Focus Your Interests
Syndicate Your Content
Link with Love
Barter to Win
Social News
Be Active on The Social Networks
Build Relationships
Promote Loyalty and Creativity
Comment on Other Sites
Tweak Your Site Layout
Remember SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Work as a Team
Use and Develop iPhone Applications
Talk to Offline Brands
Rep Ad Inventories

Onit Marketing can help you with all of these.

To start a list,click the bar currently on the top of your Twitter homepage, you can generate one right from there.

In the future,  it will appear on the right side task bar on the basic Twitter account.

Check out Onit’s new public Partner list as an example :

http://twitter.com/#/list/onitmarketing/partners

The five billion figure mark quite impressive. Including the Twitter page views, tweets/status updates, number of users – Twitter has grown astronomically. In the 11 months, Twitter has grown more than fourfold in accordance to the increase in the number of tweets.

Are you in the conversation?

The Twitter Contest

“Enter to win” and “Reply to win” are bound for a company Twitter near you. Companies are already using Twitter to broadcast its message, educate users, promote articles, and also monitor conversations among its niche community. The contest is not a new mechanism, but social media is the new medium.

Last year, Murphy-Goode Winery brought social media to the attention of career-seekers with a contest dubbed the “Really Goode Job” where contestants made their own YouTube videos and used social channels like Twitter to build press.

At this year’s Rothbury, Onit Marketing and Merrell was able to throw a twitter contest during which followers who were able to guess The Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan’s first song and win awesome prizes. Prizes included Merrell shoes and apparel. Follow @MerrellOutside to stay up-to-date on all the latest Merrell trends and contests.

The contest is a familiar and constantly used mechanism to promote, reward, and encourage fans to participate.

The NHL, National Hockey League started the season with their #NHLPick15 contest, giving fans a chance to win free game tickets.

Find other contests on Twitter
http://twitter.com/#search?q=twitter%20contest

Remember follow us at @OnitMarketing to get the latest social media news on your Twitter.

I wanted to tip you off to a recent alchemy opportunity: Facebook has opened their fan page framework to allow brands the ability to add product catalog’s and direct links to shopping carts from Facebook. What does this mean? It means a new profit-driving presence where people spend the most time (holiday rush!)

Good examples of this can be seen below (perform a quick search within the Best Buy or Merrell catalog window and note how you can then click directly from the page):

http://www.facebook.com/MerrellOutside

http://www.facebook.com/bestbuy

We’ve had the opportunity to work on this type of page for several clients including Merrell, opening a dynamic sales channel with minimal time and investment. Our typical turn-around is less than two weeks and includes full design reviews, QA, and approvals.

In fact, there has been so much Onit client activity on Facebook and other social networks sites e.g. Twitter), that our client’s social engagement activities have reached record high populations with Onit’s managment and growth. If you’re interested in learning more about a page or social media management, please let us know immediately as we are gearing up to launch a number of pages and campaigns before Thanksgiving.

As always, let us know if there is anything you need from us or if we can be of help in any particular area.

How great was your last tweet?

Twitter’s new retweet feature will let you know just how far your tweet spread into the twitterverse.

A user-created feature, retweets are becoming a core part of the Twitter service. Project Retweeter was undertaken about a month ago by the Twitter API development team. Their plan and efforts are to make it a little easier to count retweets, see who retweeted you, observe your retweets, and provides solid credit to the original author or twitterer.

The new features of the adapted retweet will include an added resource under your tweet that gives all users retweet functionality, user profile links, and counts for a given tweet. Many users and developers had wanted a full timeline of the retweets, Twitter opted out of the full collapse and instead offers a first profile retweet listing.

Retweet is already being tested on beta profiles and will appear as an option at the end of any tweet. Clicking this will share that tweet in your Twitter stream, just like a normal retweet would. No news as to the outcome of the  “RT @username” syntax we have come to recognize. Comments on retweets will be the next issue as social media players are addressing the fact that even retweets need customization when repeated.

Twitter Basics 101

Defining Key Terms

Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Tweet: Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

Example:

OnitMarketing: Follow the latest social media news on our blog.

@reply: @replies (created by typing the @ symbol followed by the person’s username) will appear in the Tweet feed and are therefore visible to all Followers. Limited to 140 characters.

Example:

OnitMarketing: @RoniRudell Follow the latest social media news on our blog.

Direct Message (DM): private Tweets that only the Follower/addressee will see. Limited to 140 characters.

Retweet: A retweet (created by typing RT @ symbol followed by the person’s username and their tweet) is when one individual copies a tweet from someone in their network and shares it with their network. It’s perhaps the highest degree of content approval, it means that the content was so valuable and important that they were willing to share it with their network –causing it to spread from one community to the next –retweets are the core essence of the viral aspect of content spreading.

Old syntax:

RoniRudell: RT @OnitMarketing Follow the latest social media news on our blog.

We can’t wait to see what the new retweet will look like.

During my initial visit, the frontpage of Fast Flip covered all the hot topics such as Patrick Swayze’s passing and Kanye outburst during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMAs.

Google Fast Flip

What feels like a combination of Google News and Google Reader, The main webpage is separated into three sections: Popular, Topics, and Sources. Fast Flip is a great concept for people-on-the-go, but it still needs a bit of fine tuning. Strengths for the site include quick-loading images, clean demarcation of sources, and article categorization.
Some users already claim that the recommended items are narrow topic recommendations, unrelated news, and basically irrelevant content.

A foreseen improvement would be more of a basis around the recommendations (or personalization of the recommendations). Other issues are small article font sizes in images and low resolution images, both making the pages hard to read.

I honestly appreciate the blindingly fast overviews of headline pages of top newspaper sources, I am the type to grab the daily rag at the subway and flip through the pages to understand the daily happenings around the world.

An adaptation during the downturn of media, Fast Flip is another form of collaborative journalism. In the age of iPhones and Laptops, newspaper viewership and sourcing has met their digital companion.
The mobile version of Google Fast Flip is available for the iPhone and Android devices, simply navigate to the Google Fast Flip homepage on your phone.Already a struggling business, Fast Flip will pump up the newspaper industry’s online presence. How will social media be integrated with Fast Flip?

For information about Google beta applications visit, http://www.googlelabs.com/ and stay tuned as more social media innovation is going to roll out of the Onit labs by subscribing to our newsletter and following our blog feed.

The T-Mobile exclusive myTouch 3G has full 3G connectivity with the T-Mobile network, but what else?

T-Mobile myTouch 3G

One of the most interesting features in this new T-Mobile device is the pre- loaded Sherpa app, featuring GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation) which is pattern-recognition software that offers suggestions based on past behaviors.

Into the specs of the new myTouch 3G:

Touchscreen (3.2-inch TFT-LCD 320 x 480

3G (HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA 2 Mbps)

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (with A2DP)

192MB RAM / 256MB ROM.

T-Mobile App Store with thousands of options.e

Note the MyTouch 3G lacks standard features like a standard 3.5-millimeter headset jack, a file manager, and camera/photo-editing.

Consumers can try a virtual demo at http://www.t-mobilemytouch.com/emulator.aspx

Wait, there is more!

The Google Android team has confirmed that over 18 new phones can be expected to hit the market sporting  Android mobile operating system. The phones will come under 3 types of licenses dealt by the Google  team. This big push for Android was demonstrated by the free Google Ion developer phones  given to everyone who attended the Google I/O conference.

Is this an “iPhone killer?”

On the smartphone market, there is not going to be any iPhone-killers. Apple stepped up to the plate first and delivered home runs with the iconic iPhone, iPhone 3G, and this year’s iPhone 3G S. Their plans to release a new phone every year will help them dominate the market place and existing consumer-base. Other manufacturers, such as Google, should only hope to capture market share using innovation and brand strategy. With that said, companies can try to solve some of the consumer’s biggest problems with the iPhone. Multitudes of AT&T/iPhone users want to use tethering, Slingplayer, and Skype without restrictions (as most WinMob and Symbian phones allow). Companies need to aim farther, by even slightly criticizing the revolutionary iPhone, look for ideas and develop from the experience.

With the myTouch 3G, T-Mobile and Google are offering some customizable bells and whistles to differentiate it, but is it enough?

You’re a social media alchemist, visionary, a tactician, and a leader…the perfect combination of digital savant meets business strategist meets the new marketing kid in the office…then someone throws a serious question into the conversation like “which is better for my business, Facebook or Twitter?”

Social media is in your blood; you’re excited when posting status updates about your life to audiences who seemingly demand new tweets, photos, videos, experiences and updates twice an hour. How does that translate for a business?

Through Facebook’s multiple API platforms and technologies, keeping up-to-date with all your fans and the consumers in your network is easy. With Twitter, your business and your thoughts can be instantly sent into the universe for immediate viewer imprints and attention. So which is better? I can’t say, because they serve different and similar functions. Facebook and Twitter are comparable like marketing and public relations are comparable – at some point the two blur.

In a recent survey, most individuals voted for Facebook as a preferred method of social media communication. Participants claimed that Twitter is limiting with a 140 character cap, usually leading users to other sources of information like a website or blog. In Facebook, entire communities can be built and harnessed using Facebook Pages. Both companies have mobile apps and a wide variety of third-party applications. Both companies have evolving business plans and delivering new product concepts almost monthly. Facebook recently introduced its search feature, which puts its foot in the same market as the Googles and Yahoos of the world.

This month, Facebook has embraced Twitter allowing users to publish to Twitter from their Facebook Pages profiles. Facebook engineer, Michael Gummelt explains, “Twitter was a natural next step to link with Facebook Pages because it is a powerful tool for broadcasting short messages widely.”
More details about the application:
“If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.”
Source: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=123006872130

Returning to the original question, you must have different strategies approaching both platforms. What works in PR does not necessarily work in marketing. Social media bridges the gap between traditional communications within a business and its consumers with new web tools and applications. Users expect companies to engage, listen, and share. As the company, you connect with people on a new level allowing transparency that hopefully gets you noticed in a good way. Consumer outreach and communication is an enduring business value and becomes more crucial and consequential with the proliferation of information in the 21st Century.

Here at Onit, we manage a portfolio of initiatives in the social media space. Social media marketing’s role is two-fold: first, to ideate a strategy with the company, coming up with the big ideas that will wow your fans and win business; and then to execute. Expect work on profiles, microsites, sweepstakes, dedicated email campaigns, rich media ads, etc. for at least two social media sites. In essence, your agency can handle the campaign management from start to finish on both Twitter and Facebook.

What are your thoughts? Is Twitter a threat to Facebook? Can we categorize the two companies under the same umbrella?

Image Source: www.sga.neu.edu

As part of the agreement, all 12 FriendFeed Mountain View employees will join Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering divisions and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and previously Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

Facebook has had its sights on FriendFeed for a long time. The company had approached FriendFeed only two weeks after its October 2007 launch. “Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.” On-and-off talks have concluded with this acquisition.

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit. He added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

As of this week, the two services will be integrated and planning will determine the future synergy for both products of similar platforms. On FriendFeed, Bret Taylor has announced that “FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team.” Behind all the excitement, there is no specific plan for integrating FriendFeed with Facebook or killing off FriendFeed yet. The significant overlap of features between the two products brings into question what will happen next?