Feb/100
The Friendliest Moshpit in the World
Photo via Flickr user kirstiecat
Let's talk about common misconceptions of internet users. One fairly common belief is that the web is full of creepers -- people who post weird things on Craigslist and spend too much time stalking people on Facebook. Or, the internet is perceived to be full of nerds obsessed with 4chan and World of Warcraft. The last, possibly more recent misconceived notion of internet users is that they are plain old oversharers who Tweet, blog, and vlog every banality. The underlying understanding of the internet, based on these web archetypes, is that it is not a particularly earnest or friendly place.
Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and open source advocate, begs to differ. He believes that the internet is "made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust." Watch his TED talk, where he illustrates using three examples that the transfer of data over the internet is best understood as crowdsurfing in a crowded moshpit, or as the process of passing a beer from the aisle to its recipient in the middle of the crowded row -- where none of the people in the middle who receive and then pass on the beer have any stake in its arrival but they do it anyway. Ignore the fact that I can't seem to write a blog post without talking about beer and pay attention to Zittrain, especially his example of the Wikipedia entry for Star Wars Kid.
Beyond Wikipedia and CouchSurfing, the inherent friendliness of the internet has very real implications for social media, for marketing, and for the work that we and you would like to accomplish. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, illustrates how social media, aided with the use of LOLz, can harness the group-consciousness of the internet (his speech is shorter, don't worry).
Dec/090
Image Space Media Newsletter: December 2009
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IMAGE SPACE MEDIA News for December 2009 
Welcome to Image Space Media's newsletter for December 2009. HAPPY HOLIDAYS EDITION!! WIN THIS CAMERA! As usual, a big thank you to our publishers using Image Space Media's technology in beta, and for your feedback. Your input helps us identify what areas we need to improve upon. With your help and feedback we've been steadily working to improve our technology. If you have any comments or questions please send them to info@imagespacemedia.com. in this issue:
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Oct/092
Social Media Proven to Boost Site Traffic
The numbers are in and it’s official: embracing social media increases site traffic.
When the Huffington Post launched its Social News site on Facebook Connect in mid-August, the site received 6,925,000 unique users in September according to comScore. Social News allows users to link to Huffington Post articles directly onto their Facebook profile using a pop-up window and one section even them see what their Facebook friends are reading on the site.
According to Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, Facebook-referred
traffic is up 48% since the launch of its Facebook Connect site and 15% of all comments now come through Facebook. Users of the political news blog increased by 50% over the last year, surpassing The Washington Post and BBC. This is pretty impressive for an independent blog that is barely four years old.
We predict that many news organizations will follow in the HuffPost’s footsteps and encourage all of our online news publishers to appoint a social media editor ASAP!
Source: guardian.co.uk
Oct/090
Would You Drink Twitter Wine?
Twitter has teamed up with the California-based winery Crushpad to form what they call the Fledgling Initiative. According to the organization's website, “the Fledgling Initiative embodies two things that are at the core of Twitter's mission: providing access to information and highlighting the power of open communication to bring about positive change.” You can take part in @fledgling’s mission by following their wine-making tweets and pre-purchasing their Twitter-branded bottles of Pinot Noir and Chardonnary. $5 from each bottle will be donated to Room to Read, a non-profit children’s 
literacy and education organization that brings books and libraries to the world’s most impoverished regions. What a great way to drink for an honorable cause!
Oct/090
Tweet your Wordpress posts through Publicize
Are you a Wordpress user? If so don’t forget to take advantage of the built-in promotion tools WP offers bloggers to help increase traffic and reign in repeat visitors.
Last week Mashable highlighted Ping-O-Matic’s new feature Publicize which allows you to instantly post your entries to your Twitter feed. Unlike TwitterFeed another popular plug-in which periodically checks your blog for new updates and posts to Twitter, Publicize is instantaneous and allows for instant feeds.
Increasingly blogs have peppered their looks with “Tweet This,” “Stumble Upon” widgets to attract traffic and hopefully more fans to their content. Of course you can always opt of the service but with many competing voices on the web it seems to be a quick and easy way to reach a wider audience.
Oct/090
Monetizing Your Tweets
In light of the Federal Trade Commission's new guidelines regarding social media marketing, here is a comprehensive list of three organizations that are helping users monetize their Twitter pages while staying ethical:
1. Twittad is a "social media affinity network" for Twitter advertising. It offers Twitter 
users anywhere from $2 to $2,000 to post paid endorsements to their accounts. Twittad requires users to disclose the ads by posting a Twittad badge to their profile and including a link to 'spon.in' in their post to indicate that there is a 'sponsorship in update.'
2. Ad.ly automatically sends one tweet to your feed every other day for a week. (Users must explicitly approve these tweets first.) At the end of each Ad.ly tweet, (Ad by http://Ad.ly) appears to let readers know that it is an advertisement. Ad.ly's impressive list of registered publishers includes celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Greg Grunberg, and Nicole Richie.
3. IZEA's SponsoredTweets is another platform that is connecting advertisers with Tweeters. Users set the price they want companies to pay them and then wait for ad offers. SponsoredTweets promises 100% disclosure and belives in "safe, ethical sponsored tweets" through their disclosure engine (below).
All of these ad services are meeting the basic requirements of the FTC's new guidelines. However, their standards of disclosure vary, which may end up confusing the average Twitter user. We wonder whether 140 characters is enough room to accurately notify readers of the message's paid sponsorship. And will filling your Twitter feed with ads turn off followers? What do you think?
Oct/093
FTC to Regulate Social Media Marketing
The Federal Trade Commission is putting limitations on advertising on social media sites in an attempt to make sure that paid endorsements are fair and transparent. On Monday, the FTC updated its guidelines to specify that bloggers are required to publicly disclose “any material connections” they might have to a brand or product they discuss, even those posted on Twitter and Facebook. While these guidelines are not law, the FTC can bring advertisers and bloggers into court for violating them.
To define what constitutes an "endorsement," the FTC examines factors such as:
- Whether compensation or a free product/service was provided by an advertiser
- Previous or future acceptance of products/services from the same or similar advertisers
- The terms and length of the relationship
- The value of products/services received
The FTC says that “a consumer who purchases a product with his or her own money and praises it on a personal blog or on an electronic message board will not be deemed to be providing an endorsement.” This means that independent consumers are still allowed to review their brands.
It’s important for all of our publishers to know about the FTC’s new guidelines. To make sure you stay safe and informed, read the full FTC announcement here.
Oct/090
Universities Connect Through Blogging
What marketing tool are colleges using to reach out to high school applicants? Student blogs!
According to The New York Times, dozens of colleges are putting student blogs on their Websites to market themselves to prospective students. The blogs offer first-hand narratives about student life and the college’s culture. Many high school seniors have become loyal followers of blogs at their top choice colleges and can post comments to connect with the authors and other applicants.
M.I.T. is an example of one university that has successfully integrated student blogs into
their admissions process. M.I.T. bloggers are paid $10 an hour and write about a variety of topics, including tips for the application process and advice for managing the university’s difficult workload. In September, Snively ’11 devoted one of his blog posts to describing his fall course schedule in an interactive video format (see picture).
To learn more about how M.I.T. and other colleges are utilizing student blogs, check out the full article here!
Sep/090
NYT to Conquer Twitter?
The New York Times is working on an interesting Twitter project. The newspaper is building an application that can pull relevant tweets on a specific topic to make search more efficient for Twitter users. The Moment, a popular Times fashion blog, has already been using the tool and may have over 1.2 million Twitter followers as a result.
At yesterday’s OMMA conference, the Times’ Senior VP of Digital Operations Martin Nisenholtz said that the news organization has an opportunity to take on an important intermediate role on Twitter. Nisenholtz believes that there is “a lot of power in organizing and curating this world” and believes that developing a Twitter aggregator that understands context would help foster this idea.
Nisenholtz also noted the role of social media in boosting the site traffic on NYTimes.com. Twitter adds approximately 15,000 Times followers each week and Facebook is expanding the newspaper’s demographics.
Sep/090
Connecting with Your Readers
In August, we listed some helpful online tips for small newspapers, including creating a Twitter tree of accounts, tweeting a live headline feed, posting online events, and blogging. With more and more online news publications signing up for our technology, we've decided to introduce another basic way to connect readers to your organization: user-generated blogs.
Using user-generated content can help enhance the relationship between you and your readers. Implementing social tools that your readers are already using is a great way to involve your audience and enable them to share information through photos, videos, and written posts. For example, CNN's iReport allows users to submit articles, videos, and photos that are unedited or screened before they are posted. "At CNN we live for news," states the About section on iReport. "We love talking about it. And we know that there's a whole lot more to it than what you see on TV or read on your favorite Website. So we've launched an independent world where you, the iReport.com community, tell the stories we're not used to seeing. And the most compelling, important, and urgent ones may get seen on CNN."
The best part is, user-generated photos can be added to your Image Space Media Image Manager so you'll end up with more images on your website. Not only will you build a stronger sense of community, but you could potentially increase the earnings for your site!