Yahoo! Directory shuts down! A historic monument has been taken down!

Yahoo! Directory (formerly at http://dir.yahoo.com) the starting of Yahoo! what it originally was, a hand curated list of websites, the first search engine since 1995 has finally been taken down after 20 years!

Yahoo! originally started as a directory, a hand curated list of authentic websites. Later the company evolved into an internet conglomerate with business & services ranging from Yahoo! Mail to Yahoo! Small Business Center to acquiring Tumblr & what not!

But finally, the original Yahoo! directory has been taken taken down. It is like a historic monument from the world of internet being taken down.

Google Authorship : The End

Google has withdrawn its authorship program from showing into the Search Results

Google had started the authorship program 3 years back when it started supporting the rel='author' tag & later started showing author photos in the search results. Now, since June 2014 Google stopped showing the author photos & later in August 2014 stopped supporting the rel='author' tag altogether.
Reasons stated were :

1. Low adoption rates by authors & webmasters.
2. Low value for searchers.
3. Minute difference in clickthrough rates

Flying Off the Chart - Power of Social Media

Real Social Media Optimization

Facebook Page Manager for iPhone is here!

Facebook Page Manager's ad on facebook app for iphone

New Facebook Feature : Interests List

Facebook has launched a new feature today!

Interest Lists :

What is it?
A collection of facebook pages & people whose updates will be available in the list, to which anyone can subscribe (if the privacy is public)
It is like a personalized interest based newsfeed, similar to hashtags (#facebook for example)  in twitter using which you can see everything related to #facebook in one news feed.

Check out this example, https://www.facebook.com/?sk=fl_10150660106619803 for high-end jewelry & watches that I created.

How do you plan to use this feature with your friends?

Hint : You can also make private lists with exclusive stuff only for your friends.

Groupon - Too much of a good thing?

Groupon Wild Success almost made them bankrupt!

Sometimes, there can be too much of a good thing.

Baker frosts a chocolate cupcake April 19, 2011, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A small bakery experimented with using Groupon to attract customers, and the decision -- which in some ways proved wildly successful -- almost shut down the business.

Rachel Brown of Need a Cake bakery in the United Kingdom put an ad on Groupon, a group-discount website, offering 75 percent off on cupcakes to those who bought a dozen, BBC reported. The $40 cupcakes suddenly cost $10.

Turns out, people like their cupcakes. And their deals.

The bakery, based in Woodley, received 8,500 requests for a dozen cupcakes, far above the normally 100 it produces a month. Brown suddenly had to make 102,000 cupcakes. Brown's company only employs eight people, and she had to bring in an outside agency to handle the orders. The temporary agency cost her $19,500, effectively wiping out her year's profits, MSNBC reported.

"Without doubt, it was my worst ever business decision," she told BBC. "We had thousands of orders pouring in that really we hadn't expected to have. A much larger company would have difficulty coping."
Brown told the Daily Telegraph that her staff was working around the clock, and one person came in at 3 a.m. because she couldn't sleep as a result of the cupcake stress. Brown said she does not plan on doing this again.

News courtesy : Globalpost.com

Engagement beoynd facebook fans

There are more users engaged than the total no. of fans on the page, that says something! (Achievement) :D

Facebook's most talked about brands!

With the new facebook metric finally people are understand what me & other social media marketers have been trying to tell for years (2 years in my case lol), engagement is more important than the number of likes. Below is a list of the top ten facebook brands sorted by engagement :

1. Starbucks: 508,526
2. Coca-Cola: 220,867
3. Victoria’s Secret: 145,125
4. Skittles: 137,558
5. Oreo: 114,454
6. Red Bull: 112,051
7. Playstation: 104,837
8. Converse: 52,866
9. Pringles: 50,488
10. Converse All Star: 40,858

Now, for the traditional metric folks, below is a list of brands sorted by no. of likes.

1. Coca-Cola: 34,511,504
2. Starbucks: 25,446,846
3. Oreo: 23,092,391
4. Red Bull: 22,427,254
5. Converse All Star: 20,780,055
6. Converse: 20,141,021
7. Skittles: 19,348,317
8. Playstation: 17,420,065
9. Pringles: 13,602,128
10. Victoria’s Secret: 15,343,727

Important Metrics of Social Media

Just completed a new project at BuzzWorthy, here are some stats from the project, reproduced with permission.

Though I cannot disclose what I did in the project, I want to shed some light on important metrics of social media. (In this case, the medium was a facebook page, but it could be anything)

Facebook's New Features!

Facebook released a lot of new features today! Here's a sum-up of the most important ones :

• Subscribe option for facebook profiles - This step takes the usual facebook profiles a step closer to facebook pages (in particular Public Figure pages). Now if you want to receive my updates but do not want me to see your updates or I do not accept your friend request, you can still receive my public updates by subscribing to my profile! Just go to my profile & click on the subscribe button, you'll start seeing my updates in your news feed! This is especially helpful for people who have hit the facebook friend limit of 5000 friends, like my friend Dan Gordon or the belle dancer Meher Malik.

Facebook Subscribe button for profiles

• Share facebook statuses - Long awaited, but here at last! Now you can share facebook updates, so no - via @ anymore! Just click the share button below a status & it'll be shared with your friends! :D

These are 2 of the most important new features I came across. But there are still many more awaited! The most important & the most awaited is :

• Advanced Notifications for facebook Pages! : If you run a page & engage a community on facebook, you know what I mean! Right now pages & their admins do not receive a notification if an old status or photo on their page gets a comment or something which results in less engagement than there can be!

Hope facebook launches this feature soon!

UPDATE : Today, September 16, 2011 the facebook navigation bar has become omnipresent, like vodafone's pup, wherever you go, it follows.

UPDATE : October 3, 2011 Facebook has announced the launch of a yet another feature, this one only for business pages on facebook, "People Talking About" (that might not be the final name for the metric) which will measure user-initiated activity on a Page, including posting to a Page’s Wall, “liking,” commenting, sharing a Page post or content on the Page, answering a Question posed to fans, mentioning a Page, “liking” or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place.

UDATE : October 5, 2011 (USA) Facebook is removing reviews & discussions tab from October 31, 2011 from all business pages.

What do you think, how does this fit in your scheme of things? Tell me in the comments below

P0rn Industry teaching Crowdsourcing to the world!

Learn CROWDSOURCING from them!

I was recently searching for good examples of crowdsourcing & guess what I hit, the P0rn industry! While everyone is thinking how to make money on the internet, even facebook cannot find ways to charge its users, p0rn industry is improvising & leveraging the biggest buzzword, 'crowdsourcing' to make money & get people involved!

Death of the Deals craze!

It all began with the popularity of Foursquare, then came facebook deals, yelp deals, groupon & numerous other such ventures! Most of them are still there & not closing down, yet, but it seems facebook & yelp have gotten over their craze for daily deals! Point worth noting, facebook deals was seen as a group-on killer to the extent that some people suggested facebook will acquire groupon within a year!

This week facebook announced that they are closing down facebook deals & (so did Yelp)! Anyway, facebook had launched deals only as a test project in 8 cities of the USA, so unless you are one of the businesses from those cities who used deals very frequently, this won't affect you, at all. Facebook did say in a statement, "We've learned a lot from our (Deals) test, and we'll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses." I really don't know what they mean to say, because that is all they said.

The Important Question is WHY did these giants decide to withdraw from a space that was seen as the next big thing in e-commerce just a few months back?

I have done a some analysis on this & would like to know your thoughts on this big retreat in social media commerce by facebook. (Let's not consider Yelp for this case study, it was anyway not going to beat Groupon or Foursquare anytime soon)

1. Overcrowded : Mark that word, that is the single biggest reason why most companies, brands no matter who it is, they leave a segment, be it BMW in the 90's or Google of 2009-2011, (yes, I'm referring to Goodle's failed attempts at social media). This market is overcrowded & facebook does not offer anything new the deals market, so it had to go out.
2. Sales : Google may not require sales teams to make people sign up, it does require sales teams in all the cities it launches deals to make merchants & speciality retailers sign up! & sales teams cost a lot of MONEY! Who'd know that better than me :-/

There must be other reasons too, can you think of something, post it in the comments below!

How Social Media moved a country to end Corruption!

You got it, another post on Anna Hazare & his fight against corruption. We all know how this Indian Army Veteran & Gandhian moved the whole country to a fight against corruption & finally won, at least partially. But what I emphasizing in this blog post is how he (or at least his supporters & his team) extensively used social media to move people to the cause.

Believe it or not, Anna Hazare is in the list of top 10 "Online Brands" of India! 

For a whole week, he was the SINGLE BIGGEST trending topic on twitter in India & had a fanbase of 380,000 people on facebook in just about a month, with more then 50,000 joining in in just 1 day!
The Official India Against Corruption (IAC) Facebook page received over 71,000 'likes' and 13,000 comments for mere 170 posts updated in the month of August. However, MTV India (Facebook.com/mtvindia, 2.9 million fans) and Dominos (Facebook.com/dominospizzaindia, 0.5 million fans) received 21,000 'likes' (for 59 posts) and 11740 'likes' and 1568 comments (for 41 posts) respectively, during the same duration.

Anna also has a Klout Score  of 80, that is higher than even Amitabh Bachhan & is probably the second highest in India! For those of you not from the realm (yeah, I saw Thor recently) of social media, Klout is a score of your influence in social media, mostly your twitter influence though. For eg. I have a Klout score of over 24.

Moreover, there used to be a time, when I typed Anna in Google & it suggested Anna Kournikova & not Anna Hazare, so I guess that says a lot for Anna!

Google Blogger v/s Wordpress

Blogger v/s Wordpress

The grand battle between Blogger & Wordpress is something heavy on every new blogger's mind, including my own, when I had decided to start blogging. This is not one of those posts where I will list out merits of both, there are already a lot of posts on the internet that describe & compare features, merits & de-merits of both, wordpress & blogger, & other blogging platforms too, for that matter.

For me, I will tell you the reasons why I chose Blogger over Wordpress (both wordpress.org & wordpress.com)

1. Advanced Customization : The most crucial reason was the ability to tweak with the HTML in blogger. By editing the HTML & the design elements of blogger, I could design a blog as I wanted.
2. Javascript : Ability to add Javascript, even wordpress gives you the ability to add HTML, but no javascript on wordpress, whereas on blogger you can add as much Javascript as you want!
3. Hosting : A lot of people like to host their own blogs, I don't, that is one less task for me. On blogger, I can simply pay attention to the content part rather than the hosting part as I'd have to do otherwise on wordpress.org blogs, even with the "1 click installs" that many web hosts offer. For wordpress.com, it made no sense as I'd have had to buy a custom domain package & other advanced features, why pay for something that is available for free! ;)
4. Multiple Blogs : I operate multiple blog, Official Jewelove Fine Jewelry Blog, The Ruby King Blog & My Personal Blog. I don't know how it goes on wordpress, but I knew that it was very easy to do, using one interface, on Blogger.

Those were the reasons for me, I don't know what are your requirements, if you want to discuss, feel free to post in the comments below!

P.S. For people obsessed with stats, there are about 150 million public blogs on the internet (courtesy : wikipedia) & exactly 55,956,313 of them are hosted on wordpress.com i.e. about a third. Blogger does not publish similar stats.

Vote for your favorite platform below!

Your favorite blogging platform
	Blogger
	Wordpress
	TypePad
	Tumblr
	Others
pollcode.com free polls

Facebook versus Google +

The Grand battle between facebook & google has begun again! Again, because the earlier battles were lost by Google, namely orkut, google me (which was never launched full fledgedly)

A lot of excitement has been around google plus, but it all seems to be dying out already. According to the stats, close to 20 Million people are already on Google + (remarkable given the amount of time they've been online) but the visitor stats & time spent by users on google plus is already falling, especially since the Facebook Skype collaboration! With the facebook & the skype user base, it totally roots out hangouts (where anyway just 10 people can "hang out" at a time)

Besides that, facebook enjoys the patronage of the whole web! Especially, with all the open social & web apps developed using facebook APIs, facebook has become an integral part of the web!

Another critical factor is, Brands & Businesses! Google Plus still hasn't rolled out anything comparable to Facebook Pages,whereas facebook is already planning to go to the next level this fall.

Though nobody is sure what the next level for facebook is going to be, but experts have speculated some tremendous changes coming up that might totally root out competition for facebook!

Faceboo or Google, whom do you think will be the Lord of Social Media?