Facebook has recently implemented thorough guidelines to running promotions on the platform. Ultimately, marketers and brands must go through third-party applications to implement any promotion or viral growth strategy on Facebook.

Read the official guidelines here: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php

Today Bing plans to announce the incorporation of Facebook and Twitter status updates into the Bing search engine. This move by Bing to become a real-time search engine is definitely going to help the Microsoft owned company mark its territory amongst the vast landscape of search engines.

Details on the arrangements are supposedly going to be announced later today at the Web 2.0 Summit. According to @mashable, “Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook back in 2007, and has since signed search and advertising deals with the social network.” The relationship developing between Twitter and Bing comes in the wake of signs over the course of the last month that point towards Twitter working on a search partnership.

While the incorporation of tweets and updates isn’t a new concept, see One Riot, the large scale players in the search category are about to take off the gloves and bout over the incorporation of trending social media buzz. According to All Things Digital (via Mashable) the companies are also talking with Google about the motion.

I randomly decided to check on InYaHead Music which is the first site we ever built and was subsequently taken down right after launch because they sold a bunch of tracks. To my suprise they put the site back up. This was the first website ever done by Movement Strategy and isn’t half bad. Chickety Check it out!

-Jason

I love seeing young, new companies do exciting and innovative things online. I especially love seeing young, new ski companies doing these things.

Brand new ski company, Bluehouse Skis is trying to make a name for themselves in the skiing industry and they are doing it exactly the right way. Instead of taking out a full page ad in Powder mag for around $30,000, they have gone the more grassroots method. They have contacted college ski clubs and offered discounts in return for an email blast. This is a win win win situation. The ski club will have something awesome to give out to their fans. Bluehouse Skis will be able to sell some product, even if the margin is not very high with the discount. And, Bluehouse Skis will have people using their product, so on the mountain they will have advertising in the form of people using their skis and raving about them (hopefully).

While this is really smart, it is not the “new & innovative” thing that I am talking about. What I am talking about is a link contest that Bluehouse skis is hosting. The contest is that if you post a link to Bluehouse skis using one of their banners you are entered to win a pair of their skis. Why is this so smart? Because not only are they getting people excited about the company, but this contest will be great for SEO. Instead of paying a few thousand dollars (minimum) for someone to go and make some minor adjustments to their meta data and keywords and post a few links here and there, they are getting a ton of inbound links for free.

It seems that more and more people are utilizing giving out product in return for marketing. This has been exemplified on Twitter over and over with retweet contests in return for product, has been seen on Facebook with contests that auto populate content onto your stream and I am sure has been done on other social networks time and again.

Thanks Bluehouse skis for being innovative online marketers!

Today Facebook has widely released Facebook Lite. The new version of Facebook was released in beta throughout August, but as of today is available in the U.S and India. Facebook Lite is a simplified front-end version of Facebook that is optimized for slower internet connections. Essentially it is Facebook on a diet plan, losing all unnecessary “fluff” such as third party apps. However FBL users can still enjoy the essence of the Facebook experience with the “wall” feature media sharing and status updates all being the same.

The introduction of Facebook Lite has been received by many as a direct attempt to integrate a simple, Twitter-style user face focused on micro-interaction in the form of status updates and sharing.

Another new feature integrated into Facebook this week is @ tagging in status updates. Now when referring to a friend in a status update simply place the “@” in front of their name, begin to type and Facebook will automatically drop-down a list of names with the letters you have begun to type. It may seem that Facebook is stealing a bit of Twitter’s thunder, especially following a month in which Facebook experienced 4 times the amount of unique visitors to Twitter.

NOTE: There has been issues for many Facebook users trying to use the @ tagging, stay tuned for more.

The social media revolution has been in full force for the past few years. It is evolving beyond demographic and age barriers, becoming an all encompassing mass communication channel that every person and business should be in tune with. This is an intriguing video that observes the magnitude of social media and uses numbers to show why its so important.

-enjoy

Thanks to Socialnomics

Nailing down a solid foundation for a social media campaign still comes as the most important element of a social media strategy. Before building apps., micro-sites, widgets or otherwise the communication channels between brand and consumers must be free flowing and continuous. Social media continues to evolve at an exponential rate as new programs, features and connection methods are being developed. While its certainly important to stay ahead of the learning curve in the social media landscape it is most important to foster the conversations occurring in the traditional social networking manor.

It is obvious that demographics and  business goals of each company by in large determine the shape that a social media campaign will take, but for any business, brand or otherwise to see the desired ROI from a social media effort the countless hours of community building, content sharing and conversing must come first, otherwise the innovative tech and development methods fall short. Success in social media depends upon persistence and dedication in terms of providing community members with a desired ROI for their time spent contributing to the community and helping shape the company’s online existence.

We’ve been heading up the social media campaign for northeastern music festival, Gathering of the Vibes, which has been a great experience with great people. Our focus for the entire campaign has been centered on getting fan interaction and engagement, not developing the coolest new app. or strategy. What we’ve seen is exponential fan growth, fan engagement that rivals top brands and festivals and a stoked community that has made social networking with the festival a daily routine they look forward to. That is a favorable ROI that directly correlates with success.

Yesterday twitter silently released a new user interface within the “following” and “followers” sections of profiles. Selecting the “expand” option on the new UI shows the latest updates of all, giving a better idea of their content and activity without having to travel to their page and also provides a drop down menu with options to DM, @reply, unfollow or block.

There is also the option to view in a list. The list option is more condensed, showing just the menu drop down and user name, leaving out real names, locations and latests updates that you can see in the above screen shot.

The new upgrade seems an insignificant change to the site, but does provide a more simplified usability. Personally I enjoy seeing the expanded details on followers and the people I’m following. With the increased amount of garbage accounts sometimes it is hard to distinguish between genuine users and BS accounts that provide no value to your stream. Now with the expand option the tidbit of info helps to determine validity and provides a more relative introduction.

Looking further into the subtle changes made by twitter, Techcrunch has made the hypothesis that a new mobile site is in the works, heres their take.

“What’s interesting about these icons is that they appear to look exactly like icons that Apple uses for OS X — including some of the ones on the iPhone. Could this mean that we’re about to see a revamped mobile version of the Twitter site? Who knows, but it could sure use an overhaul.”

Thanks to the pressure put on Facebook by the advances of Twitter we the people are receiving a better service. Twitter reigns as the thought sharing, micro-blogging mecca, where Facebook provides the end-all be-all network, aggregating all of ones personal sharing and media. Twitter’s success comes about through its simplistic model of sharing and communicating, today Facebook released a beta feature that may set a new standard for Twitter’s content sharing model and groupings.

New publisher controls were released in beta today on Facebook. The new publisher controls provide various grouping options to sharing content and dispersing it as widely or privately as desired.

Status updates can now be viewed not only by those in your social network but also by those who aren’t. Perhaps most importantly, Google, Bing and every other search engine that indexes Facebook pages and profiles will now display shared content at the desire of publishers. “The privacy settings that you implement for each story will also carry over to the stream.get API call.” It seems quite apparent from a marketing standpoint that the avenue this creates to spread branded content and awareness is very beneficial, granted that it is quality content being dispersed.

For brands, twitter brought about an avenue where companies could add value and depth to their identity by not only positioning themselves in a business segment, but by providing links, ideals and thoughts that brought forth a personality with whom consumers could interact and relate. Facebook is beginning to reach a stage where brands can better connect with not only there friends or fans, but reach out to a broader audience and introduce themselves through personified content sharing. In my opinion this is a milestone feature release for Facebook.

Read more on AllFacebook or AdAge -

So as we all know due to the berade of advertising, Microsoft has launched a new search engine, Bing, as a response to Google. And the question that remains is, will Microsoft be able to take market share away from Google?

To answer this question let’s look at the history of the two companies a bit.

Microsoft started out as a software company. When Bill Gates and Paul Allen began the company, they were writing software to be used on the Altair 8800, this was in the mid to late 70’s. Their software become incredibly popular and they quickly locked in deals to distribute their software and it took off from there. They went on to refine their software with MS-DOS and then Windows and now Vista. Along they way they have been extremely successful building and selling software and bundling their software into personal computers. So much so that they were part of the infamous monopoly case.

Google started out as a search engine. Larry Page and then Sergey Brin realized their was a better way to search through the information on the internet by putting emphasis on backlinks rather then how many times a keyword appeared on a page. They got some initial funding from some prominent angel investors and venture capitalists and continued to grow their search engine. Google quickly rose to become the most used search engine because of it’s uncluttered feel and amazingly good results.

As consumers we have grown our trust in Microsoft as a software provider. Microsoft Word dominates it’s field as does Excel and the Windows operating system. In much the same way Google dominates search because we have come to trust Google, even making the verb “google” an official word in the english language.

Microsoft trying to get into search is a classic case of a big company seeing a smaller company’s success in a particular field and trying to bully their way into that field. Unfortunately for the bigger company, this rarely ever works. Take a look at the company Sears. Sears was known as being one of the best providers of hard goods and was doing really well. So what did they decide to do? They decided to get into softgoods and then clothing. Unfortunatly for Sears, people continued to think of them as a hardgoods company and didn’t buy their softgoods or clothing. Sears had loads of overhead of softgoods and clothing, put millions into advertising these things and wound up losing a tremendous amount of money. All because people think of Sears as a hard goods company.

In the same way, I think of Microsoft as a software company. When I think of search I think Google. There is pretty much nothing that Microsoft can do that will make me think of them as a search company. Furthermore, Google is doing a really good job. They are continually improving, have kept their site clean and have kept me, the consumer happy. So why would I switch to Microsoft Bing? Certainly not because of an advertising campaign that Microsoft is doing. I have logged thousands of hours on Microsoft operating systems and software and thousands of hours using Google search all of which has ingrained the idea into me about what these respective companies are for. No way an advertising campaign can break these perceptions.

Microsoft made a mistake a year ago with their failed acquisition of Yahoo! and is going to fail again with Bing. They need to stick to what they are good at which is software develpment and continue to be innovative in that field. Because in the field of search, Microsoft simply can’t win.