Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service is now offering one full terabyte for users, enough storage space to hold whole swathes of the world’s photos. The service is offering this benefit in addition to its full resolution photo storage service.

While the average user will probably not touch the outer limits of this storage space in a lifetime, this alone is probably enough to draw dedicated photographers to the service and, more important, bring lapsed users back to the Yahoo fold.

This move is important. Given the odd nature of most photo sharing services, you are either limited to a few dozen gigabytes or, in the case of Instagram and other mobile services, an unstated upper limit that is not part of the marketing collateral. While I don’t doubt that Google or Facebook could make the terabyte claim in the near future, being first to market with this particular feature is an important milestone.

This move is quite clearly a play by Yahoo to make its wares relevant. The long-beleaguered Flickr has at once enthralled and frustrated pro users with claims of abandonment by the web giant.

As Marissa Mayer noted in her presentation, this is about “bringing lifetimes of beauty into Flickr.” It’s also about convincing casual photographers to trust Flickr as a universal shoebox for their old snaps – a lucrative and surprisingly important thing to be.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at Majestic Media, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer & digital marketing agency, specializing in custom apps and promotions for web and mobile.

Marketers are starting to focus more on social media efforts, realizing that it’s an important piece of the marketing puzzle. They’ve started to use social media, but only as an extension of a traditional campaign or as a small marketing initiative on the side. Many of them are hesitant to rely too heavily on social media. They’re willing to let social media ride in the car, but they’re reluctant to give them the keys.

According to a report released by Social Media Examiner at the end of 2012, 83 percent of marketers have said that social media was important to their business. However, the CMO survey released in February found that marketers are only allocating 8.4% of their budget for social media.

Many believe that in order for a campaign to succeed, it always needs to be integrated across different channels. This is simply not the case. At Majestic Media, we’ve seen time and time again that a fully digital campaign, or even a fully social campaign, can reach hundreds of thousands of consumers, achieving millions of social impressions and engagement, and generate a tremendous amount of traffic.

Majestic Media recently launched a social campaign for Maple Leaf Foods, promoting their new product, Bacon Portions. It was a simple Facebook Application that allowed users to pledge to “Never Waste Bacon” and enter for the chance to win a year supply of bacon.  Yes, bacon.  Not a brand new car, $25,000 or an extravagant trip, simply bacon.

The campaign was launched organically on Facebook, posting on Maple Leaf’s Facebook Page for current fans to see. Within 12 hours, we had reached 3,458 pledges. Following the launch, Maple Leaf Foods started a small paid campaign on Facebook consisting of Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories. Within a week, we saw nearly 19,000 pledges and #NeverWasteBacon was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in Canada.

Facebook was the primary focus, but Twitter and Instagram also played a large part in the success of the #NeverWasteBacon campaign (which is still running).

Maple Leaf was able to gain a huge amount of traffic without incorporating traditional mediums like radio, TV, or print. They were able to generate such a large amount of organic traffic because they took the time to build an audience. They spent time interacting with their followers and provided them with engaging, relevant content.

Social media has the power to drive a major campaign, but only if you do it right. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many brands blame a failed Facebook campaign on the social network, rather than the fact that they didn’t take the time to prepare.

Social campaigns can be wildly successful if you have the right strategy in place, give people the incentive and the encouragement to share with friends and spend the time listening and building up your audience to ensure what you launch is inline with what they want to engage with.  Campaigns don’t always need to be fully integrated and rely heavily on paid media to be wildly successful.

Mario Zelaya is the founder and managing director of Majestic Media, Canada’s first Facebook Marketing & Technology agency. His extensive experience on the Facebook Platform includes building out social strategy, campaign ideation, app architecture, and social design for brand clients such Volkswagen, Kia, General Motors, Mazda, Gatorade, Hot Wheels, Infiniti, Nissan, Visa and many others. Majestic Media has executed over 200 large-scale campaigns and works with big brands and agencies in helping them to get results and ROI through campaigns that are social by design. Follow Majestic Media & Mario on Twitter @majesticmedia @zelaya.

BrandYourself is expanding its efforts to take on the big names in the online reputation market (particularly Reputation.com) with the launch of a new version of its service.

The company started out as a fairly simple self-service tool for trying to improve your presence online, for example by creating a website and other content to push down undesirable results when someone Googles your name. (It has become increasingly focused on Google results over time.) The basic service is free, but BrandYourself charges $10 a month for additional features and usage.

With BrandYourself’s freemium, self-service product, it seemed to be serving a difference audience than Reputation.com, but now the newer startup is challenging its more-established competitor in a direct way. With a recently-launched concierge service, users aren’t just presented with a list of to-do items for improving their Google results — they can also pay BrandYourself team members to work with them on a strategy and actually do the work for them. So if, say, you don’t have the time create and maintain your own personal website, BrandYourself create and maintain one for you. And co-founder and CEO Patrick Ambron said that where Reputation.com can cost thousands of dollars per month, BrandYourself’s concierge services can cost as little as $200 or $300.

Why the dramatic price difference? Ambron insisted that it’s not because BrandYourself delivers lower-quality, cheaper work — he showed me one of the websites created for a BrandYourself customer and it did look like a real personal page. In contrast, he showed me content that he said had been created through his account with Reputation.com, and it was basically just an empty template. (I emailed Reputation.com to discuss how the company saw itself stacking up against BrandYourself, but I did not receive a response.)

The big difference, Ambron said, is that existing online reputation services are built around a model of high acquisition costs and low retention rates — they pay for a lot of advertising to attract customers, and those customers don’t stick around for very long, so the companies have to charge high rates. BrandYourself, on the other hand, can treat its free tools as the marketing funnel for its paid version and concierge service. Plus, Ambron said that with lower prices, customers can use BrandYourself on an ongoing basis.

“We’re really trying to fix the online reputation space, ” he said. “Until it was only meant for rich people and it was notoriously ineffective.”

In addition to the concierge service, BrandYourself is launching a new interface that makes it easier, among other things, to submit links that you want to promote in your Google results. And there’s a new report card showing users BrandYourself’s score of their current search results, the progress that they’ve made with the service, and details about who is actually visiting your BrandYourself website.

The company says it has been used by more than 200,000 people. It has also raised more than $1.5 million in funding and is now based in New York City.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today announced that its new version of Offers with larger images and calls to action are now available on Android.

In February, the social network began testing the new layout on desktop with an option to shop immediately or get a reminder before the promotion ends. The interface also lets users decide if and when to share the offer with friends. We started seeing this on iOS in early April, and the company officially announced it a few weeks later. Now, the product is uniform across desktop and mobile, including Android.

Overall, the new design is likely to increase conversions on Offers posts because of the cleaner design and more prominent buttons to “Get offer” or “Shop now.” The “Remind Me” button available for some retailers working with Facebook directly allows companies to prompt users to redeem their offer at a later date through a notification on Facebook.

The new Offers also provide users with a better experience since they can now claim an offer without publicizing it to friends. After users select “Get Offer” or “Remind me,” they will have an option to “Tell Friends.” Their activity won’t be shared unless they click this button. Previously, whenever a user clicked “Get Offer,” it generated a story in friends’ feeds and in the recent activity section of their Timeline.

An additional benefit is the My Offers section accessible from a bookmark in the sidebar menu. This feature lets users access all of the offers they’ve claimed.

Indoor mapping software startup Meridian, continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to their offering.

Called Zones, the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and indoor is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps. When customers with the accompanying app walk into one of those indoor areas represented by the polygon on the map…Bam! They get a push notification.

To be sure, it’s a real marketing opportunity and a concept underserved by the current, mostly GPS-based location awareness model for mobile devices.

Differentiators
There are several geo-fencing platforms out there — PlaceCast, Digby Localpoint, Wifarer and ShopKick all come to mind — so what is the big deal here? Meridian’s VP of Marketing Jeff Hardison, believes there are several differences in the Meridian approach.

First of all, this notification system will work even when the accompanying app is not open nor in active use — essentially working while the app is in background mode — without significant battery drain. Other geo-fence providers might be able to do this via GPS or cell tower triangulation, but not by WiFi sensing, which is how Meridian works. This means that once the WiFi network the location is using is recognized, that network can “wake up” the app and send push notifications when different Zones of the store are passed through.

Most importantly, per Meridian’s secret sauce and strategy, this works with Wi-Fi triangulation for indoor maps and can function at a sensitivity of about 10 feet. This gives the system an advantage in locations where GPS antennas often fail — like, say, in a casino under ground parking garage.

Recap
To recap how Meridian’s technology works, the company has built a CMS and rapid app building platform so that partnered companies can upload maps of their locations into the CMS.

Once their location maps are digitized and uploaded to the CMS tool, the geo-fences can be drawn on the location maps. The new or existing WiFi hotspots in the locations are then coupled with the map data.

Accompanying mobile apps — also built with this system — can access the map data in order to display accurate indoor maps, based on location. Now the push notifications have been added to the mix.

Software Development Kit
You may have uncovered what could be seen as the Achilles Heel in the strategy, in that a brand’s native app must be built with Meridian’s app rapid builder technology (another offering they have). That could seem like a limitation for brands that already have their own app, and don’t want to rebuild with Meridian’s proprietary app-building tool.

However, Jeff said the team is currently piloting an SDK approach for the Zones platform, so brands with existing apps can use the new push notification system with an existing app. This will be deployed in the coming months.

Meridian is currently wrapping up live pilots with The Bellagio in Las Vegas and also with Fernbank Museum. They’ve also received some recognition from Cisco as a best of breed provider of indoor mapping technology and Cisco has actually integrated some of Meridian’s technology into their own hardware platforms.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Triggit

Facebook Exchange retargeting partner Triggit today announced that it has secured $6 million in additional funding led by North Atlantic Capital along with existing investors Spark Capital and Foundry Group. Triggit says it will put the investment toward engineering and other talent as it focuses on improving products for advertisers retargeting users on the social network, particularly as Facebook evolves the exchange to include News Feed inventory.

Compass Labs

Social marketing platform Compass Labs today announced a new dynamic campaign solution, The Social Advertising Optimizer, which automatically manages an advertiser’s bids. The tool can identify and optimize campaigns by ad placement, targeting and creative combinations based on different weighted actions and goals. Compass Labs says The Social Advertising Optimizer has helped clients achieve a 17 percent decrease in conversion costs. It is available as a standalone product or integrated in Compass Lab’s main platform, the CLIQ Ads Manager.

Optimal

Social advertising and analytics company Optimal, Inc. has launched Optimal Analytics, an audience analytics dashboard for demographic and engagement statistics, as well as competitive analysis across sources like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. The tool looks at historical engagement data for top brands and daily interactions among millions of demographic and interest-based segments to give marketers key insights about their competitors and target audience. Marketers can get daily or weekly emails about the most engaging content from competitors or visit the tool directly to generate new consumer insights or build lookalike audiences for ad targeting.

Viralheat

Social marketing suite Viralheat today released a mobile app version of its platform, including the Viralheat stream and publishing tools. The app lets users manage multiple Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts from their iPhones. They can schedule posts, monitor conversations, respond and check analytics.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Cisco Meraki, which offers cloud-managed networking solutions, announced a partnership with Facebook last week to include Facebook Wi-Fi in its new Presence platform for businesses to gather location analytics and promote engagement among visitors.

Facebook Wi-Fi is a service that allows businesses to offer customers free Wi-Fi after checking in on the social network. It began as a hackathon project a year ago and gradually rolled out as a local experiment with a few businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now it’s a full-fledged commercial product thanks to the Meraki partnership.

The integration with Presence gives business owners access to Facebook page insights with aggregate demographic information about the customers who check in. The check-in also results in increased exposure for the business and leads users to a business’ Facebook page, which could lead to more Likes or interactions. It could be a useful feature for local businesses, retail locations, the hospitality industry or large events and conferences, which want to learn more about their visitors and generate word of mouth.

For now, Facebook Wi-Fi is only available to businesses through Meraki wireless products. The Presence platform, which includes other real-time location analytics and an API to connect with CRM systems, is included free with the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN. Meraki says configuring Wi-Fi with Facebook login only requires two clicks in the Meraki dashboard.

Businesses also have the option to allow users to skip the check-in step if they don’t want to share their location on Facebook.

More information is available from Facebook’s Help Center and Meraki.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Thank you, Newt Gingrich, for this YouTube gem; I think America needed a good laugh. Last week, the former Republican presidential front-runner and moon colony-enthusiast called upon the wisdom of the Internet to come up with a term for an Internet-connected phone, apparently not knowing that they are already called “smartphones”.

If we had told you that Newt Gingrich’s “multimedia production company” had made a YouTube video titled “We’re Really Puzzled”, it would have been too ridiculous to fabricate. We cannot make this up.

“You probably think it’s a cell phone,” said Gingrich. “But think about it, if it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cell phone…This device, is something new and different. I’ve been calling it a handheld computer.

It gets better: “So having failed for several days to come up with an adequate term for the device we call a “cell phone,” we want to open the discussion up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think we should name it, and we’ll feature the best ones in a future newsletter.”

The YouTube comments are priceless:

–”i reached out to laurent too. Issa is participating in Bloomberg’s march for immigration

–”Smartphone? How about smartphone. Oh hey, look, we already call it that.”

–”I suggest calling it a “horseless telephone.”

–”There’s a book on the shelf behind him titled “Social Marketing”. LOL”

Ironically, Gingrich made a rare bipartisan endorsement of the wonky open government book, Citizenville, from California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom. “Every single conservative in this country should read it,” said Gingrich. Citizenville is arguably the most thorough account of government technology to date, and, most importantly, mentions “smartphones” 16 times. I agree, every conservative should read it.

I will leave readers with a more sober and thoughtful idea to mull over: these people want to run our government?!?!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Silverpop, the marketing tech company that announced $25 million in new funding last month, is announcing a new feature to help customers adapt to all the different ways that people are opening their emails.

The feature, called Email Insights, accomplishes three main tasks, the company says. First, it allows them to preview how an email will look in up to 30 different apps across multiple devices. (It’s working with a company called Litmus to create those previews.) Adam Steinberg, Silverpop’s director of emerging apps, said that there was previously a lot of uncertainty and guesswork in the process — for many marketers, the testing process previously consisted of emailing people they knew with different devices then asking, “How does it look?”

Next, Silverop provides analytics about which devices and applications are being used to open those emails. Customers can then use that data to create emails that are customized based on a user’s “preferred device.”

“The marketer wants to know which type of device their customers are using so it can give them a device-centric marketing message,” Steinberg said.

For example, he told me that if an online retailer is launching a new iPhone app, instead of sending the same promotional message to everyone on their mailing list, they could create a special message for people who usually read those emails on an iPhone, with a direct link to download the app.

Email Insights is now available to all Silverpop customers with pricing that starts at $40 per month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post from Jed Singer, director of client engagement at Stuzo, a creative technology company and Preferred Marketing Developer with Pages and Apps badges.

The Facebook News Feed is becoming evermore critical to engagement on Facebook. When you design branded social solutions, they need to serve as conduits for storytelling. 100x more people are likely to see the stories that your social product or campaign pushes out than will ever actually experience the product or campaign.

This amplification through the Timeline and News Feed is inherently key to awareness and viral distribution of the brand’s message, but it’s even more important because those stories in the Timeline and News Feed are more accessible by mobile users (63 percent of Facebook users) than the solution, itself, today. This focus on the “story” can mean success or failure of the program as it relates to actual business outcomes — the metrics that matter.

There are also other ways to have consumers effectively story-tell through a branded social experience: Rich Media News Feed Experiences. This is an HTML5 experience on mobile and a Flash media unit that is the experience within a promoted page post, or pushed out of a custom experience on Facebook (by either a user or a page). Both can be activated and engaged with directly within the News Feed.

Even into Q2 of 2013, these are rare for brands, but they are extremely effective at engaging users. Some, like Dunkin Donuts, Rovio, and Lexus have leveraged such units in their social repertoire. At Stuzo, we make sure that clients are intimately aware of the possibilities; one of our most successful Rich News Feed Experiences was for People’s Choice Awards this past season, which enabled fans to explore all of the award categories and vote for their favorite nominee. This gives users the full voting functionality in-stream and exposes them to the main business metric for the People’s Choice Awards — votes — without having to leave their News Feed browsing experience.

Another example is AutoTrader’s social inventory search feature, Decide My Ride, which enables users to share out three cars that they’re interested in and have their friends then vote on which they believe the user should purchase. This voting is all done in in-stream in the News Feed, and below, we can see examples on both the desktop and via mobile. This is rich branded interaction and storytelling that is cross-device and directly in-stream.

When do you, as a brand, want to consider these Rich News Feed Experiences on Facebook? Here’s a simple list of questions to ask yourself. Do you have:

• A CRM conversion point, like an email sign-up?
• An engagement conversion, like a social vote or poll answer?
• An awareness conversion, like a social good campaign?
• An off-site traffic conversion with teaser content?
• A lightweight social game that users could preview in-stream?
• A product that could be interacted with via News Feed?
• An inventory that users could explore in-stream?
• A service that customers could reserve in the feed?

The list goes on, and the above should serve as thought-starters. There is an array of potential use cases for Rich News Feed Experiences on Facebook, and to maximize engagement and conversion of your audience, these mobile-accessible, mobile-optimized products are an extremely powerful solutions for your digital and social marketing toolbox.

Jed Singer has been studying, advising, and executing in social since 2006, and has worked with brands across verticals including the National Football League, National Basketball Association, Toys “R” Us, Coach, Procter & Gamble, Anheuser-Busch InBev, MasterCard, CBS, ESPN, and HBO. As director of client engagement at Stuzo, one of the original five Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers, Jed specializes in social strategy, management, and application development.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook