There’s finally an end to the arms battle between the video industry and the so-called pirates that are sharing content on the Youtube platform. According to the Google video sharing service, over 90% of the content owners who find their work on the platform are leveraging the visibility of them to run ads on them. A new position and an interesting attitude to rule the Internet world, or at least take benefits from the work of average customers. Read More

100 millions visitors worldwide a month for Facebook. That’s the latest news we have from the next expected-to-be-awesome company. But while they gather more and more users, they do not get the right monetization model. It’s a tough job, but still FB guys don’t seem able to create stickiness from their platform members and then aren’t able to move as fast as they’d like. And without any vibrant relationship between users and company, Facebook is not in a shape to leverage visitors and turn them into monetization asset. The new design adoption rate is the proof of it with 20% of the users actually using it. Read More

Twitter’s hype may start sinking if no Twitter representative takes the floor and provides with some business data. Speculations are increasing about the volume of content generated by the company of the whale and the bird since they’ve done some moves into the business efficiency direction cutting some costs. And those actions have fired up again questions about their business model and numbers. Numbers the company doesn’t want to share, but that TweetRush is spreading. Read More

Video games industry is definitly one of the most powerful entertainment industry (look at the stats, being before music and behind book industry). They’re also the industry with the most web connected market, and they do know how to leverage it. Just look at the Starcraft II and Diablo III thrill while those games are to maybe be released in late 2009 (chek results on Google). Video games companies know well how to tease and raise interest from players in their games. Other industries should be closely looking at what’s happening in that area, and take notes to adapt their strategies to their own market if they want to drive more business in the coming years. And we can take as an example what EA Sport has done with the Tiger Woods PGA Tour licence. Read More

From the annoncement Twitter made on the developer mailing list hosted on Google Groups, Twitter’s got a new feature that may fundamentaly change user’s experience giving ability to connect status and replies like in forum threats. Which is in accordance with the recent moves they did, downscaling costs of Twitter use limiting to 2000 followers the max following users (and caping max following people proportionally to the user’s followers) and cutting SMS receiving for private messages. In accordance because that shows hints of a business model. Read More

Jeremiah Owyang has highlighted challenges the social media industry has to face in the current state. He has listed in the challenges the industry has to overcome market actors over population, amateurism, and lack of industry standards to measure ROI (read the full article here). That’s all due to the youth of the Internet market. Though that youth some industries are very experimented and we should be taking more attention to them: porn and gaming. They are the real social media thought leaders and we have a lot to learn from what they’ve done. Read More

“Small is the new big“. That was the title of Seth Godin’s post on June 5th 2005. The latest post of Sarah Perez issued on August 4th could have been “Lifestreaming is the new big”. Instead it has been “The Future of blogging revealed“. Which actually may be the right way to do. Lifestreaming has become sort of hype since Twitter generalized it (”say anything but in 140 caracters”). Facebook also generated a lifestreaming tool, the famous activity stream. And those two have moved the Internet. But why and how blogs might be killed by lifestreaming social tools? Why lifestreaming may become the new big thing? A new wave has come and if you want to surf it, you should prepare to ride it now. Read More

A Deloitte study on Corporate Online Communities by Ed Moran has made some waves into the digital world. Here’s what you can read from the study coverage done by WSJ: “Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects”. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” as Moran says. Ok, $1 million to set up a community is a big bet. Moreover when the most of the amount goes into building the structure and not into community management consulting and what’s the outcome companies can expect of. It’s sure consulting is important: how can you imagine people getting involved in cat litters, as you can see at the end of the Read Write Web post about the study of Deloitte, you have to think out of the box and identify how to engage people to make them speak of the cat litter … There are some major points marketing people have to take into account and learn from differents digital world before jumping into the community thing; involvement, time consuming, personal benefits, and others. Read More

After having shown interests in 3D with Sketchup (which you can still use to design your home to put on Google Earth, and also use its power to make 3D speed modeling, this software being enough performing to do so), Google seems to have mashed up experiences from the Wii console and SecondLife strenghts and weaknesses and gathered a smart tech team to develop a new social virtual world experiment: Lively.com. More than a new competitor landing into the social virtual worlds field, Lively.com would certainly become the test field for Google to challenge current advertising and face the new opportunities, including social media advertising placement, value added advertising embedded into conversations, technology challenge to make it work and worth time spending, and above all new and relevant metrics and ROI calculation methods. Read More

McDonald’s has launched a TV campaign to get in touch with parents on reinsurance about their food quality. A quite good TV spot managed by Leo Burnett agency. But there’s still a thing missing in that campaign. Though communication agencies like Leo Burnett laud their 360° communication ability (holistic approach as some say), they don’t care about launching in parallel an online communication plan to engage the brand with consumers to keep the conversation they started continue. Which would have been a great move, inviting parents who see the TV spot to discuss about the feelings they have about Happy Meals (that’s the main reason of the TV spot) and tap parents insights for new communication ideas and find out needs the brand has to cover to incite people to go more frequently at McDonald’s. Read More