Twitter has decided to promote a customized background service right from their ’settings’ screen on user’s profiles. Themeleon, created by COLOURLovers, allows users to go straight to their API twitter interface to create customized tiled twitter background. Using patterns that are categorized in themes like ‘retro’, ’stripes’, and ’simple shapes’, users can pick their favorite tiled pattern, and then customize it using colors of their choice or the suggested colors.

Themeleon is great for small businesses or individuals who don’t have time to create a customized background of their own in photoshop or another image editing tool.  Additionally, Themelon doesn’t place any logos or text anywhere on the user’s finished background image. They simply ask that the user tweets about Themeleon after they have finished creating their background.

Check out Themeleon in work on my twitter page and by previewing what your own page would look like. Go to settings, then design, and the link to start using Themeleon should be at the bottom right. You can also go directly to the interface by visiting here: http://www.colourlovers.com/themeleon/twitter

Other Websites that are Talking about Themeleon:
http://www.demogeek.com/2009/12/17/easily-customize-your-twitter-page-layout-with-themeleon/ (article image courtesy of this site)
http://techie-buzz.com/twitter/the-best-tool-ever-to-create-custom-twitter-backgrounds.html (screenshots included here)

Sometimes the best posts about our industry (social media and SEM) come from unlikely sources. One such example is this great article, entitled “Find out how social media can save you money” by Alison Brownrigg on nwsource, a shopping and fashion information portal owned by the Seattle Times.

Alison gives several tips to social media savvy-shoppers on how to use websites like facebook and twitter in order to garnish the best deals. One such tip is to search for different twitter hashtags (http://search.twitter.com) like #holidaydeals.

Be sure to read the full article and come back here to share more tips or let others know what you think!

Does anyone think the boom of social media is a cause of newspapers and magazines slowly dying?

Infographic by CartridgeSAVE.co.uk

Courtesy of Creative Cloud.

Other Links on the Decline of Print Media:

The Decline of Print Media: Blame Free Access

Newsday to Charge Fees to Non-Subscribers

Newspapers fold as Readers Defect and Economy Sours

Here are two new social media/internet campaigns that depend on internet and social media users to spread the word in order to win big.

The first is Yahoo!’s yodel contest, as explained by their official blog:

Today, we’re giving the Yahoo! yodel back to the people with the launch of Yodel Studio, a global casting call for the world’s best yodels. Yodelers who take us up on this challenge will personalize and reinterpret our yodel, competing for a chance to be featured in Yahoo!’s new global advertising campaign and on one of the world’s largest stages: the Yahoo! homepage. Your yodel will also be heard through the donation Yahoo! will make to local and global charities of your choice for each yodel submitted (up to $130,000).

Even though this is for a good cause, the massive amount of buzz this will surely generate around the internet probably doesn’t hurt either.

The next is a really new campaign for Butterfinger, starring Seth Green. This relies on social media, online games, blogging, and video.  As summarized in a press release on BusinessWire:

Someone has laid a finger on Seth Green’s BUTTERFINGER®. Nestlé USA today announced the launch of “Dude, Where’s My Bar?” an innovative online narrative game for consumers to help solve the mystery surrounding the October 2 theft of Green’s vintage Butterfinger bar. The “lite” alternate reality game starring Seth Green will call upon the clever, irreverent thinking of Butterfinger fans, as they compete to find and solve clues that could lead to the return of Green’s missing bar and a one-of-a-kind grand prize: a solid-gold Butterfinger bar worth $10,000.

This is definitely a fun, interactive campaign that will surely blow-up online, especially on Twitter and Facebook. I see a possible Seth Green/Butterfinger trending topic in Twitter’s future for sure. To partake in the fun and games, visit http://www.dudewheresmybar.com/

Paranormal Activity poster

You may have seen previews for the movie ‘Paranormal Activity’ on tv, and you may have seen it promoted on Facebook and Twitter. Regardless of how you may have heard of it, Paramount’s online viral marketing efforts to promote the movie have made it a success. Users can go online to the movies website and Demand for it to come to their city. If Paranormal Activity gets 1,000,000 requests, it will open nationwide (Currently, there are over 530,000 requests). A quick check shows over 3,000 requests for the Kansas City Metro alone . Once a user has ‘demanded’ the movie, they can then choose to share the link via their Twitter or Facebook account.

The movie has only been shown in about 30 theatres, but has already grossed $780,000.  Will it become so popular online that it will be shown nationwide? We can only wait and find out.

Links:

Fox News: Facebook, Twitter Fuel Indie Movie Sales

Marketing Campaign for Low-Budget Horror Flick Paranormal Activity Causes Big Buzz (has movie trailer)

With Facebook making changes in privacy practices and the Federal Trade Commission considering adopting a more aggressive approach in policing online business practices, many business owners are taking action to protect the privacy of their customers as well.

In August, the New York Times posted a piece about the growing trend of bars, nightclubs, and other entertainment venues in adopting policies that prohibit tweeting or taking photos of other groups. “In an era … when shots of you in unflattering jeans become part of your permanent Google search results,” writes Allen Salkin, “there are signs that some are tired of living their lives on the Web.”

Far more unsettling than unflattering jeans are the findings from a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which discovered that medical students were in violation of doctor-patient confidentiality by tweeting or blogging about patient details.

Of 78 US medical schools studied, over half reported incidents of medical students posting sensitive or unprofessional material online. In some cases, even when patient names were not used, enough information was provided that patients could potentially be identified. One in ten postings was found to be in blatant violation of patient confidentiality. Profanity, discriminatory language, and sexually suggestive material were common.

Few of the schools had policies that dealt with social networking and blogging. Investigators involved in the study are recommending that professional use of social media become part of media school curricula.

Headline image from the New York Times

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Karen Eisenbraun is a freelance writer and marketing specialist based in Kansas City, Missouri. She enjoys yoga, rock climbing, an occasionally jumping out of airplanes.

My first Search Engine Land article was published today! Search Engine Land is one of the top SEM websites and gets over 500k visits a month! My article offers effective ways to measure the value of social media marketing when it comes to business.

To read it, please visit How to Measure The Value of a Fan or Follower in Social Media. Don’t forget to comment and share!

Also, SearchCap: The daily SEL digest also included my article as the 1st one in their list of top news:

Yay!

As stated in my social media video that was in my previous post (Social Media: Why Should You Care?), YouTube is the 3rd most popular search engine IN THE WORLD. And since accounts are free, taking advantage of what YouTube has to offer is an easy way to promote your website and services.

These are just some of things you and your company or website can do on YouTube to customize your channel (aka your profile) and drive traffic and revenue to your site:

Integrate with Facebook and Twitter: This is so every time you do certain actions on YouTube, such as favorite a video, upload a video, or subscribe to someone, a notification is posted on Facebook and Twitter. This is an easy way to continuously drive users to your site, and it’s automatic, so you don’t even have to remember to do it!

Favorite Related Videos: When you “favorite” a video, it posts to your channel. Favoriting videos related to your company or website can provide users with a one-stop channel to get all their information related to your industry, rather than searching around YouTube for it. For example, if you are a bead making company, favoriting videos about how to make beaded jewelry or crafts is a great way to increase user traffic.

Embedding Videos: If you have a lot of videos on your website, uploading them to YouTube is a good way to let as many people as possible see it while also avoiding the server space the video takes up. Then, you can simply embed the video into your website, choosing from a variety of different sizes and colors. You can also embed any video on YouTube that hasn’t been deactivated from embedding by the user who uploaded it.

Custom Channels: YouTube allows you to edit the background and theme colors of your channel, truly making it your own. Use your logo as your profile picture and then have your site colors as the background, link, and text colors to maintain as sense of similarity between your YouTube channel and your website.

Google AdSense: Because Google owns YouTube, it’s possible to put Google AdSense on your uploaded videos. These are usually banners that run at the bottom of your video while a user is playing it. This is a great way to make some extra ad revenue, and it’s easy to set up if you already have an AdSense account.

Subscribe to Related Users: Subscribe to other users’ channels if they have similar interests as yours.  Much like Twitter, this will promote them in turn subscribing to you and many channels allow users to view who is subscribing to that channel, therefore increasing traffic to your channel if your channel profile picture pops up in the window of subscribers.

Promotion: Be sure to promote your growing YouTube channel on all available outlets- your website, social media profiles, and even in your store or on your business cards.

Like other social media websites, having a YouTube channel requires some maintenance and love, but is an easy way to build traffic, especially if you and your website was already posting videos.

I did a presentation at my full-time job last week about the importance of social media and what it means to our business, a marketing agency (BIGSHOT). Everyone thought it was a great and informative presentation and I thought I’d share what I offered.

Here’s the video I showed as an introduction:

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/BIGSHOTmktg
Free micro-blogging website where users can only post updates (or “tweets”) of 140 characters or less. Good for promoting website links, coupons, and specials. Has grown from 1.6m to 32.1m users just in the last year.

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/bigshotKC
The most popular social networking/media site, where anyone with a valid email address can join for free. Separated into networks of schools (high school and colleges/universities), companies (they have to apply for their own network), and cities (usually only metros and capitol cities, as of now). Now has over 250m monthly active users (as of July 2009), with 120m users logging on at least 1x/day. The fastest growing demographic is adults ages 35+.

MySpace:
Like Facebook, except MySpace offers the ability to completely customize profiles. Bands, Businesses, and Individuals all have profiles, there are no pages. Monthly page views have decreased over 20% in the last year, from 47.4b to 38b. Focus is on music, video, and celebrities.

LinkedIn:
For professionals; focused on business and career networking. Their slogan is “Relationships Matter.”  Had 43m registered users in over 200 countries as of July 2009. Profile focus is on job experience, skill set, what the user is looking for, and recommendations (references) from other contacts.

Why Should You Care?
In the last year, social media has become one of the most influential components of the web. Because of it, newspaper readership has been steadily declining, about 10% from April 2008 to April 2009, according to comscore (during that same time period, online newspaper readership increased 5%). Studies show that internet users also let social media affect their online shopping choices.

More Resources:

• “Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter Statistics”
• “On Twitter, Most People Are Sheep”
• “Compete: Facebook US Traffic Nearing Google, Yahoo”
• “Lollapalooza Tracks Social Media”
• “The Future of Newspapers: Who Killed the Newspaper?”
• “What the Horizon Realty Fail Can Teach You About Social Media”

Headline image from: http://blog.host1plus.com