebook’s privacy policy to give better clarity on subjects such as reasons for the collection of date of birth and how its advertising programme works. It will also be encouraging users to review their privacy settings to make sure the default selections reflect their preferences.

The social network will also introduce a new model for third-party apps that will require applications to specify the categories of information they wish to access and obtain express consent from the user before any data is shared.

Elliot Schrage, VP of global communications and public policy at Facebook, said, “We believe these changes are not only great for our users and address all of the Commissioners’ outstanding concerns, but also set a new standard for the industry.”

Work on the changes to the platform will start immediately, although Facebook said some changes may take a while before they’re visible to users.

Cross posted from www.marketingweek.co.uk