The Promo Direct Blog

Microsoft has built an app for Washington voters to register their vote on most used social networking site, The Facebook.

Facebook, in alliance with Microsoft approached Washington State worked together to bring in a new online registration application. Washington will soon be known the very first state in the USA to bring in online registration via a social media site.

This application will be launched soon.
This application will derive basic information of the voter from Facebook with which applicants can reach the voting portal on Facebook that opens in a box.

Shane Hamlin, the State election coordinator says.

“Even though you’re on a Facebook page, the information you provide to us isn’t going through them. He further added. “They’re not collecting it and giving it to us, you’re interacting directly with us, but in a frame that is Facebook’s – and you get to us through Facebook.”

Although this process appears trendy and convenient not everyone is keen or enthusiastic about the same.

On the other hand, people have often seen Obama busy thumbing messages in his blackberry while rallies and campaigns. He shrewdly understands the electrical power of the web, especially on social media sites.

This had definitely taken Facebook to a much superior level amongst other social networking sites. Hence, small companies can now start applying new online tactics and pull more business through Facebook. With a 125 million active Facebook users in USA itself, once can analyze how much a business can bloom and mint dollars in today competitive business world. With a figure of 1,564,940 number of Facebook users, stats says that majority of these users are between the age group of 21-35 years.
Having such stats we can state the elections in Washington through Facebook will create a new history.

Other may click the below mentioned path.

http://www.facebook.com/WashingtonStateElections

The first principle of marketing is that you market what you believe in and what you use yourself. Michael DeGusta recently did an analysis of Google+ and how frequently the senior management at Google uses it. The statistics are shocking because no one would expect the web giant to be so presumptuous about its own offering.

Let’s start right at the top of the hierarchy. Whereas Zuckerberg spends all day on Facebook and Twitter CEO tweets up to even 30 times a day, stats show that since the launch of Google+ in June 2011, Google CEO, Larry Page, has only put up 7 public posts till now.

Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt can’t even claim to that number–he has never posted at all! Several board members have never posted at all either. So much for being leaders!

Of the 6 SVPs, 4 have not posted since August and between them they have only 9 posts in all!

Out of the 18 senior most people who oversee Google, 11 haven’t even joined or have never posted even once, while 5 have hardly used Google+ at all.

With such statistics, one wonders—if Google management does not like or use its own product, should we?! The product simply did not look convincing enough right from the start…a quasi-Facebook attempt, and though it had some features which gave us some hope that Facebook might finally have something to contend with, people just weren’t convinced enough about Google+. Now that we know Google’s top management isn’t either, we know we were right all along!

Facebook is out to give Google Plus a run for its money….once more!! An overhaul of user profiles is in the offing which is beyond anything Facebook has done so far.

What is going to go–

–The single column wall post display will go for good!

–No more divided panels of Facebook profile pages

–No more scratching your head over how to view what a friend was doing a few years ago, what he/she looked like, etc.

What you will see–

–A lineup of tiles that exhibit status updates, photos, links, videos, etc., in a dual column arrangement

–A wide open space at the top of your profile where you can post your favorite image—it’s all about you!

Tunnel into history–

–Browsing posts and updates from anything more than a few months ago is tedious and near impossible on the current Facebook chronological structure

–A virtual timeline on your profile allows anyone clicking on it to go back to any year and view updates or content

Dynamic history–

–FB timeline will allow you to insert events, pictures, etc., for events you missed in the past but wanted to share

Apps galore—

–On viewing your timeline profile, friends can look at a set of new apps through which they get to know which movies you go to, which songs you love, or even your favorite activities

Works great on mobile as well as on desktop–

–It adapts well to mobile devices and their respective screen sizes and looks just as good as on desktops.

Access coming soon for all–

–Right now developers can get access by signing up. However, Facebook is going to launch it for the common user over the next weeks too!

Twitter has come to the rescue of website owners, social media marketers, news organizations, and the like, who want to keep track of how much referral traffic they get from Twitter with the announcement of a new Web Analytics tool, last week.

This tool is currently free and is in beta. It will help website owners determine three basic sets of information:

1.)    How much of their website content is being shared across Twitter

2.)    How much traffic comes from Twitter to their site

3.)    Gauge effectiveness of their Tweet Buttons.

The tool will initially be accessible to a select group of partners and go on to be available to all website owners in just a few weeks, reported Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman.

Twitter has over a 100 million users most of whom “tweet” on Twitter with the aim of increasing traffic to their websites, blogs, etc. Right now there are only a few options available for websites to analyze their Twitter-driven traffic, and what is available is not only pricey but seldom effective or reliable. Third party products like bit.ly enterprise, Radian6, etc., disappoint at best! So this new tool from Twitter comes as some respite for all!

Facebook has managed to leapfrog MySpace by a mile and a double with over 700 million members, 157 million visitors in the month of May alone, and an ad revenue of $2.2 billion!

How did it happen that a business which started in a Harvard dorm room overpowered and brought down to its knees another that was started long before and even had corporate backing?

a) One theory goes that “Facebook was more effectively designed to appeal to young Internet users than MySpace was.”b) Another theory is that News Corp. simply “did not understand the Internet well enough to steer MySpace toward regular Internet users, and instead tried to use the social network as an instrument to promote its Fox products.”c) Or was it the advertising clutter on MySpace that did it in? MySpace struck an advertising deal with Google and since then the site was replete with marketing messages.

What do you think it was?