November 2009

Last year, Twitter launched their TweetsGiving program and almost raised $11,000 which enabled them to build a classroom in Tanzania. This year, the Thanksgiving Twitter program is back and they are aiming to raise $100,000 in 48 hours for charity scheduled for November 24 to 26 2009.

As a background check, TweetsGiving is a global volunteer and non profit organization that uses social media for its charity drive every Thanksgiving. The program was made to support Epic Change and to help build additional classrooms, a library, a cafeteria and a dormitory for a school in Arusha, Tanzania. It is recognized as a global celebration done online that aims to change the world through gratitude. The 48 hour event also has live events all over the globe where guests are invited in order to encourage people to give to a common cause.

The school that you will be helping is a school founded by a Tanzanuan Epic Change fellow known as “Mama Lucy” Kamptoni who used to sell chickens and used her earnings to build a school that now has 300 children and facilities are much needed.It is easy to participate in this fundraiser and give your own donations for this cause. First you can simply share whatever you are thankful for on Twitter, Flickr, your blog,  YoutTube, Facebook or blip.fm  then add the link to www.TweetsGiving.org and the #tweetsgiving tag. Another way to contribute to the success of this program is to contribute in cash. Each $10 donation equates to 1 brick for the development of the school in Tanzania. Next year, Epic Change and Twitter aims to widen their campaign by reaching out to other parts of the world beginning next year. This Thanksgiving, why not show your gratitude by giving back?

Twitter, one of the biggest Social Media sites in the World Wide Web has launched a new feature a few weeks ago called Twitter Lists. This feature has got users of the micro blogging excited allowing them to make lists of Twitter users that other users can follow.

This allows Twitter users to organize other users that they follow into groups or lists. Lists can be a stream of stories, breaking news, or tweets from the users who are behind the stories. The Twitter Lists can be public for the entire world to see and they can be private for personal use.

Basically, Twitter Lists have three aims: to organize your followers and the people you are following, to lists out recommendations for the Twitter users to follow and third is to make a list in order to measure the influence that they have.But a weakness was immediately spotted in the list and that is the fact that there is no way to describe what the list was all about. And now, Twitter is making improvements in their Twitter Lists feature starting out by applying the number one suggestion and request of Twitter users which is descriptions. Before, you can find that there is only a title indicated in the Twitter Lists.

Now, when you edit any list, you will find that you can place in a description which will allow you to describe your list in a hundred characters or less. All you have to do is to visit the list page, click “Edit” which can be found at the top right of the edit page, add a description then save.

Now that Twitter has a description field available you can now use short and snappy titles and be able to give a more effective description on what the list is all about.

A lot of buzz has been spreading around the World Wide Web about scams and deceptive ads reaching Facebook and MySpace – two of the most popular social networking communities online. The two social networking giants have decided to make commitments when it comes to tracking down all these misleading offers and scams.

A favorite target these days are the social gaming applications found in the networks. They have been found to allow certain types of scamming advertisements that urges users into a contract for services without disclosing the costs they will have to pay up front.

For instance, Farmville, a popular virtual farming simulation game, have users spend real money in order to buy virtual goods or to complete offers or surveys from their partner companies so that the users can have virtual credits. The problem lies in the fact that some of these offers have “opt out” riders that places the user in a paid service or subscription that requires the user to act in order to avoid any misleading charges.

MySpace CEO Own Van Natta has identified these “opt-out” offers as misleading and made a change to the terms of Use in order to clarify what is acceptable for both users and developers.

Facebook also made an announcement that they have joined in the fight to eradicate this type of scamming advertisements. In fact if you check their blog, you will see that they have disabled two complete ad networks because of this and that Facebook have addressed ad-related violations in over a hundred applications.

Facebook now has the “friends of connections” targeting feature that allows you to advertise to the friends of the people who are already listed as your fans. This will allow you to have a wider reach of audience by simply sending your ads to the friends of people who are already connected with your Page, Group, Applications or Events. So basically when people see your ad in their page, they will know that their friends are your fans.

Although Facebook’s Page Ads have been already noting members when their friends are fans, it is not hard to see why this added targeting feature has so much potential in terns of expanding your audience. By being able to target the friends of your fans as well, you can instantly reach a hundred and even a thousand more people. Of course this will depend on the size of your fan base. Through this, the friends of your fans will be equally exposed to your brand through the endorsements of their friends as well.

As for Pages, Groups, Events and Applications that you are an administrator of, you can only target your fans as of now. Facebook is looking into the option of expanding this as well though it would be easy to see how this idea and feature can be abused especially in competitive areas. But if you have the money and the time to invest in order to make your Facebook audience grow then this can be an option that you should consider.

Facebook is one of the best sites used for social media marketing but there are people out there who are confused as to which they should create in order to use the social networking site to their advantage effectively. The confusion is based entirely on the Groups and Pages features of Facebook. Even senior media marketing consults are confused since both have overlapping features. Add the constant changes Facebook makes to their Pages and the whole issue becomes more complicated.

Here are some factors that you should consider when it comes to choosing which is right for your project:

• Interaction – because of Facebook Group’s security features and size limitations (under 5,000 members) they are more set for personal interaction. While Facebook Pages on the other hand do not list the names of its administrators and are thought of more as a corporate entity. The content of Facebook Groups is an extension of personal actions while content in Pages does not need to be linked back to you personally.

• Updates – for Groups, as long as they are below 5,000 members, you can send messages to the members that will appear in their Inboxes. For Pages, they can send their updates to their own Page and will also appear in the “Updates” section of their inboxes. Unlike Groups, there are no limits on how many updates you can send or how many fans you must have.

• Control – Groups have more control over who can participate. The permission settings can help you restrict access to a group or person. Access to Pages can only be restricted by age and location.

• Moderation – both Pages and Groups can be mediocre when it comes to how things are posted and who can post. If someone posts spam or something negative in your Group or Page you will have to remove it manually but you have the option to remove the member who did it.

• Advertising – advertisements can be bought to promote both Groups and Pages. But Pages have the benefit of having exposure through the fan connection that they have as they can be posted on their walls.

• One more difference that can help you is that Pages are indexed by major search engines like Google while Groups are not.