What Vogelstein fails to look at and FB doesn’t highlight is where the bulk of the FB members are. The largest market for Internet advertising is the US, but up until very recently FB wasn’t even outperforming MySpace in the US let alone Google.

So where is Facebook really creating a stir?

Somehow I don’t think  Turkey, Croatia and Tunisia are the markets where the majority of corporations are looking to target their advertising dollars.

According to Vogelstein Facebook thinks its users will turn to each other rather than Google to navigate the Web.  “Why settle for articles about the Chrysler bankruptcy that the Google News algorithm recommends when you can read what your friends suggest?” asks Vogelstein.   Based on a little experiment of my own I am not so sure friends know best.  Back in May I was going on a 3 week trip that would afford plenty of time for reading.  I put out a request on FB to find out what friends would recommend I read.  I gave them details of books I had read and enjoyed and were the type I’d like to take along.  I also went to Amazon and searched the titles that I had already read knowing that their algorithm would make suggestions based on this.  Guess what?  The anonymous crowd on Amazon outperformed my friends and gave me better suggestions!

Beyond recommendations this step has the broader goal of  “redefining search”  Here Mark Zuckenberg, founder and CEO of Facebook may have made a critical error in judgement colored by his apparent disdain for Google.  Facebook encourages its 200 million users to use Microsoft’s search engine and has installed it on FB to make this easier.  The problem is that Microsoft’s search engine has been notoriously poor at offering the results users want.  If its latest effort, Bing, proves to be no better than all Zuckenberg has really accomplished is to diminish the experience of FB members.

Step 3? Colonize the Web.  To this end FB has formed partnerships with 10,000 other sites which they call Connect.  Now when you log into any of these 10,000 sites you can see your friends activities as they relate to the site and they can see yours.  This might be all well and good if it was just between friends, but Facebook has a creepy propensity for spying on its members and sharing data that members think is private with others, just think Beacon.

Finally we come to the Achilles heel of FaceBook.  In order to survive they eventually must start making money.  The current plan for making money is through running ads.  The problem is that FaceBook is not search engine and its users go to it as a destination site not a jumping off point.  More over, the last thing that we want when interacting with friends is to be interrupted by annoying advertisements.  Yes, Facebook has a tremendous amount of data on its individual members.  It knows if you like dark chocolate, going to the beach, what you like to read, if you’re pregnant or if you’re planning a vacation to Disneyland.  Not only can it serve you messages about the cutest baby clothes it can serve your friends ideas for baby shower gifts.  The problem for FB is that one of the things we’ve all learned from the past 15 years of using the Internet is how to filter out the information that surrounds the content we’re interested in.

The Internet is never going back to the pre Web 2.0 world where the only object was message delivery and information gathering.  What remains to be seen is if the interactive part of the Web can be monetized as well as the information gathering part has been.  It may well turn out that FB is simply not where the money is and if that’s the case than there massive server costs will surely bring them to their knees.

Apparently the tulips are going to bloom late this spring and the farm has updated it’s “field report page” to read ” Due to the weather, the field is still green and there is almost no color.”    Reading that, from April 4th on their website, made me think what a perfect opportunity they have for using Twitter to microblog and build anticipation about peak bloom and the best weekend or day to visit.  Since they have events going on each weekend the could tweet those.  They could even tweet the capacity of their parking for folks who are checking their iPhones as they tour the Mid-Willamette valley.  They could also avoid some of the frequent calls they get about the condition of the gardens, the weather etc.

Thinking about how the Wooden Shoe could use Twitter also got me thinking about how my local nursery, the plant kind, could use it.  As a gardener I can guarantee you that I am interested in when certain things happen.  For example, I’d like to know when your organic vegetable starts are in.  I’d like to know when something goes on sale, and I would certainly appreciate being updated if there’s a particular plant mold or bug that hits the area and what I should do about it or at least where on your site I can go to find out about it.

If you’re a business and your on Twitter drop us a comment below and let us know how you’re using Twitter to help your customers.

According to Hitwise nearly 20% of the traffic leaving Twitter is going to social media sites like Facebook and MySpace.  The next biggest category is entertainment, followed by news and media, then business and finance.  About 5% are going to online shopping sites and classifieds and even fewer to education.  Here’s the graph.

If it seems like the potential for traffic has diminished a bit based on the next moves of the Tweeple out there, you’re right, but that’s not all.  If you’re not Tweeting, but you’ve heard the media hype you may think everyone but you is using Twitter.  Not so.   Twitter just hit the 8 million user point in March according to Compete.  That may seem like a lot, but it that’s less than one account for every New Yorker.   If you’re a local business and you break that down to how many people in your city are on Twitter chances are far greater that your potential client or costumer isn’t on twitter than that they are.  The fast growth of Twitter means this may change quickly.   Nick O’Neill of the Social Media Times predicts that there will be 50 million user accounts by the end of the year.  Will they all be legitmate and active Twitter accounts?  Probably not, but that’s another story.

My recommendation is that you not spend your time trying to get new  local clients and customers from Twitter right now, but check back for future posts on how you may be able to use Twitter to better server your customers and keep them coming back to you.

Jeff Berman the president of Sales and Marketing for MySpace said about the launch that “MySpace Local offers American small businesses a free way to reach more than 70 million local MySpace customers and engage in the online conversation.”

The first thing you should know if you’re a small business is that right now MySpace Local is in Beta and it is starting off with restaurants and night life spots, but that is likely to change fairly quickly.    The next thing to know is that MySpace Local is using CitySearches database to pull business in for it’s users to review, so your business needs to be listed with CitySearch before it will show up on MySpace.

Here’s what a local business page on MySpace Local might look like.  People will be able to view such things as videos from the business, a restaurant’s menu, and insider tips.

The can also view a message from the business and  visitors to your MySpcae local business page will be able to download coupons.   In case you haven’t caught on coupons are very popular in the current economy.

When someone reviews your business on MySpace that review is going to show up under their current updates in the Friends Updates of all the pages of their friends

Here’s what the whole thing looks like on a MySpace user’s page.

In conjunction with this MySpace is launching “hubs” for all major U.S. cities and these city hubs will include new local search functionality
Users can browse and search by: (1) Neighborhood, (2) Small Business Categories, (3) Cuisine Type
Hubs include citywide user reviews  as well as celebrity reviews featured on each hub page where celebrities rate and review their favorite hot spots

You can read their full press release at Reuters

And see the full slide show from which the above were taken here.

I didn’t actually catch this story until I read it at Mike Blumenthal’s blog the other day and then went back to listen to it here, that said I do know that NPR is all a twitter with twitter and I can imagine they ate this story up, without thinking twice about it.

Study social media sites long enough and you’ll see a pattern that comes up over and over again.  Those looking to shortcut the process of rising to the top will attempt to do two things.  First they’ll try and make themselves look more popular than they are.  In general this is done by creating fake accounts.  On Digg, for example fake accounts are created and then these are used to  vote up stories.  Annalee Newitz wrote about buying diggs in Wired back in 2007.

In order to create a story newsworthy enough to get national media attention someone on Twitter would need a lot of followers.  At the time of the story kogibbq was reported to have over 8000 followers, last time I checked they were over 13,000.   Are all of these accounts legitimate?  Maybe, but maybe not.  I decided to sift through some of their “followers’ and found a lot of instances of accounts where kogibbq was the only account being followed and in many of those cases, like this one:

and this one

and this one

the followers have never uttered a tweet nor do they have any followers themselves.   I certainly don’t have the resources to sift through the thousands of so called followers and see how many more there are like this, nor is that really my point.

Here’s the thing.  Right now every one is singing the praise of Twitter and a lot of it is deserved, it’s pretty cool, and if you’d like to follow me there please do,   but if you’re a small local business wondering if you can leverage Twitter into thousands of new customers I urge you to go slowly.   Try and get a feeling for how many people in your market might be interested in your service or product are on twitter, try not to listen to the hype and remember that while lots of people would like to sell you their $127.99 course on how to maximize profits from Twitter the territory here is really new and untested.  The success many of those folks wanting to sell you a course for $127.99 have had is in all the people they’ve successfuly sold the course to over Twitter by hyping it as the “must do” marketing technique of the year.

All that said, if you’re a local business and your Tweets have helped you grow your business please share it in the comments.  I would love to hear from you because it’s not that I think Twitter will never be useful to the local business person it’s just yet to be proven.

Searches for MySpace in the US actually peaked in July of 2007 and have been on a decline ever since, but they had so much initial momentum it has taken a long time for Facebook to catch up and Facebook still has never reached the heights that MySpace did with US users.

I wouldn’t go out and bet on a two week trend, but it is interesting that for the last two weeks as the interest in Twitter has continued to heat up searches for both MySpace and Facebook have declined.    If you dig a little deeper you find that while Facebook is leading for news stories right now, they’re not the kind of stories fb might prefer.  “Facebook virus” is second only in search volume to “new facebook” and in the top ten is also “Facebook worm”.    In the meantime top searches for Twitter all positive and include Twitter tips, Twitter search, how to Twitter, which show increased interest by people new to the idea of Twitter.  Furthermore Twitter has caught up in search volume for news with MySpace, suggesting if they can stay in the limelight they could see much bigger gains before the year is out.

How does it work?

Being called pay per click by some it is really pay per view.  Just like in Adwords, you set up a campaign, choose your keywords, choose how much you want to pay and set a daily budget.

Launch your video and when people search YouTube, and by the way more people search YouTube than Yahoo!, your video may show up for their search.

Is it a good idea?  Well it can be, but it would be worth your while to spend some time looking at the types of videos that people watch on YouTube.  Your not going to get many viewers if you launch a boring commercial.

Keep LEGS in mind.

Laughs, educational, grungy, sexy.  Those are the kinds of videos people watch

For full details go to https://ads.youtube.com/