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Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
Here are a few reasons you cannot ignore Empire Avenue. This is some of what I have discovered after almost two weeks playing on the latest social media hot property.
In case you don’t know, Empire Avenue allows people across the world to buy and sell shares in individuals, brands and businesses. Your share price is based entirely on your social media activity, both within the site, and also on an ever-increasing variety of social media properties, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Tumblr, blogs and so on.
It could be seen as a game, but it is also much more than that.
Empire Avenue launched around a year ago, in beta, to a small group of friends and family of the Canadian developers. It has obviously undergone some fairly radical changes during that time; including a major reset which returned everyone’s share prices, which they had worked extremely hard to increase, to 10eaves.
(The virtual currency on the site is Eaves, which you can earn by carrying out a multitude of tasks – from joining and commenting in discussion groups, earning badges, adding new content, buying and selling shares, and generally getting engaged with the site and the social media sites which it links to.)
Empire Avenue only really began to come to the notice of the social media world a few months ago when individuals such as Robert Scoble (aka Scobleizer) began “playing” and then interviewed the man behind the Empire Avenue concept, Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana
I joined because there is never any point in hearing about something new and not looking into it. And some of these applications cannot be assessed easily in just a single visit when you have half an hour to spare. Empire Avenue needs a small amount of dedication to really get to grips with what it could prove capable of – for businesses, for brands, for internet marketing agencies, for individuals looking to network.
So, after two weeks here are a few thoughts about its potential value to YOU.
Firstly, if you are not actively engaged in social media by now, you a) should be and b) EAv (as it is known on twitter) will help you to see where your efforts may be better co-ordinated and effective.
Your profile and interests offer you the chance to describe to passers-by (and potential investors) what you and your business is all about. You can go into detail using the interests section, and this offers you a great chance to make the most of your SEO keyword list.
By joining up all of your social network accounts – Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Tumblr, Flickr, youtube, RSS Feeds from your social bookmark accounts, etc – you become a better prospect to invest in. BUT, this action alone will help you see where you are missing a few tricks to get onto as much social media real estate as possible, and to populate these sites with VALUABLE CONTENT for your target audience.
As you can see from this screenshot, the boxes on the right show the scores out of 100 for social networks. This would immediately infer that more work is required on the Facebook fanpage, LinkedIn, Flickr and Youtube to bring those accounts into line with Twitter, the Facebook profile and Empire Avenue activities. This is 100% true that those accounts are under-used and partially neglected – these are my own personal accounts and I never seem find time to upload videos or photos.
So, if you have only one video on your YouTube channel – isn’t it about time you made another?! If you have no photos on Flickr, why not add your entire product catalogue, add keyword rich descriptions, and tag them all?
All of these actions will also help with your search engine optimisation efforts. So, it’s a win-win.
Are you using an agency to do your social media marketing? Or using in-house resources? Once all your accounts are linked up, you have a great, free, third party tool to assess how well those actions are working. Eav assigns a score out of 100 for the content and engagement of your activities, and this is very valuable for any business to see whether your social media campaigns are being effective.
If you are using a social media agency to carry out your campaigns, this is a very simple mechanism for checking whether activities are being carried out regularly, and are capturing the necessary target audience and engaging with them. It need not be the only tool – there are also sites such as Klout.com and PeerIndex.com which help you measure effectiveness and authority as well. Empire Avenue is just one of many options to measure your social collateral, but it is a fun and easy way to do so, whether you are an internet marketing client or an agency providing social media marketing services.
The final comment has to be about the networking and exposure possibilities. Just having a presence on the site does give you a chance to engage with others in your industry, in your area, and whilst it is still new and fresh, it allows you a unique opportunity to talk to some of the biggest brands and names in the business. After all, it is not every day you get a message like this:
Or this:
More to follow soon as more of the intricacies and subtleties of the application reveal themselves.
Tags: agency, chris pirillo, co-ordination, empire avenue, marketing, Microsoft, share price, Social Media, strategy, zune
Posted in Blog, Small Business Resources, Social Media
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Saturday, April 2nd, 2011
It has to be time to ask – is this innovation or are they all following the cloud crowd?
An interesting social media cartoon has surfaced today….implying that each of the CEOs of the top social media players are watching, and imitating, their competitors far too closely.
Is it accurate? Well, without access to each CEO, it can only be guesswork, but are we not all beginning to feel that there is a deal of toe-stepping and encroaching on each other’s territories going on?
In fact, aren’t many of the social media worlds beginning to look remarkably similar? Even SXSW failed to throw up a clear winner in innovation this year.
As a business looking to use social media for your internet marketing campaigns, it may be worth considering whether during the next year these companies are going to become ever closer, whether one will find a unique selling point, or whether 2 years of similarities may force a new player out of the box?
And if they are all much of a muchness, where do you put your budget if there is barely a cigarette paper to fit between them over the coming months?
Your thoughts would be welcomed.
Tags: business, facebook, Google, Microsoft, Promotion, social, Social Media, twitter
Posted in Blog, Social Media
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Saturday, March 12th, 2011
The horrendous events in Japan have created an unexpected problem for Microsoft and their search engine, Bing. Whilst trying to be generous and offering financial aid to Japan, someone in the marketing department thought it would be an idea to publicise the donation on Twitter, with a promise of a $1 donation per Retweet of the original message, up to a maximum of $100,000.
Whilst many Twitter users have been happy to RT, the inevitable has happened – the Twittersphere has erupted at the thought that Microsoft are attempting to cash in, and we are seeing a tsunami of bad PR.
Too many people feel that this is a somewhat crass moment to seek publicity, especially considering that the latest news appears to show that possibly many thousands of people have lost their lives. The growing feeling on Twitter is that Microsoft should just have donated the money, without seeking to promote the search engine at the same time as people are dying.
This is not the first time that a large company has attempted to cash in on a global crisis or breaking news story. It surely won’t be the last. But it should act as a salutory reminder to all marketing departments that it only takes 140 characters to create an unholy PR mess that could damage a brand reputation for a long time.
Tags: Bing, japan, Microsoft, pr, reputation management, twitter
Posted in Blog, SEM Industry, Social Media
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Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
You can’t beat competition to inspire innovation and keep everyone on their toes. It looks like Microsoft are being quite determined in their attempt to capture some of Google’s market share in the search market.
Wolfram Alpha had a marginally rocky start last June when, after a blaze of pre-launch publicity, the servers crashed big style and then it turned out much of the world didn’t understand the difference between ‘search engine’ and ‘knowledge engine’. Meanwhile, Bing, after similarly loud launch, has crept slowly into the consciousness of many and has become the favourite search engine of choice for a few.
It will be interesting to see whether this turns into a re-run of the Apple vs MS debate/saga, with a minority of users adamantly declaring the solution is AlphaBing and the ROW sticking with the only solution many of them have known since they first got online.
In some ways, it is hard to see how people will adapt from the “Just Google it” mentality, which seems to have become a common term in a vast number of languages. It’s more than just engrained habit; for some, it’s a little like being unaware there are other operating systems, software choices and so on out there, Google is THE internet search engine.
What search engine(s) do you use? Do you prefer Bing? Or Google? Or A N Other eg the meta search engines? Do you think AlphaBing is a match made in heaven, or doomed to lose? What do you think Wolfram Alpha and Bing together will bring to the search party?
Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, search engine, wolfram alpha
Posted in Google, SEO
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Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Unless you have been under a rock, you will by now know that Yahoo and Microsoft have joined forces in the search engine arena.
Although some of the commentary in the blogosphere is mere speculation, with many answers being unknown until the deal goes through (which could take quite some time), it is worth considering what the deal means for SEOs.
Even though Bing is quite a new player on the market, this deal means it is time to take it seriously. Estimates show it may hold around 15% market share following this deal, and that, compared to say AOL with around 2%, means optimising for Bing has just moved up the priority list. Time to experiment with its algorithm, folks – you may have a couple of years though so you don’t need to clear your desk right this minute! In the meantime, you really need to get to know Bing’s webmaster tools, especially as these will help you compare how Google and Bing may view your site(s) differently.
Losing link info – Rand Fish is postulating that link data might become scarcer. For those in the coding business and SEO, it might be time to look at ways to replace what could well go missing when Yahoo fully adopts Bing.
Loyalty – there are many who are struggling to decide where their loyalties now lie, as users, and Microsoft’s involvement with Yahoo could affect this, pushing some (possibly a miniscule number of) users to Google permanently. However, it is likely that for the many who seem to manage to get through life without disliking Microsoft, Bing’s potentially better search features will be the pull, giving Bing an increasing market share.
There will now only be two major players in the PPC arena, which may simplify matters for SEOs, but it will undoubtedly mean that days of cheapie listings on MS AdCenter and Yahoo! Search may be over, depending on how things pan out.
In some ways, it is good to have simplicity, but as in all things, with more competition comes more innovation, and it is to be wondered whether we are now prisoners to these two monoliths’s plans, or whether new entrants may attempt to take them on in the future.
Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, search, Web search engine, yahoo
Posted in SEM Industry
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Friday, June 5th, 2009
Statcounter reports that Bing has overtaken Yahoo! for the #2 search engine spot today.
Microsoft’s failure to purchase Yahoo! last year for $40bn may have unwittingly led to a cheaper and faster solution to Steve Ballmer’s stated desire for MS to be the number 2 search engine within 5 years.
However, tis early days for Bing, so let’s see how it pans out over the next few months when the novely wears off and the marketing flurry slows down a little.
Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, search, search engines, Steve Ballmer, Web search engine, yahoo
Posted in Google, SEM Industry
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