“During the 2000 presidential elections, bloggers who were just as passionate about the news and politics as I was were having these amazing discussions online,” Calvert said. “The same thing happened after the events of 9/11 and for about five years, I spent several hours a day reading and commenting on blogs.”

Calvert’s epiphany hit him one day when he was stuck in traffic on his way home from work while listening to a news program on the radio. The host said something that made him call into the show, and at the end of the conversation, the host suggested that Calvert should start his own blog. Calvert went home that night and within five minutes he did just that.

“It was that easy; anyone can do it,” Calvert said. “I started contacting other bloggers whom I liked and respected and asked them for some advice, and not only did they contact me back, but they also linked to my blog. Over time, more people started contacting me, and companies wanted to advertise on my blog. I was surprised to learn a blogging tradeshow didn’t exist. So in 2006, BlogWorld was born, and in 2007, we hosted our first show with 1,500 attendees. This year, our show will have more than 4,000 attendees with a combined audience of more than 250 million people.”

The Social Media Explosion

Social media is the simultaneous reinvention of radios, newspapers, magazines, televisions, movies and books. Social media grows exponentially faster because it’s all of these mediums combined.

“It’s a fundamental shift in the way people communicate with each other, and our business practices have to change in order to keep up with this shift,” Calvert said.

Facebook has more than 300 million users today, which is larger than the total population of the United States, and tops Google with the most weekly traffic, according to Calvert. In contrast, it took radio 38 years to get to 50 million users. Ninety-six percent of millennials have joined a social network.

Engage Yourself

If you’re worried about starting a blog because people will say bad things about you, if you have a terrible product, they’re already saying bad things about you. The best strategy is to be engaged. Have a blog, be on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, where people are having discussions about your company, products and industry and engage in that conversation. If you have a great product, people will say nice things about you. Before blogs and social media, if a customer had a good experience, they might write you a letter of thanks, but this was always a one-on-one experience where no one else could see it. When this happens via social media, everyone sees what that customer says about you and how you respond to that customer.

“If you have a bad product, social media can’t save you,” Calvert said, “but if you have a great product, if you treat your customers well and you are passionate about what you do, social media is the best friend you will ever have because everyone will know how great your product is and how you interact with your customers.”

Bloggers are like guitar players, according to Calvert. Almost all of us have played a musical instrument at some point in our lives. Most people aren’t very good at it; they get frustrated and quit over time. These people are at the bottom of the pyramid. Then there are people who keep playing, and they get better. They play in a garage band with their friends or for some extra money at weddings. There are also people who make a living out of it. Las Vegas is a great example of this; the place is full of musicians who play for a living, but they aren’t famous. At the top of the pyramid are those most-influential musicians who are rock stars. Likewise, some bloggers are real journalists; it’s what they do every day. Others are rock-star journalists who have their own fan base.

Drive Traffic to Your Blog

For companies just starting out and introducing a new product, to get your name out there, start a blog that talks about the problems your product solves. Reach out to people individually to tell them you just started and ask for their feedback. It takes time, but slowly build relationships with them.

To drive traffic to your blog, post good content. Write about and post videos of what people need because they want value. For instance, if you’re selling brake pads, talk about the types of materials that make a difference in performance. So, when your community is ready to buy, they’re going to buy from you because you’ve already given them value for free. Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations, while only 14% trust advertisements, according to Calvert. Newspapers as they exist today are dying. They must either learn to adapt or die.

Word of Mouth

Treat bloggers the same way you would treat traditional media outlets, but don’t send them press releases. Blogs should serve as your home base, and you should direct traffic from Facebook to your blog. It’s where you create your contact and add the greatest amount of value to your customers. Blogging is an ongoing thing, and you want people to relate to you as a human and not as a company. One quality blog post a day or even a week is better than 10 lousy blog posts per day.

“Build brand loyalty and trust,” Calvert said. “It’s word of mouth on steroids. Once you start doing this effectively, your customers are going to sell for you in a way you could never do yourself.”

Don’t call it the 4G or the 4HD. The Apple iPhone 4 is here and Gizmodo ruined the surprise. As predicted, the new handset has *almost* all of the rumored features, including a 960X640 resolution display, a bigger battery, HD video recording and editing, a three-axis gyroscope, an upgraded 5MP rear camera, and a front-facing camera for use with Apple’s new video chat program FaceTime.

Apple’s new Retina display promises 4X improvement over the current screen, and Steve’s demo screenshots show significant improvements to text and images, but CNET’s own TV expert David Katzmaier takes issue with the claim that viewing HD video on the new device is akin to the HDTV experience.

He emphasizes that users will likely notice a significant difference in text, but the change in photos and video will be subtle, especially since most of the video material out now on YouTube and other sites just isn’t scaled to fit the pixels on the small screen. Also, keep in mind that Steve’s giant demo projections show a much more substantial difference than you’ll see on the actual 3.5-inch handheld.

Regardless, Wilson and I are both excited about AT&T’s “favor” to Apple that offers immediate upgrade privileges to any user with a contract ending in 2010, including yours truly. Forget about flipping your old iPhone 3G or 3GS on eBay for a profit, though: Apple also announced that only the 3GS will remain with a price drop to just $100. You can, however, take advantage of RadioShack’s trade-in program that’ll net you a gift card ($210 for a 16GB 3GS or $122 for a 16GB 3G) that you can use to preorder the iPhone 4.

During yesterday’s WWDC Keynote, Jobs also unveiled FaceTime, Apple’s proprietary video chat program for the iPhone and optimized for the iPhone 4. Currently, the program only runs on Wi-Fi, but Steve also talked about plans for 3G access coming next year.

CNET’s Rick Broida gave three reasons why FaceTime will flop, but we’re just excited to have our Jetsons dreams finally realized. Apple is hoping parents and friends will be the first early adopters to jump on FaceTime, but we’re thinking couples will be the most creative with its uses.

The iPhone 4 has so many more features than I can write about in this blog, but we cover them almost all of them in today’s episode of The 404 Podcast. Download the episode and don’t forget to circle back and let us know what YOU think of the new iPhone.  e-mail the404(at)cnet(dot)com.

Help People Find Your Videos

First, you’ll want to make sure your video has good metadata–a descriptive title, a description, a category, and tags–which will help it get discovered on the site. You can fine-tune your metadata in your video’s detail page.

Upload Better Video Quality

If you’re interested in improving the quality of future videos, read the tips on video settings and formats and HQ (high quality) videos in our Help Center:

Automatically Share Your Uploads With Friends and Family

Now you can automatically share your uploads (and other activities) to your profile on Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader via AutoShare. Once you’ve opted in, AutoShare will send an update to the selected services when your uploaded video goes live.

Promote Your Video

When you’re ready, you can actively promote your video by sharing it via email, embedding it on your blog or using the Promoted Video system to purchase placement on high-traffic pages. While you’re at it, you might also want to make sure your channel reflects your personality, just like your videos do, by customizing your channel.

Understand Your Video’s Views

One tool you definitely won’t want to live without is Insight; it gives you information about who’s watching your videos, where they’re from, and more. This information can help you tailor your videos just for your audience; that might mean using annotations to add subtitles so your fans in Japan can understand what you’re saying, or getting a detailed breakdown of where your views are coming from. (Please note that in general it takes a day to start to see traffic data for your newly uploaded video on Insight.)
]]> http://horsepowermarketer.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/a-little-youtube-love/feed/ 0 horsepowermarketer YouTube http://horsepowermarketer.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/social-media-audit/ http://horsepowermarketer.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/social-media-audit/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 23:47:50 +0000 horsepowermarketer http://horsepowermarketer.wordpress.com/?p=1150 ]]> Social Media Audit – Is your Website Utilizing Social Media?
- How to Integrate Social media with your website
- How to get better SEO Rankings using Social Media
- How make your website more interactive for visitors

http://ow.ly/1Pxym

Your Blog

In one of our previous posts we talked about the importance of content syndication. By producing well planned, informational blog articles you can achieving good rankings for both medium & long tail keyword phrases in Google’s SERPS.

This not only helps create brand awareness through organic search. If used correctly, your blog can be used to syndicate your website content to many different sources all over the web.

First of all, to maximize your websites visibility,your blog should be attached to your domain name. Frequently, I see companies that use external blog URLS’s on Blogger.com or WordPress.

For example, they might have http://www.myblog.wordpress.com. Implementing a blog this way is only building the authority of the WordPress site. When you eventually migrate to your own hosting solution, e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/blog, any backlinks you’vre built up will be lost when you migrate!

Search engines and people like fresh content. If you are starting a company or personal blog, try and get into the habit of posting an article once or twice a week. This is obvious right? Of course it is, but starting and maintaining a blog is not something you should get into lightly. You need to set aside 3-4 hours per week to research, write, edit and publish one or two really good articles.  If your company is starting a new blog make sure that the person responsible has enough time within their diary to actually write the content.

If you produce good content, the page rank of your blog URL will increase over time from people linking back to your articles. When your page rank increases, any additional internal cross linking and other link strategies become much more effective, leading to greater visibility for your website.

Open Source CMS:

Joomla and Wordpress are two of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS). Many websites and blogs run on either WordPress or Joomla because they are flexible platforms with large user support communities, and they’re free. They allow you to get access to some great plug-ins which can really create a different methods of customer interaction on your blog page.

In terms of choosing a publishing platform, I would highly recommend WordPress as my preferred blogging tool. It’s really easy to integrate with your website. The learning curve is very gentle and as it’s open source there are tons of plugins to enhance the functionality of the tool.

You can even design your own webpage or blog themes for different content management systems using a program called Artisteer. It’s really easy to use and when you’re done you can simply extract the theme as a plug-in and upload it to your server.

Some of the social media plug- in’s you can implement in WordPress also really help with content syndication, allowing you to build up a huge network of followers and help promote your brand off your website.

By installing Twitter and Facebook plug ins your can help spread good “word of mouse” campaigns across different social networks, making your website content visible to people all over the web.

It might be a good idea to set up both email and RSS applications on you blog page too. Feedburner is the most common RSS application.This brings your news and articles to your audience, instead of them coming looking for it.

The SERP’s are competitive enough as it is, so if someone reads an article that they like on your blog, they should be given the option to receive regular updates from that blog.

Twitter

We all know how powerful Twitter is. Anyone that reads one of your blog postings or views an interesting webpage should have the option to tweet (syndicate) that URL to all their followers.

When you check your web analytics you’ll be able to check  how many visits you received fromTwitter , right down to the actual  individual piece of content.

Twitter can give a specific webpage even more visibility on its network with some of its recent developments, including Twitter Search and Google’s Real Time Search.

Twitter search is great for people searching for “real time” content.Its quite a handy PR tool in that sense too. You can now see any fresh content that is tweeted in a matter of seconds without having to wait for Google to index it! Try searching for recent tweets related to your business using Twitter Search.

Real time search is now becoming a big feature on Google’s organic listings page. When you search on certain topics you will now see a live feed of tweets that are related to that topic. See below for an example.

You can also track each tweet using Hootsuite. This application also has a handy PR tool which will allow you to see who is mentioning your brand across the Twitter Network.

Twitter is now integrated with Social Networking Giants’ Facebook and Linkedin. So when you “tweet” it can automatically go straight to both your profiles on these social sites.

If you produce a good article there’s no telling how many times it can get tweeted. The more places the article appears, the more chances it has of being re tweeted.

Images

Image optimization is another strategy that is often overlooked. Flickr is one of the best online photo management and sharing applications on the web. Anything you upload onto its network should really be traceable back to your website.

Flickr acts as an “image search engine” and can be very effective in driving traffic to your website. If you tag your images appropriately when you upload them to Flickr or any other photo sharing website, you will increase your chances of being found for different keyword searches on these websites..

You can also attach your Facebook or Linkedin profile information to images on the Flickr Search network, making even more sources available for people to see you brand when they search for an image related to your business.

Video

YouTube is now the second largest search engine on the web. In recent posts we discussed how important it was to optimize your Youtube tags. Any videos that you make for your business, should be uploaded to Youtube and easily traceable back to your website.

More and more people are beginning to explore brands on YouTube . People are now using it as a learning center. Whether it’s companies promoting their brands, or individuals just reviewing different products, Youtube is becoming a huge information source for web users.

With Google’s new interface, vertical search engines (images, video, blog, news) are going to used even more. SEO professionals tasked with doing a website audit are going to have broaden their scope to include all areas of online marketing, not just on-page and off-page SEO.

Bookmarketing

Social bookmarking allows web users to search, share, organize, and store the bookmarks of different web pages. This can be done publicly or privately (in private groups), or a combination of the two.

People who are allowed to view the bookmarks can view them using a variety of different functions to sort and tag them. If used effectively, social bookmarking can have a very positive effect on the visibility and authority of your website.

The tagging and descriptions used in bookmarking is referred to as external meta data and can have huge benefits in SEO, because the information used in the tagging is not controlled by the site owners, but by the public.

In essence, the information in external meta tags can be much more valuable than external inbound link anchor text.

Remember, if a social bookmarking sites uses nofollow links, then your website will not gain the link juice benefits from back links.

However, don’t overlook the power of social bookmarking, especially for the major sites which use No Follow, because their tags and external Meta data can still be used to qualify and classify major sites.

Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are two of major social bookmarking sites to join because even if you don’t get the long-term link benefits of a No Follow, you’ll have the long term benefits of external Meta data, votes and traffic.

Facebook

Facebook enables you to create a buzz around your product or business in a familiar environment for the customer. Having your Facebook integrated with your website is very beneficial for increasing its visibility. This has been done up to now very successfully via Facebook Connect.

Any webpage on your website that has a frequent flow of traffic should have the Facebook Connect icon on it. It’s a simple way of branding your website at absolutely no cost or effort.

The “F share” button is also a useful icon to have beside any blog posting on your website to allow readers to syndicate your content  to all of their friends on Facebook with just the click of a mouse.

Due to the recent implementation of Facebook’s new “Open Source Protocol“, we saw it fit to implement the Facebook “like” button to all our blog postings. Facebook seems to be heading on the direction of creating a Social Search Network, so why not jump on the bandwagon early!

Your Faebook page will also usually rank very high in SERPS. Sometimes even higher then your website for certain keyword searches! So waste no time in setting up a presence on this Social Networking giant.

Linkedin

Some Social Networking sites like LinkedIn have the “follow” attribute enabled so you can put your company website on your public profile and your website will gain some benefit due to LinkedIn’s high authority.

You can also engage with your industry specific audience by starting discussions or posting news articles in the appropriate groups. This can generate a huge amount to traffic to your website.

I’d recommend you download Hootsuite. This free piece of software provides you with a very efficient way of posting links to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook at the same time. This saves you time and effort by not having to log into your accounts in all of these sites and post your links separately.

Slideshare

Slideshare is another great way to increase you brand awareness. This allows you to upload different presentations which can then be traced back to your website. Its integrated with Facebook and Linkedin now also, giving you more channels to show off your presentations to different audiences.

What about your experience of Social Media? Have you  or your business used it successfully? Was it to drive sales or customer engagement?

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Published: May 25, 2010

At the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi, a cash machine dispenses gold.

Vending machines in neon-splashed Tokyo have electronic eyes that evaluate customers’ skin and wrinkles to determine whether they are old enough to buy tobacco. In bathrooms at upscale Canadian bars, vending machines with flat irons enable women to defrizz their locks.
In Abu Dhabi, the lobby of a luxury hotel has a vending machine that dispenses gold bars and coins at more than $1,000 an ounce.

A new breed of vending machine is proliferating around the world — and while the United States is coming late to the party, Dr Pepper and Baby Ruth are already feeling sidelined.

Flashy and futuristic, souped-up machines are popping up everywhere, be it the Mondrian hotel in Miami or at Macy’s in Minneapolis. They have touch screens instead of buttons, facades that glow and pulse, and technology intended to blunt vending machine rage — sensors that ensure that a customer’s credit card is not charged unless the chosen item has dropped. These machines are not for quarters: purchases are measured in dollar amounts that typically start at two figures and go up.

Changing consumer preferences about shopping and the high cost of operating brick-and-mortar stores are inspiring premium brands to rethink how they sell their wares. As Gower Smith, whose company, ZoomSystems, has created about 1,000 automated kiosks called ZoomShops, put it, “A ZoomShop costs less than an employee.”

And with examples overseas showing there is money to be made, the so-called automated retail store (the term vending machine is so Industrial Revolution) is venturing into fashion, beauty products, electronics and more.

A couple of months ago, the Body Shop cosmetics franchise began offering skin care products with ingredients like hemp and vitamin E in deluxe machines at airports; soon will come shopping centers.

In the fall and winter, a company called U*tique will begin selling high-end beauty products in machines that light up when customers approach — a better reception than shoppers see from most retail employees.

In the last few years, Best Buy, Sephora, Apple and Proactiv have put their products in vending machines. Quiksilver offers board shorts and bikinis in machines at Standard hotels.

Such machines also offer nascent brands that have no store outlet another way to bring their products to market. Customers can make returns by calling a phone number on the receipt.

In an age of iPads, high-speed Internet service, A.T.M.’s and self-service check-in at airports, consumers expect instant gratification. Not only are they accustomed to researching and buying products on their own by touching screens and pressing buttons; they often prefer it.

A study published in 2008 by NCR Corporation found that 86 percent of North American consumers were more likely to do business with companies offering some sort of self-service. Many respondents also said they had a more positive perception of a brand if it offered self-service technology. This appears to be especially true of young shoppers.

“You will hear in studies, ‘My mom shops at the beauty counter, and I want to shop for products on my own,’ ” said Mara Segal, chief executive of U*tique, which plans to install up to 20 automated machines this year before going full throttle in 2011. “They are actively avoiding the counter.”

The new machines are meant to provide a feeling of discovery and charm often lacking in traditional retailing. Indeed, the machines are not “stocked” — they are, as Ms. Segal put it, “curated.” Merchandise in U*tique machines is arranged and lighted like works of modern art in a series of dainty portals, evoking a neon honeycomb.

“We put a lot of attention and focus on all the things that are sexy about retail,” she said.

The machines — which bridge the gap between old-fashioned stores and online shopping — are not only being installed in airports and malls. They are materializing in supermarkets, military bases, college campuses, even chain stores.

The economics make it easy to see why. Mall stores produce about $330 a square foot a year, while a 28-square-foot ZoomShop can generate $3,000 to $10,000 a square foot a year, Mr. Smith said.

Or consider airports, where stores make about $1,000 a square foot and ZoomShops generate $10,000 to $40,000 a square foot, he said. ZoomSystems, based in San Francisco, charges the brands in its machines a fee that includes the cost of rent at an airport or mall. Landlords typically take a percentage of the sales too.

As Mr. Smith noted, the attraction goes beyond payroll and rental expenses. If an airline closes a terminal, or if customer traffic is slow in a particular mall corridor, the machine can be unplugged and moved.

Machines have fewer inventory problems and less theft than a traditional store. Additionally, the main way a brick-and-mortar store discovers what its customers want is when they check out. Automated machines, in contrast, learn about consumers’ shopping habits from the moment they begin using the machine because every click is tracked.
Enlarge This Image

Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
A ZoomSystems vending machine carrying Best Buy merchandise at Newark Liberty International Airport.
Stephanie Rosenbloom on the Vending Machine Revolution

“We’re starting to see, more and more, weirder items and weirder machines,” said Christopher D. Salyers, the author of a new book, “Vending Machines: Coined Consumerism” (Mark Batty Publisher), that chronicles the rise of the machines, from the boom in the 1800s Tutti-Frutti gum era to today.

At the same time, the classic vending machine business — sales of soda and snacks — is troubled. Research by IBISWorld said the industry is in decline because of trends toward more healthful eating, increased cigarette regulation, declining industrial work forces and more competition from fast-food restaurants and convenience stores open late or 24 hours.

Revenues for vending operators are expected to be $11.3 billion this year, according to IBISWorld, up from $11.1 billion in 2009. Yet the industry is expected to grow only 1 percent a year through 2015, down from a 2 percent growth rate over the five years ending 2010.

The newfangled machines, which cost $3,000 to tens of thousands of dollars, are now a small part of the industry, generating less than a $1 billion in revenue, said Chris Rezendes of VDC Research.

And expanding the vending frontier has not been without setbacks. One of the first automated convenience stores in the United States began operating in 2002 and was controversial.

Known as Shop 2000, it offered sundries — eggs, diapers, condoms — in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington. But as it turned out, one man’s convenience was another’s dehumanizing eyesore and the machine was shut down.

Other parts of the world are less hesitant. In Europe and Asia consumers buy underwear, umbrellas, toys, pizza and organic strawberries from machines.

Japan has one vending machine for about every 23 people, Mr. Salyers said. The country’s population density, low crime rate and fascination with technology have made it a vending paradise.

“They just line the streets,” Mr. Salyers said. “You can’t find a trash can there. But you can find a vending machine.”

– Seth Godin

I met a new addition to the family the other day. She was eleven days old.

It was the warmest day of her whole life the day I was there. And she had just eaten her biggest meal ever.

Firsts are fun and exciting and it’s neat to keep topping ourselves.

I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I’m never going to eat tuna ever again, and that I’m never going to be able to easily walk onto a shuttle flight at the last minute and just show up in Boston. Never is a lot harder than first, but I guess you get used to it.

The internet is like Ice 9. It changes what it touches, probably forever. We keep discovering firsts, the biggest viral video ever, the most twitter followers ever, the fastest bestseller ever… And we constantly discover nevers as well. There’s never going to be a mass market TV show that rivals the ones that came before. There’s never going to be a worldwide brand built by advertising ever again either. And Michael Jackson’s record deal is the last one of its kind… And there may never be a job like that job you used to have either.

Revolutions are like that. They invent and destroy and they only go one way. It’s like watching a confused person in a revolving door for the first time. They push backwards, try to slow it down, fight the rotation… and then they embrace the process and just walk and it works.

Pepsi will take a massive gamble this year, they are pulling their multi-decade, multi-million dollar Superbowl opening ad position and trading it in for a $20 million social campaign at levels we are yet to experience. To me, this doesn’t seem like a massive risk with the way social campaigns have played out in the last 12 months.

But, for a company that spends almost all it’s money on TV ads – it’s an incredible gamble, particularly when you only have 250,000 (actively engaged) facebook fans compared to Coke’s 4 million plus! 250k is a big number, but in comparison, it means they haven’t really been able to compete with coke online.

So the Pepsi Refresh Project is about getting the global community to nominate projects that need funding in local communities, you upload your video / project profile, gather as many votes as you can by spaming the social sphere and the top projects will win finding from $5k multiple times per month up to $250k a few times every month. That’s a serious spend. This campaign idea isn’t exactly original, infact we had a localised version of this exact campaign idea pitched to Mitre10 (national hardware giant in Australia) 2 years ago, just with a muuuch smaller budget! They didn’t think it would fly. Hmmm.

Entries open up on the 13th of January, but you can download official submission tool-kits to get ready! I’m very much looking forward to seeing the engagement levels and watching how the campaign pans out for Pepsi. Hopefully it’s a massive win for them, but I can’t help but feel perhaps they should have kept the Superbowl ad to tell the world about their social media campaign?! Click here to check out the campaign website. (via Mashable / Viralblog)

How Social Media is Received

From MarketingSherpa

The question was — Which statement best describes how social media marketing is perceived within your organization at budget time?

Considering that social media is at a very early stage in its lifecycle, a 7% confidence rating that it is producing measureable ROI and should be funded liberally is outstanding.

Conservative budget increases by half of all organizations at budget time — based on the promise that social media will eventually produce ROI — is another vote of confidence in the medium for the longer term.

The 17% of organizations who still believe social media marketing is basically free and should stay that way, are destined to get what they pay for.

Not surprisingly, those who have reached the strategic phase of social marketing maturity are far more likely to be producing measurable ROI or at least seeing signs of a return on their investment on the horizon.

On the other hand, marketers in the trial phase of social marketing maturity are more than four times as likely to not recognize the value this tactic has for organizations willing to invest appropriate time and resources.

For additional research data and insights about social marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report.

Update all your Social Status Messages with Ping.fm

If you’re a social network magician, you’ll know that a big part of these sites is “updating your status”. This can be something profound such as “discovered the meaning of life – 42!” to the more tedious “hey! Just discovered something big and green up my nose!“. But like it or hate it, status messages have become a big part of social networks and now Ping.fm has come along to make updating them a lot easier for you.

The service currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Tumblr (with MySpace and Bebo coming soon). By entering your current status into Ping.fm, the site will then send your status to your account on these social networks within 60 seconds (for me, it was done no later than 30 seconds). No longer do you have to visit each site individually and enter your status again and again. Now it can all be done remotely from one central location. A big time saver.

Upon creating your Ping.fm account, you are asked to log into your accounts on these social networks and authorize Ping.fm to update your status on your behalf. The fact that you have to provide your password may worry some people but Ping.fm has provided a privacy policy and you should read that and make your own mind up before proceeding. I was inclined to trust Ping.fm with my details. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Make me lose even more atScrabulous?

Once you have authorized Ping.fm to act on your behalf, there are three ways they can update your status:

1. By web interface: you can enter your status message on the Ping.fm website and hit the enter button. Easy.2. By email: Ping.fm provides you with an unique email address which you can use to email your status messages into the site:3. By instant message: I really like this one. You can put Ping.fm bots on your IM contact list and then send your status to Ping.fm as instant messages. Supported networks at the moment is only AIM but a Google Talk bot is apparently imminent and support for more networks are apparently in the works:

But the feature I really like are the “triggers” – these are if you only want to post to certain networks and not to others :

@fb message – Post directly to Facebook
@jk message – Post directly to Jaiku
@pn message – Post directly to Pownce
@tr message – Post directly to Tumblr
@tt message – Post directly to Twitter

So if you wanted to only post to Facebook that you were watching a movie (for example) then your status message to Ping.FM would be @fb watching a movie. That way, it would only go to Facebook and not to say Twitter or Pownce.

To find out more, I had a short interview with the creator of Ping.FM, Sean :

Mark : What gave you the idea to start this service? What made you confident you could compete with an already existing service such as HelloTXT? What makes Ping.FM stand out from the crowd?Sean : Ryan, (a colleague-of-mine-now-partner-in-crime) and I tossed the idea around the office for a day or so. We decided it would be pretty useful what with all of the micro-blogging sites starting to become so popular, so we put the gears in motion. Ryan moved to San Francisco shortly after and I started the concepts for the development.At the time we started all of this, we had no idea that HelloTXT existed! It wasn’t until we were mentioned in a Mashable blog post that one of the guys came out and said hello.I’m confident that our points of engagement; i.e. chat bots, widgets, apps and all of the other various platforms we’ve deployed on, not to mention the ones slated for launch will keep our services very useful.Mark : How reliable would you say Ping.FM is? Has there been any down-time? Be honest now!

Sean : The only down-time we’ve come across was an issue with the AIM bot. It decided to go off line for several hours last weekend, but has yet to become a repeat offender. The site is very lightweight which makes it incredibly stable with high traffic. All message handling is done off the site, even if the site is down for any reason, all of the other
platforms will remain live as if nothing is wrong. It’s an intense system.

Mark : What definate new services are you planning to roll out in the near future? Do you have any other vague Ping.FM plans in your head that you’d like to share with the Make Use Of readers?

Sean : Current plans include an iPhone web app as well as a WAP based app for the phones that don’t support rich web content, an AIR platform, Windows platform, Mac dashboard widget and a few other platforms I’d like to keep a secret for the time being. We’re trying to push weekly roll-outs that include new features, but we’re developing them so fast we have to pace ourselves.

But, you can expect the GTalk bot and some other super secret platforms to go live within the next week for sure.

Mark : Are you planning to offer a cellphone text messaging capability like Twitter?

Sean : Yes, we are currently looking into premium SMS capabilities that will allow users to send messages to custom SMS short-codes.