Far from the customary social networking principle of connecting you with people from within and beyond your social stratum, Fixedia fosters a much more focused audience made up of professionals working across a range of media industries. As such, you get people from traditional print media, new media, TV and radio, graphic design, film and photography, among others, doing a professional six-degree shakedown online.
From this, it becomes easy to connect with other players within the same industry, learn more about new trends in specific fields, look for potential new employers (if you’re scouring the Web for either a long-time job to commit to or a part-time/contractual gig), and, on the flipside, for companies looking into hiring suitable candidates. While the concept behind this new platform is easily comparable to LinkedIn in many regards, Fixedia offers much more than networking opportunities.
Seeing the immense popularity of the Facebook game Farmville, Bing has began an advertising pilot earlier this week with Zynga, the social gaming company behind the agriculture-inspired time-waster as well as many other social games. This follows another Microsoft-Zynga partnership announced last month where Famville extended pastures onto Microsoft’s MSN Games property.
According to the Bing blog, the search engine made a cameo via an ad on the lower right of Farmville’s main page which ran from Tuesday afternoon up until Wednesday morning. This graphic ad simply invited players to join the Bing Facebook community by becoming a fan of Bing in exchange for farm dollars, Farmville’s virtual currency used to buy farm elements like animals and structure and for upgrading their game level.
With the continuously skyrocketing popularity of Twitter from the household consumer to the financially-driven marketing strategist, it’s really no surprise that even established Web entities have adapted to the Web culture that followed it. After all, millions of eyeballs are drawn to the 140-character-based service on a daily basis, relying on it for news, updates and even the daily funnies.
This week, Yahoo joins the plethora of easily recognizable Web entities to strike a partnership with Twitter, citing the collaboration as a part of its ongoing commitment to provide its users relevant information from a multitude of sources online. This collaboration will integrate Twitter results into its search engine and will be rolled out to its more than 600 million users worldwide.
The SEOP team had the opportunity to attend Google’s Agency Meeting last week in Mountain View for what proved to be a most interesting and informative day. After arriving at the San Jose airport Thursday morning, my cab driver sped off with barely a look at the address when I mentioned Google. This proved to be unwise because apparently GPS is now required to navigate what is now the digital Disneyland. I arrived just in time to meet up with my SEOP colleagues, Claire and Nazy, and grab seats in the front row for the Opening remarks from Suresh Khanna.
The following Keynote by John Nicoletti touched on the Five Rules of Engagement – Maximize Your Assets, Get Connected, Be Instrument Rated, Look Everywhere, Be Open-Minded. It was a great reaffirmation of SEOP’s 2009 key initiatives focused on Analytics and Crowd Sourcing. The most interesting Google tool reviewed was the recently launched Google Wonder Wheel which can be found on the Google SERP page when you click the “Show Options” link on the upper left side of the screen. The tool graphically shows related search terms to the original query.
The Google Content Network features and training also took center stage for a major portion of the day and the importance of the GCN was reinforced when we had the pleasure of meeting our new Google Agency team. The common theme throughout was clear – Google is more than just PPC.
It was just after 3:00PM during the closing remarks when I was hit with a text message from a buddy that simply stated “Michael Jackson is dead.” Considering the source, I knew it wasn’t a hoax. As the session ended, I shared the message with a few of the attendees who were in disbelief. They wanted proof. When I tried to pull up the story on my mobile phone, I knew the world had truly stopped because I was standing in the middle of the Google Campus and couldn’t access the internet. In fairness to Google, I wasn’t on a gPhone. My Fuze let me down. Thanks a lot AT&T.
Today is the launch of SEOP at the Events! Our goal is to bring the events to you when you’re unable to attend them yourself. For our first episode, we made our way to Downtown Los Angeles and hung out at the MindShare event. They’re tagline is “Enlightened Debauchery,” and it was my goal to find out what it really meant.
In our video, we meet Doug Campebll, the Co-Founder of MindShare LA, and ask him what inspired him to start MindShare. We also ask the guests the following questions:
How is the world different now that we have social media?
How are you using social media at your company?
How do you feel about companies using social media for marketing?
We met the following great people at the event:
Eric Garcetti - President, Los Angeles City Council
