Try this geek T-shirts store in Amazon and tell me what you think

Shimrit

Baby Geek T-Shirts

These are great news for the web marketing community. Now we will have official channels to market our online brands, and maybe even statistice opportimoties, branding possibilities, advertising and who knows…

I think that until now there was no such thing as a “Twitter strategy”. All you had to do was as a brand marketer using Twitter was try to  get as much followers as possible and provide some quality content to your followers. I hope the new Twitter business tools will be useful and help marketers to develop brand presence in a much efficient way.

For more updates you can follow me on Twitter – Shimrit Ben Eliahu on Twitter.

For more information read here.

You are also invited to visit my team’s Youtube channel – Diamond Babes.

This is the first video – a response to all the daft hands videos out there…

I’ve participated today in the Israel developers garage meetup in the Interdisciplinary center (IDC) Herzelya. The facebook Garage Meetup is being held in many cities all over the world,even in Africa.

The event was initiated by the.co.ils and included a presentation of Nethanel Yaacobson (BizDev director) at facebook, Eyal Magen from Gigya and Alon Carmel from Devunity (both invested by Benchmark Capitals, who also attended this event).

facebook launched the facebook Platform on May 24, 2007 and enabled many developers to participate in building this tremendous social empire. facebook also launched at that time the Facebook Markup Language. The numbers of applications has reached to 33,000 by July, 2008.

Nethan from facebook described the accelerating success of the user created applications in facebook is overwhelming for facebook.  He noted that facebook developed only four(!) of the applications by herself, and all the other applications were created by users. Today there are over 650,000 developers and over 52,000 applications in facebook.

What does facebook do for the developers?

facebook is now funding various applications and helps them to grow and distribute themselves – Therefore it offers the “fbFund“.They  have recently funded 5 new applications including weddingbook, GroupCard and KontaGent.

facebook also offers a new verification service that aims to evaluate the applications and define some standards.  The user experience is very important to facebook and also there were many “spam applications “over the last period.

Nethan also mentioned that facebook has a new partnership with the enterprise platform force.com. This collaboration creates the ability to create social enterprise applications – sounds promising..!

All about facebook Connect

facebook introduces the facebook Connect -  This feature enables facebook users to bring with them their facebook friends network everywhere they go on the web, even on third party sites. So basically the idea is that you carry your social data with you but you can control who will access to this precious knowledge and how much access it will provide.

The target is to map social connections everywhere – You can link between your Digg account and your facebook account and find who among your facebook friends have a Digg account and reach them through Digg. This feature actually saves time filling many registration form for sites – You identity is shared, and therefore you can log in to many third party sites with your facebook user and password.

Nana10, a leading Israeli portal, announced lately that the site will fully integrate facebook connect. This is very impressive and shows that there are lots of hopes hanging on this feature.

Sounds Great… But what’s your business model?

Thinking of a great idea for a facebook application is easy, bringing many people is pretty hard but the business model is the hardest part without a doubt. Many of the applications developers today are young entrepreneurs, who knows how to program really well but don’t understand how to build a proper business model.  Many of the application developers place affiliate links and advertisement in order to take advantage of the amazing amounts of people who use their application – but this is obviously not enough. Also, every caprice of facebook can change th

eir whole business model. There is no doubt that this is one of the biggest challenges of this audience, and it is not clear if facebook is going to find the solution for this (considering the fact that facebook’s own business model is still unclear).

After the facebook presentation Eyal Magen from Gigya (the gadget network) and Alon Carmel from Devunity (social collaborating coding platform) also introduced themselves and their promising start ups with very interesting presentations.  Also saw there Orli Yakuel from Go2Web2.0 and Ayelet Noff (also known as Orli Yakuel from Go2Web2.0 and Ayelet Noff (also known as Blonde 2.0). It was great to finally see them, maybe next time I’ll stay to the pizza and beers networking time and talk to them…

Good night 

My advice is to review this site and start thinking how to implement a similar idea for your business.

They describe themselves as a “mobile network for 16 – 24s that’s funded by advertising” and they’re currently active in UK only (although they’re planning to start their activity in Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Germany.

Blyk’s appearance reveals the great progress ans development that the mobile marketing has recently done. The ad-based business model was converted from the web to the mobile world and with the development of “3rd generation” mobile phones smart phones, it is going to become much more popular and profitable.

So what’s Blyk all about? Basically, they give 16-24 old teens free text messages and free minutes in exchange to the right to send them very targeted and interactive advertisements. Why targeted? because each user, when signing up to Blyk, fills his own preferences and favorite brands, therefore Blyk is able to be more specific and efficient. So Blyk makes around 2/3rd of its revenue from advertisers and 1/3rd from users.

Meantime, the teens’ response rate seems to be higher than expected and the number of new users is increasing. This impressive increase can be explained by the attractiveness of this business model, a thing that can be changed really quickly. Also, the financial crisis these days can make advertisers decide that they cut their advertising budgets, and it is reasonable to assume that the mobile advertising budgets will be the first ones to cut.

On her Twitter account, you can read updated straight from Britney or one of her staff members. If you’ll follow after her, she’ll automatically start following you (well, it’s not REALLY Brit, but it’s close enough).

I think it’s interesting that artists start using Twitter and other social media sites to promote themselves, their music and everything they want their fans to know. It’s a very important step to the social media world.

The new user profile platform is clean, stylish and easy to use. I got the sense that this service will gain lots of traffic and therefore become the next best thing after Linkedin or any other business oriented social network. It can be also a great classic social network, but I think the business orientation is stronger this time.

This new interface includes the abilities to create connections (you can invite new friends and also find existing people in Yahoo social network). The cool part is that everything you do is shown on your profile as update and the you can watch your friends’ updates as well (same as Facebook).

This is my new shiny Yahoo profile (you are more than invited to add me to your Yahoo network):

This is another great self branding tool, it takes 2-3 minutes to open a profile and you get another great result for your name in the search engine results.