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Through Buddy Media, HootSuite & More, Google+ Pages Get Third-Party Management Tools

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:36:06 +0000

Last week, Google+ launched “Pages” to enable brands, products, companies, businesses, and everyone else under the sun, to build their very own tailored Google+ presence. Google+ Pages may sound reminiscent of Facebook Pages, and they are, albeit with a few important twists. ( Josh goes into depth about how Google+ could one-up its rival in the battle over Pages here .) As one might guess, Pages offers brands and businesses a similar experience to that of individual Google+, in that brands can place people into Circles to share content with that select group, launch video hangouts to have face-to-face conversations with their customers, and it all works through the site’s mobile app. As G+ Pages roll out to all users, Google wants to give businesses looking to managing their Pages a set of integrations that will enhance their experience on the platform and give them increased flexibility. Today, Google+ announced that it is launching a pilot program that will essentially allow businesses and brands to manage their Google+ Pages using a number of third-party applications, like Hootsuite and Buddy Media, to name a few. In total, six social media companies will get early access to the Google+ API to, in Google’s words, “test Google+ functionality in their management tools”. These six companies, which include Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, HootSuite, Involver, and Vitrue, will make a subset of their tools available to Page owners to enable them to manage circles, publish to Google+, access insights, and monitor usage. According to Google+ these six companies were chosen because of “their extensive experience helping brands and businesses manage and assess their presence on social networks”. Though it’s still early, these social media integrations seem to offer the beginnings of what could be some extensive functionality for Page owners, specifically in terms of targeting, advanced Page management, and analytics. As one can see from Heresay’s announcement , for example, the company’s partnership with Google+ will allow Page owners to schedule posts and campaigns across brand pages, use the company’s CRM tools to manage customer relationships, and take advantage of social analytics to view metrics across every brand and local page. And perhaps more importantly, Heresay will allow its users to target content to specific Google+ Circles, allowing marketers to post (and schedule) campaigns that reach specific demographics within their audience. (Hootsuite, too, offers similar message-tailoring to specific subsets of a business’ audience.) For example, marketers would be able to create a “Loyal Customers” Circle and be able to blast out specific messages, deals, etc. to those power users. Because Google+ doesn’t allow multiple users to access and manage one particular Page, it seems this new integration with these social media companies will be a great substitute. Now, it’s just up to Google to open this kind of functionality up to personal accounts. For more, Hootsuite’s announcement here , and check out Google+’s third-party landing page here .

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Through Buddy Media, HootSuite & More, Google+ Pages Get Third-Party Management Tools

Links Posted By Big Facebook Pages Have A 0.14% CTR, 1 Click Per 1000 Fans

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:51:45 +0000

The click through rate for links posted to the news feed by Facebook Pages with over 100,000 fans is 0.14%, or 1 click per 715 impressions according to a new study shared with us by analytics provider EdgeRank Checker . Pages receive 0.00093 clicks per fan, or roughly 1 click per 1000 fans. These figures should give marketers an idea of how many Facebook fans they’ll need to accumulate to drive significant traffic to external websites, a core way of deriving return on investment from the social network. Facebook only started providing link click metrics to Page admins at the beginning of October. Until then, marketers had to use links with tracking tags or URL shorteners that can reduce CTR in order to determine the referral traffic their Page posts were driving. For comparison, links posted by Pages have nearly 3x the CTR of Facebook ads which average 0.05% CTR, and they top online display ads which average a 0.1% CTR according to Webtrends. Facebook Pages can be a useful marketing channel for brands, especially those that organically accrue Likes from passionate customers such as entertainment, consumer packaged goods, fashion, and automotive companies. To drive significant referral traffic, though, most brands have to invest in advertising in order to beef up the fan counts of their Pages. Most major brands have at least 100,000 fans, and Posts by Pages with few fans have a much higher CTR as you can see in the graph below. Therefore, I excluded them to avoid skewing the data. For all Pages with over 1,000 fans, including those with few fans, link posts still only have a 0.35% CTR, 1 click per 280 impressions, 0.00236 clicks per per fan, and 1 click per 424 fans. EdgeRank Checker’s data is based on 84,000 link posts by over 5,500 Pages in October. The study also looked at which days of the week were the best for Pages to post on. It found that posts on Wednesday receive the most clicks and shares, while posts on Friday receive the fewest. If they spend the time and money, brands like Porche, Netflix, and Old Navy can drive around 2,000 qualified clicks a day for free. Facebook Pages can’t completely replace the need for paid advertising, but they can become an important component of a savvy online marketing strategy.

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Links Posted By Big Facebook Pages Have A 0.14% CTR, 1 Click Per 1000 Fans

The Rise Of The Health Startup? A Peek At The 13 Companies In Rock Health’s Inaugural Batch

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:41:06 +0000

There’s been a bit of a debate going on of late among venture capitalists and investors over whether or not web startups are currently experiencing a cash crunch when it comes to early-stage and series A financing. ( You can read Alexia’s recent breakdown here .) As per usual, the answer depends on whom you ask. This recent debate contrasts with the data seen in Column Five Media’s infographic from June , which showed venture funding and investment levels picking back up in the first half of 2011, poised to storm back to pre-2008-collapse levels. Of course, the data showed that not all tech sectors were experiencing the boom times: Health and medical-related investment, for example, was on the low end, receiving only 3 percent of venture funding over the last year. Yet, there may be some evidence that investment in the digital health space may in fact be heating up. Looking at this data compiled by new healthtech startup incubator Rock Health , we see a list of 41 healthtech startups have been funded in 2011. CrunchBase’s data, which uses slightly more generous paramaters for defining “health tech”, puts that number over 120 or so. Of those startups that were founded this year, Aza Raskin’s Massive Health raised $2.25 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and more. (Well, Massive Health was actually founded in December 2010, but close enough.) And Azumio , which was founded this year, raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Founders Fund and Accel in July. What’s more, we just covered 100Plus’ $500K seed raise from Founders Fund earlier this week. The personalized health prediction startup was not mentioned in Rock Health’s list, I assume because it is still in private beta. But the point is, as we’ve seen in Dave Chase’s series of guest posts , the healthcare industry is ripe for disruption. Sure, the industry has a long way to go, but we’re seeing some great progress from startups like Practice Fusion, for example, which is busy becoming the largest provider of electronic medical records in the industry. There’s also plenty of room for help in the way of incubators. On Friday, Rock Health, the startup accelerator for health-focused startups, hosted its Demo Day at UCSF Mission Bay, where the 13 startups in its latest class introduced their businesses to 250 attendees, among them investors from Accel, NEA, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Benchmark, Kapor Capital, SV Angel, The Social+Capital Partnership, Founders Fund and more. For those unfamiliar, Rock Health provides seed funding ($20K grants, without taking equity), office space, and mentorship to entrepreneurs that want to break into healthcare. We covered their debut here . The thirteen startups that demo-ed range from BitGym , which makes motion-sensitive iOS video games for working out; to IDEO-spinoff Omada , an online support group to reverse diabetes; to CellScope , a smartphone plugin designed to remotely diagnose ear infections. It was also great to see that these teams included entrepreneurs that have previously worked in other areas of tech and media and are now bringing their talents to health: For example, Gabe Vanrenen, the former Founder and CTO of Flurry , Jackson Wilkinson, the former head of UX for Posterous and LinkedIn, to Jeff Lieberman, the host of Discovery Channel’s Time Warp. Again, we covered the initial eight Rock Health startups that were ready to introduce their wares back in June, and you can read about them here . However, five of the startups were not yet ready for the limelight, so we’re providing brief introductions to those below: Bigevidence provides clinicians focused access to the universe of medical evidence at the point of care and within electronic health records, improving quality of care, while reducing costs and risks. BitGym thinks you should be using video games to exercise. Their patent pending technology uses an iPad to turn any cardiovascular machine into an interactive gaming experience. Cake Health is the best free way to manage your healthcare expenses online. The startup was a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September. You can read our initial profile here . Crohnology is a social health network for people with chronic medical conditions to share and learn what treatments work, meet others near them, and track and share their health. Heartbeat is a salesforce.com-like enterprise solution for wellness professionals that aims to empower people to be successful doing what they love. Applications for Rock Health’s next class beginning in January 2012 are open until Wednesday, November 16th.

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The Rise Of The Health Startup? A Peek At The 13 Companies In Rock Health’s Inaugural Batch

What 11/11/11 Looked Like On Twitter [VIDEO]

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:39:53 +0000

Nerd New Year , the alternate name for 11/11/11, has come and gone. And just like the regular New Year, when Twitter records have been broken , it was a popular day to tweet. This video, created by Twitter’s in-house data visualization specialist Miguel Rios , puts a geographic spin on that fact. It shows a wall of tweets moving around the world — first at 11:11am local time, then at 11:11pm. The scale of the “1″ represents the volume of tweets from that location. “Whether you were inclined to crack a joke about this rare binary occurrence, wax poetic about its meaning, or join in a global game to share photos at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m., numerology dominated the conversation,” read a post about the visualization video on the official Twitter blog. As fascinating as it is, the video is incomplete — there’s no clock to tell us exactly what time we’re seeing at any given moment. The two waves of 11:11 local time are easy to pick out, but some parts of the U.S. seem to have jumped the gun, while tweeters in Europe and the Middle East seem to form a second wave of interest in the date. Can Twitter visualizations like this be useful, or are they just interesting novelties? Let us know in the comments. More About: design , Twitter , visualization For more Social Media coverage: Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Social Media channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

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What 11/11/11 Looked Like On Twitter [VIDEO]

The Future of Social TV [VIDEO]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:52:16 +0000

Technology is changing entertainment for better and for worse, according to TV Guide’s general manager and executive vice president, Christy Tanner, who spoke at the Mashable Media Summit . SEE ALSO: Social TV: How Content Producers Can Engage Their Audiences in New Ways TV Guide launched Watchlist , a social feature that lets users search online to see where they can find their favorite shows on TV or on other connected devices. Tanner also talked about social media’s effects on the TV-watching experience. The Mashable Media Summit in Pictures Media Summit 2011 The Mashable Media Summit on Nov. 4 at the Times Center in New York City attracted professionals in digital, tech, advertising, sales, marketing, mobile and publishing from all over the world. Click here to view this gallery. Presenting Sponsor: AT&T More About: features , mashable media summit , Media , social tv , television , trending , Video For more Entertainment coverage: Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Entertainment channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

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The Future of Social TV [VIDEO]

Penguin Becomes Latest Publisher to Sell Digital Shorts

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:45:00 +0000

Penguin is the latest publisher to test out e-singles with the launch of Penguin Shorts, an ongoing digital series of original fiction and nonfiction titles from authors like Colm Toibin and Anita Brookner. The program is launching in the UK first, with nine titles being released on December 1. All are priced at £0.99 ($1.58) or £1.99. ($3.17) In the U.S., Penguin has been publishing short-form “ Penguin eSpecials ” since 2008, and those will be rebranded as Penguin Shorts next year. A glance at the two countries’ lists suggests that Penguin has a little work to do in terms of branding and merging the titles under one banner. Most of the U.S. “eSpecials” are fantasy, romance and mystery titles (“Romancing Lady Cecily,” “Kris Longknife: Training Daze”), while the UK’s Shorts tend toward more serious topics like immigration and history’s great battles. Penguin aims to publish new e-singles each month and sell them across e-bookstores. In the U.S., Open Road and Rodale both recently announced e-singles publishing programs, and the “big six” publishers are experimenting with individual e-singles across platforms. I expect the next step for these publishers is more branded programs like Penguin Shorts. More About: books , ebooks , penguin For more Business coverage: Follow Mashable Business on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Business channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

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Penguin Becomes Latest Publisher to Sell Digital Shorts

Robotic Bear Paws You When You Snore [VIDEO]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:15:30 +0000

This bear may be soft and pillow-shaped, but you might want to think twice before curling up for a nap on Jukusui-kun. If you snore, it will stroke your face with its furry paw. It’s not hitting on you. Rather, it is helping your partner or roommate sleep by urging you to move on to your side, a position in which you are less likely to snore . Japan Trends discovered the robot, created by Wasaeda Univeristy , at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo last week. Jukusui-kun, which does not yet appear to be on the market, monitors snoring through a microphone and a matching fuzzy bear oxygen meter that the sleeper attaches to his or her hand. To avoid using cords that could interfere with sleep, Japan Trends says the creators developed a mat of sensors to be placed under the sheets instead of using cords. When oxygen and decibel levels signal loud snoring, the pillow takes action. It’s an interesting set up, but will getting pawed by a bear actually inspire snorers to shift to a quieter sleeping position? Or will Jukusui-kun be little more than an annoying stuffed animal that swats at their ears? Let us know in the comments if this would help the snorer in your life. More About: Jukusui-kun , robots , trending

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Robotic Bear Paws You When You Snore [VIDEO]

Is Lenovo About to Release a Quad-Core Android Tablet? [PICS]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:57:18 +0000

Tablet backside Click here to view this gallery. Asus isn’t the only tablet maker working on a quad-core Android tablet — Lenovo appears to have one in the works as well. Engadget has gotten its hands on what appear to be “leaked” photographs of a 10.1-inch tablet Lenovo is allegedly planning to release by the end of the year. Like Asus’s next-generation Transformer Prime device, the tablet is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 T33 processor and Android 4.0 ( Ice Cream Sandwich ). It also sports a back-facing camera, 2GB of 1.6GHz of RAM and a “fingerprint scanner” that also functions as an optical joystick on the backside. (If you’re wondering what an optical joystick is, read this .) Lenovo declined to comment on the veracity of the report. But if it’s true, is this something you would like to get your hands on? Let us know in the comments. More About: android tablet , lenovo

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Is Lenovo About to Release a Quad-Core Android Tablet? [PICS]

Music Lovers’ Social Network Flowd Gets All New Mobile Apps

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:53:58 +0000

The music lover’s social network Flowd , which recently arrived stateside after its European debut, just updated its mobile applications with a boatload of new features that make them worth a look. Up until now, Flowd was only mildly interesting, as it was primarily touting its 600 or so artists and DJs who had signed up for the network – a number which, in the grand scheme things, is merely a drop in the bucket of all things music. But with the new mobile apps, Flowd is now aggregating artists’ activity from other social networks, including Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud and Last.fm, allowing users to access artist updates, bios and gig calendars, even if the artist is not on Flowd. Although in testing, this added import/aggregation functionality didn’t mean that every artist profile page was now filled with data (it was still sort of hit-or-miss), there’s certainly more information than before. Plus, it should be noted that the problem with filing out profiles through automated means could be affected by the simple fact that some artists don’t have gig info online right now. In other words, nothing to pull in. In the updated Flowd mobile apps, there are nifty Twitter-esque “follow” buttons which let you quickly build a stream of updates from your favorite bands in order to get details on new concerts and other news. In a way, the Flowd apps can serve as a Twitter client for those interested in music, without you having to…you know…actually use Twitter. Also new in today’s app updates (iOS and Android) is a feature that lets Flowd scan your device to see what music is currently being played or the last track played. It can then post that info back to Flowd and optionally cross-post it to Facebook or Twitter. It’s not as elegant as the Spotify + Facebook integration (or MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, etc. + Facebook), but it can serve as a path for social music sharing for those old-school people who still like to purchase MP3′s from services like Amazon or iTunes instead of paying for a music subscription. (And yes, there’s a lot of those people left yet). The Flowd mobile apps are available for free on iTunes , Android and Ovi (Nokia), but the app updates are on iOS and Android only. Flowd is a portfolio company of Digia Ventures, the venture division of leading Finnish technology services firm Digia, Plc with offices in Helsinki, Finland and Santa Clara, CA.

Tumblr Numbers: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [INFOGRAPHIC]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:45:10 +0000

The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus ‘ Social Media Strategy Tool , a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals. In four short years, Tumblr has grown from relative obscurity to start-up darling to international microblogging network. The platform has grown a staggering 900% in the past year and eclipsed platform competitor WordPress , largely due to its global reach and brand-building potential . Those under Tumblr’s influence are fiercely loyal — with 2% of users making up 43% of total visits — and they log in from all over the world. Take a look behind the scenes at Tumblr’s influence on the web, including top tags and fun facts, in this handy infographic. Infographic designed by Emily Caufield . Series supported by Vocus This series is supported by Vocus ‘ Social Media Strategy Tool , a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today! More About: features , mashable , Social Media Infographics Series , tumblr For more Social Media coverage: Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Social Media channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

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Tumblr Numbers: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [INFOGRAPHIC]