<supportEmptyParas]—> Lately, the sterotypical “anti-social” view of gamers is changing. First the Nintendo Wii showed that a successful game isn’t always the ones with the best graphics, but the one that brings people together. Now, the introduction of Halo 3 may show that a successful game encourages sharing, collaboration, and user generated content through social media.

An article in BusinessWeek stated that the game’s producers took clues from sites such as Myspace, Flickr, and YouTube and that Halo 3 is, “one of the first console titles that allows players to collaboratively create and swap content as well as keep tabs on opponents and teammates remotely from the web”.

Why do I think the folks at Bungie (the developers of Halo) know what they are doing?

1. They have been listening. Bungie has been listening and keeping track of fan feedback and how gamers interact with the company’s products. As a result, Halo 3 has user-inspired features that will help sell the game. One such feature saves gameplay and lets players use a custom camera to make video clips. Players can then edit these, upload, and share with friends online.

2. Revenue is extended past purchase. The game offers some free web space for uploads, but also allows gamers to opt into a subscription for more space. This opens up constant revenue for Bungie, and helps them maintain a consistent relationship and communication with their customers.

3. Relationships are nurtured, brand advocates form. The developers have obviously spent a good amount of time thinking of how to build community within their players – a tactic that builds customer relationships and brand advocates, and ensures the success of further products. Instead of just releasing Halo 3, they created a platform similiar to Facebook or MySpace that pulls the game’s features into one place, allows for statistics to be tracked, films to be saved, and increases collaboration with others. This keeps its players loyal, satisfied, and inspired enough to modify statues dressed with Halo gear(see pic).

Halo 3 proves that building relationships with customers is powerful. By building relationships, the developers were able to sell a million pre-orders. By using social media, I’m sure they will successfully continue the relationship. I challenge you to ask yourself: How does your company interact with your customers? Are there any ways you can improve this? Social media may be an option worth considering.

“MySpace is dead.” “MySpace is dying.” “Facebook is crushing MySpace.”

Well, maybe creaking, but certainly not dead. Consider some hot statistics from Comscore Media Metrix as reported by Fortune.

• MySpace served up 45 billion page views in July alone. And that’s only in the U.S.
• In 2005, MySpace made $23 million in revenues. In 2007, they will sell $525 million in ad space, 58% of the ads sold on social networking site. Facebook, in contrast will take in $125 million, or less than 25 cents for every MySpace dollar.
• In one day this summer, MySpace served up 7.3 billion ads to its users. In one day.
• 12% of all of America’s Internet time is spent on MySpace. With a zillion websites out there, that any site gets 12% is mind-boggling.

Sure, MySpace is ugly. They haven’t opened their API like Facebook did. Facebook is growing faster. But MySpace is still the leader, and our media team tells me they’d much rather work with MySpace than Facebook, as there are many more options in terms of advertising placement.

Of course, whether or not MySpace and Facebook even compete is another debate. MySpace president Tom Anderson says they do. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says they don’t. On the utility issue, they don’t compete—I’m with Zuckerberg. Totally different sites. For the ad dollar, they certainly do compete, and so far Anderson is winning that game, even as Facebook’s valuation rises to $10 billion.

Technorati Tags: MySpace , Facebook , social networking , social media , social media marketing , social media advertising

This weekend I was watching some home improvement television. It was one of those ironic Saturdays, spent watching how hard other people are working on their homes while sitting on the couch and gasping at how much money they spent on upgrading appliances. 8,000 for a refrigerator. I’m still too cheap.

Anyway as I was watching, I saw a commercial for “Blog Cabin” from the Do it Yourself Network. From the quick commercial I heard that it was a log cabin that was designed with the blog input from the shows viewers, to actually be built on the network, and to be given away in a sweepstakes. So I decided to check it out today.

Upon review, it’s an interesting connect between traditional media and social media, and it has potential to be a new source for advertisers to really connect to their audience. Below are a few thoughts I had on why I think it works:

1. It consistently fuels conversations. Blog posts are written to get feedback from the audience on the design of the cabin. So far, it seems to have worked by gaining over 4 million votes on the design a number of comments ranging for some posts over 100. By asking the audience for specific feedback on the design of the cabin, Blog Cabin’s viewers are obviously more engaged than me – a viewer who only sits on the couch and absorbs.

2. It reaches an advertiser’s niche audience. This show reaches a niche audience of viewers – the blog is an extra resource and platform for sidebar discussions and recommendations. By placing a “resources” page on the blog, the niche audience looking to build a log cabin can be connected to “Log Homes of The Smokies“

3. It makes me want to go to the Smoky Mountains. I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but the blog posts naturally talk about the beautiful surroundings of the Smoky Mountains that the cabin is built in, and promote the city of Kinzel Springs, TN. Comments by viewers supplement this by talking about their positive experiences visiting the Smokies. Conversations and tie-in’s like this have enormous potential in tourism advertising.

According to the site, this year’s cabin is finished and the sweepstakes are wrapping up. It looks like a 2008 Blog Cabin is in the works, so perhaps the network is also viewing it as a success.

RSS Feeds are a great way to keep up with the websites you like, but choosing your favorites from those pages and sharing them with others easily hasn’t been so easy. That’s the problem that the folks at FeedXI have been working to solve.

If you’re an Ignite fan, you can see one of their “feedlets” in action to the left hand side of the screen under the title: “Our picks for Best SMM News.” Currently in beta and evolving fairly quickly, FeedXI allows you to create a custom feed from multiple sources. That alone is sort of cool. But then it allows you to publish a “feedlet” in a number of fashions on your site and then, if you wish, handpick the news you want to highlight and comment on it.

Since we’re working with them on the beta, Scott England and Ken Romley of FeedXI stopped by the Ignite offices earlier this week, so we decided to do a quick podcast on what they’re up to, where they got the idea, and what’s coming next from FeedXI. Have a listen:

FeedXI is pretty cool. Check it out, and be sure to leave comments about how it works for you.

In light of Jim’s earlier post about the debut of Quarterlife, I stumbled upon an article from Alley Insider that raises the question, “Will Quarterlife Make Money?”.

Interestingly this article studies the projected profitability of the show, basing off the Business Week projected cost of $500,000 per 48 minute episode. Chop this down into the shows six 8-minute segments, and the cost is more than $83,333 a piece. The article goes on to say:

“Assuming a CPM of $15-$25, 2 ads per installment, and no ancillary revenue or costs, each segment would need to be viewed between 1.7 million and 2.8 million times to break even. In total, the installments would have to be viewed between 10 million and 16.7 million for each 48-minute episode to break even.”

To put this in scale we can all understand, the article makes a great comparison of exactly how feasible this is:

“For perspective, according to Vidmeter, the most popular video of all time is the “Evolution of Dance,” which has been viewed 72 million times. The 200th most popular video, “Football Skills,” has been viewed 4.8 million times. Using a $20 CPM (x2), each 6-installment episode of Quarterlife would break even with 12.5 million installment views—which would equal the all-time views of “How to Shower: Men vs. Women,” Vidmeter’s 55th most popular video. “

From this article, I can’t wait to see if the cost of such high production online video can be offset by an appropriate level of viewers. Will it be able to maintain this high level of viewers over time? Will it boost MySpace’s rankings? Only time will tell.

As some other bloggers have taken notice of the Ignite site, like TopRankBlog, we’ve seen some comments like: “More information on the post authors … would be nice.” So rather than type more, I thought I’d do a quick vlog post to introduce myself and the idea behind Ignite Social Media. The whole social media agency concept, the idea of working as a social media consultancy, is all very new. Here are my thoughts. After you watch (TRT: 1:54), I’d love to hear yours.

Technorati Tags: social media agency, social media, social media marketing , search engine optimization, Facebook , press releases, backlinks

We all know that customer service is a costly part of any business. Currently, most companies still operate call centers, translating to a cost per phone call of around 35$. Unfortunately, email support doesn’t lessen this, due to duplication of inquiries.

However, in light of these current customer service shortcomings, social media is offering businesses a new way to interact with customers, and a new way to respond to customer questions and complaints.

One such example of this is the site called Get Satisfaction , a site that according to Business Week is “part online forum, part FAQ, and part social network”. To put it simply, the site works by allowing anyone to ask a question, submit an idea or complaint, or discuss a particular product or company. All of these components are then listed on a public “Satisfaction page” for everyone to see, comment on, and rate.

As a result, users are creating “Satisfaction” pages for companies and products. Instead of customers calling traditional call centers for questions and complaints, they are going elsewhere to ask questions, discuss, and share solutions.

The benefit to businesses is that the site’s “rating system” aggregates users with similiar concerns. No more duplication of inquires – a company can more easily prioritize questions that need addressing, common complaints, and have insight into the product developments that most customers want. Additionally, call center traffic can be greatly reduced from customers offering free troubleshooting to other customers.

It’s an amazing phenomena, and companies like Apple and Air Canada have become involved in the conversations taking place. I have a weird feeling that customer service is about to be transformed…

The “Big news out of Hollywood” late last week, when MySpace TV announced that a new Internet-only television show will debut in November, got the info right, but the big picture wrong.

First the info: Called “Quarterlife”, the show is about a 20-something with a blog that shares the life stories of friends worldwide, and the pain that can cause. You can watch the trailer here (with exciting subtitles in Greek even!)

This is a neat idea, and the producers are Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who did My So-Called Life and thirtysomething for ABC. That’s big news. The 8-minute episodes are likely to get some attention given these producers and the nice alignment between the content and the medium it’s being delivered on.

Now the big picture: If you go to Quarterlife.com right now, you can watch the trailer you see above (without the Greek subtitles). But once the shows debut, the site will be transformed into “a social networking site for creative people.” If they’ve built this site well, this could be the real legacy of Quarterlife over the long-term: a site to replace MySpace as the creative social networking space. MySpace is creaking and a bit ugly, but replacing them is hard.

As I said last week in my post “Why Zooped Sucks”, any MySpace replacement needs a way to push a lot of people into a site very fast or it won’t take off. Maybe that’s what Quarterlife the show will do for Quarterlife.com. If the show takes off, the site will take off (again, if it’s built well), and we might just have our first credible MySpace threat in a while. Ironically, hosted on MySpace TV.

Watch for the first reviews of the Quarterlife site itself. That could be the real news out of all this.

Technorati Tags: social media , myspace , social networking , quarterlife , zooped

In working for a social media agency, I get asked a lot of questions from those who are getting their feet wet with free blogging services like WordPress, or Blogger.

Most of these are the simple questions like, “How do I embed a You Tube video?” or “How do I insert a picture”. In case you are new to blogging – these are easy questions, with easy answers.

So in light of this, I decided to just sum up some Wordpress basics in a document to help those of you out there that may be in the beginning stages of blogging. (It is based off Wordpress since that is what I use on a regular basis, but can also be applied to other blogging platforms.)

You can download the Wordpress Basics here.

Hope it helps. There is nothing more exhilarating than pressing “publish” for the first time.

About a month ago, we got a comment on this site asking us if we’d reviewed Zooped.com yet. I’m pretty confident that the post came from someone who works at Zooped trying to get coverage, but as a soical media agency, we decided it was our duty to try it out anyway. As you can tell from the title of this post, it’s not a positive review.

What the folks at Zooped are trying to do is converge a lot of interesting social networking ideas into one place. While that’s an attractive idea on the surface it’s one that, I believe, is doomed to fail. (Read “The Origin of Brands” on Google Books by Al & Laura Reis to learn why.)

On Zooped, you can put up your profile, upload and listen to music, post info about your business, post videos, play games or add them to your blog, or read the news. Of course, that’s the problem. Zooped isn’t the best place to do any of these things, so putting them all in one place doesn’t make it any better.

Like a number of other social networking sites trying to make a go of it, Zooped faces a classic chicken/egg proposition. Social network’s value is in size. When I first signed up, Zooped had only about 7,000 users. As of today, a month later, they have 12,351. Good growth from a percentage standpoint, but infinitesimally small compared to the big networks. Until they get users, they can’t really be interesting. Until they’re really interesting, they can’t get users. Tough place to be.

The Zooped folks may have had a chance if they opened their walled fortress under the social graph, or social network portability, concept. But again, I’m supposed to re-enter all my friends, convince them to join this space, etc. etc. Yet I see no compelling reason to offer them for their trouble. Oh, and want to have your blog on your profile? Start a new one on Zooped. They won’t let you import your existing blog via RSS. How dumb is that?

Most annoying, Zooped absence of real networking has opened it up to the spammers. Of the six emails from “friends” I’ve gotten, four have been Nigeria Scams, and two have offered to date me (no doubt as step one before they begin the Nigeria scam of their own). Each time, Zooped sends me an annoying email that says I have note from my friend, but no hit as to the content of that note or who it is from, and no link to it. While I understand the lack of a link is probably a security measure, it makes signing in a major pain.

I’m not being critical of the programming folks at Zooped. They may, or may not, have built a great platform. But their business decisions, mixed with the natural difficulty of starting a social networking site, make Zooped a non-starter.