If MySpace and Apple’s acquisition habits are any indication, tunesBag probably has a decent chance of getting acquired if they play their cards right.

The thing that has to jump out at you is the implications for social commerce. TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters also alludes to the upside.

There’s also a social layer wrapped around the music streaming and backup service, which makes it easy for users to share individual songs and playlists with others by e-mail or via social networks, as well as rate and recommend them publicly."

As Wauters showed with his upload, even though the song he tried to share wasn’t loaded to the cloud, there was another digital asset waiting to be monetized – a Depeche Mode video. I think there’s enough momentum in the video space alone to garner some attention for tunesBag. Hell, cutting a deal with YouTube might fund them alone. Either way, I like the innovation happening with music.

Image via CrunchBase

• Success Factors for Brands on Facebook [ADWEEK]
  "There’s no media cost to setting up on Facebook, but brands often find the quickest way to build a sizable following is through — you guessed it — paid advertising.

  Take Little Debbie. Nearly six months ago the snack food brand set up shop on Facebook with a standard fan page. It posted updates, uploaded old TV spots and waited. Crickets. Then, last Thursday, it rolled out an engagement ad "reach block" that messaged 21-49-year-olds touting a sweepstakes for a Smart car with the option to become a fan. Within 12 hours, Little Debbie’s fan base went from 5,000 to over 125,000. It welcomed people with a message asking their favorite Little Debbie snack. It got over 6,000 comments." (tags: facebook brands social+media social+networks)

• M-Commerce’s Big Moment [BusinessWeek]
  "Yet, m-commerce may finally be hitting its stride. And some analysts who in recent years became more conservative in their forecasts are now having to make upward revisions. In January, consultant ABI Research projected North American sales of physical goods ordered via cell phone would reach $544 million this year, up from $346 million in 2008. Now, Mark Beccue, senior analyst at ABI, is considering updating his 2009 forecast to $800 million. "I thought hockey-stick growth was going to come in 2010, but it looks like it’s already a hockey stick," Beccue says. "Next year, it will double again."
  (tags: retail iphone mobile m-commerce mobile2.0)

Posted via web from George Dearing dot com

I pulled this out of  Brightkite’s newsletter this morning to show how easy it is to build customer loyalty by simply listening. How many folks do you think this guy told after he got his free beer?

Related articles

Image via Wikipedia

• Marketing: True Efficiency Requires More Than Cutting Costs – Advertising Age – CMO Strategy
  "Marketers must also determine whether, in terms of generating ideas and strategy, it would be helpful to include external partners. For example, P&G drives a significant amount of new-product innovations by third parties. And many marketers partner with marketing-mix-modeling firms to better understand the right marketing mix."
  (tags: CMO business+strategy marketing innovation technology)

  

• Texas A&M Takes an Active Approach to Social Media Marketing [Campus Technology]
  "Diane McDonald, associate director of marketing at Texas A&M University, explained that reaching these prospects via social media takes more than a static institutional Facebook page; it takes an active approach to engage them."
  (tags: universities social+media marketing facebook social+networking)

Image by edkohler via Flickr

• Stores, brands tap into power of frugal bloggers – AP
  "We see (moms who blog) as a vital force for our brand strategy," said Gap spokeswoman Louise Callagy. "They are the voice of our customers, and we are working harder to develop and maintain their trust and respond to their feedback."
  (tags: mommy+bloggers social+media blogging brands blogger+outreach PR)
• Cisco CTO reasserts video’s value for work, home
  ".3,000 Cisco executives attended a virtual conference earlier this year that included video feeds and other media. The result was that the conference cost one-fourth of what an actual conference would have cost, and the satisifaction level was "as good or higher." A spokesman added that Cisco saved $2 million on that conference, with costs going from $2,800 per person to $680."
  (tags: cisco collaboration ROI telepresence virtual+meetings C-Suite)

I just got wind of CTN Green’s video mashup contest after they followed me on Twitter.

Take a look at their model if you haven’t. The company seems to have many of the traits I would say a 21st century media company should have:

• Strong focus on content
• Industry depth
• Broad digital footprint / Social Media Communication
• Media alliances and syndication partners
• No reliance on print/ digital delivery formats

While its web properties look a bit clunky pulling off the necessary aggregation, the company’s content is far-reaching, covering everything from green events and green jobs to  Eco-friendly news across the globe. Even its magazine is delivered in a purely digital format.

CTN Green’s Twitter feed is also worth a follow as it provides a healthy stream of conversation and links on all sorts of Eco-related news and happenings. 

Related articles

• Tweetbuzzer.com
  Conversations are happening with or without you. Pay attention.

I may have to start an iPhone blog soon. I’m now  up to four screens worth of apps ranging from IM aggregators like Fring to novelty services like Ocarina and UrbanSpoon. 

Animoto is one app I installed this morning and in minutes I was compiling a slideshow of iPhone pics with a matching soundtrack to boot.

After signing up on the Animoto website, you can upload content and quickly edit your slideshow. I created one movie using their web-based app and another on the iPhone version of the app. What I can’t figure out is why my accounts aren’t synced. The one I created on Animoto’s website doesn’t appear on the iPhone-based app. I followed Animoto on Twitter so I expect I’ll hear something soon.

A  few other nice touches include the ability to preview soundtracks and an email notification that your masterpiece is ready. It took me 3 or 4 minutes to produce the video below.

You can also see how the Fremium model (below) comes into play as users become more sophisticated and develop a need (addiction) for additional bandwidth and formats.  It should be interesting to see Animoto’s business model evolve as additional social services become easily connected allowing Animoto users to share and connect regardless of device or platform. The “Video from Friends” option should use OpenID or Facebook Connect to let me populate my widget on Facebook or LinkedIn instead of having to perform a one-off embed each time.

All in all, Animoto pulls the experience together quite nicely.

I’m always fascinated at collaboration behind the firewall because it’s been such a tough road to hoe for so many years. Getting people to share what they know and to be generally open about their ideas is no doubt daunting for most.

I’d read about Best Buy’s social media efforts, mostly in the form of its Blue Shirt Nation project, but I hadn’t seen the depth of detail behind the company’s motivation until seeing the video below.

With all the talk about the inability to show demonstrable ROI in social computing, it’s refreshing to see a company lay out the benefits so clearly. Though all the gains from social media can’t be distilled down into hard numbers, there’s plenty of returns across the business. One instance was a substantial jump in 401K enrollments after users were encouraged to develop a social media-based campaign targeted at its younger, gen-Y workforce. Through the use of video, blogs and other user-generated content, 401K dissenters were converted after the benefits were delivered in a collaborative, engaging way.

Best Buy simply found a way to engage passionate employees and gave them a voice. That’s a return on participation (ROP) in my book.

I’ve started using Utterli lately to push out content. Last week I published thoughts on a few Twitter-based apps. Thanks for listening.

I continue to like T. Boone Pickens’ communication strategy. While it helps to have deep pockets, you still have to pull it all together and execute. His so-called “army” is actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting itself with all sorts of digital tools and services that spur the creation of consumer-generated content. Over the last 48 hours there was a battle brewing over whether or not NBC would show a recent Pickens’ ad.

Below was the first message I saw early this morning. I didn’t realize that I was a half day late seeing the initial email message. The first blog post was this:

We have four new ads which are either on the air, or ready to go on the air. The ads have been “cleared” by every network… except for NBC which has refused to clear a :15 second ad about Iran.

Right when I was about to post this, I circled back to the site and saw a more recent blog post that updated the situation.

On Wednesday the Pickens Plan Army engaged in a battle against NBC. The network had refused to run our 15-second ad talking about how Iran–IRAN–is moving quickly to CNG-powered vehicles so they can free up their oil to sell it to us at $120 per barrel.Guess what: We won the battle!By Wednesday evening, NBC had re-examined its position and told us they WOULD allow our ad to run in its original form.

There’s no questioning the web’s impact on things like this. Call it social media, citizen journalism or what have you, the fact remains we’re in the midst of some big shifts around traditional media. The winds of change are here.

This one’s spinning around the web, most recently seen in the Twitterverse.
Enjoy.

| View | Upload your own

This post wasn’t meant to be a soapbox for why you need a widget strategy. That’s been broadcast numerous times and there’s even events dedicated to all things widgety.

• Facilitates content distribution. (remember when you had to send content to webmasters and the IT bottleneck?)
• Ensures brand integrity. It’s the easiest digital billboard you’ll ever create.
• Highly portable and mobile-friendly. Great newsletter and email marketing add-ins.
• Feeds users’ habits of consuming bite-size chunks of micro-content.
• Zero maintenance as content is automatically updated via XML and RSS feeds.
• Drives blog and RSS subscribers.
• Social Network (SoNet) ready content that’s easy to integrate and publish to.
• They’re a poor man’s enterprise mash-up.
• You don’t need a “Dummy’s Guide to Widgets” to create them.

                       

Jimmy Guterman, editor at at O’Reilly Radar’s Release 2.0, points us to a recent press release that had me ROTFL. If all releases were as honest and open as Backcountry.com’s we might actually read the first line or two.

How’s this for the lead..

After mooching off the open source world for 10 years and making millions, Backcountry.com finally threw the Postgres community a bone in the form of a database synching tool curiously called Bucardo.

And judging by their PR firm’s (Base Camp Communications) transparent writing style, they clearly architected it. Good for them.

Everyday there’s hundreds of instances where the rise of social media is impacting the way we think, share ideas, and bring about change. The latest incarnation comes from a 23 year-old graphic designer from Pennsylvania. iJustine, as she’s known, filmed herself opening up her iPhone bill from AT&T and sparked enough of a viral trend to surpass 300K views on YouTube so far.

I can hear it now.

Have you seen that video on YouTube?! Makes us look like a bunch of idiots I tell you.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, youtube, social+media, video, iPhone, environmental+awareness

During a press briefing in Seoul, Google’s Eric Schmidt was asked about the flavors of today’s evolving Web, specifically Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Before describing Web 2.0 as a “marketing term” and distilling it down to AJAX, Schmidt told the reporter, “as far as Web 3.0, I think you just invented the term.”

Apparently Schmidt’s oversimplification of Web 2.0 has folks amused. I noticed several Twitters ( or is it Tweets?)  within the hour of posting this poking fun at Schmidt’s take.

And while it’s obvious AJAX  improves the way we interact with content on the web, it’s just technology. Web (whatever the number) dot oh won’t be remembered under the brand of any technology. It’ll be remembered in terms of our collective experiences. I can see the nostalgic headlines already, “Web 2.0, The Era We Made Contact” or “Web 2.0, The True User Experience.”

Schmidt went on to guess at what the next rev of the Web might bring, essentially describing a world of lightweight mashups accessible on any device and pulling the their data from “the cloud.” He finished by predicting the applications would be distributed virally, through social networks, email, and other forms of electronic communications.

Seen first @ Read/Write Web..YouTube posting by KoreaCrunch