Vimeo Brings New Apps to Android, Windows Phone and iPad

By Christina Warren at Mashable: 
LAS VEGAS — Just in time for the newest crop of tablets and smartphones at CES 2012, Vimeo is making its mobile app available for Android and Windows Phone.
The Android and Windows Phone apps come nearly a year after Vimeo released its first mobile app, Vimeo for iPhone. In addition to the new platforms, Vimeo is also rolling out a fully iPad-optimized version of its iOS app.
Why the big focus on mobile? According to Vimeo, 15% of its traffic now comes from mobile devices. Moreover, Vimeo’s creators are more frequently using smartphone devices as their cameras of choice. After all, when you can create footage like this on a smartphone, why not?
The Android and Windows Phone apps include the following features:

• Upload raw or edited footage in HD or SD
• Pause/Resume videos
• Replace existing videos
• Edit tags, titles, descriptions and privacy information
• Share via Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, WordPress, email or SMS
• Download your Vimeo videos to your Camera roll
• Watch videos from the Vimeo Inbox and Watch Later queue
• Access stats

The Android version of the app [Market Link] is available in the Android Market and in the Amazon App Store and is compatible with all Android devices running Android 2.3 and higher. This means that devices like the Kindle Fire can get in on the fun.
The Windows Phone version of the app is available in the Windows Phone Marketplace and works with any Windows Phone device running Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.

The new iPad-optimized version of the app offers a tablet-optimized view of browsing and discovering video. It also brings over the popular video editing functionality of the iPhone app to the bigger screen iOS device.
In the past 18 months, Vimeo has increasingly focused on streamlining its offerings to provide a consistent user experience across devices and platforms. Vimeo was one of the first major video services to embrace HTML5 and it started targeting the connected device. Vimeo’s Roku app continues to be one of our favorites and we expect the company will continue to target connected devices and platforms.

MySpace Goes Social With TV Experience

By Samantha Murphy at Mashable: 
Justin Timberlake just took the next step in his campaign to bring MySpace back. The pop super star and MySpace co-owner joined Panasonic on stage at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show to announce a new service that will make TV a whole lot more social.
Available on the next generation of Panasonic VIERA ConnectT-enabled HDTVs, an app called MySpace TV will allow viewers to see what their MySpace friends are watching, and enable them to make comments through the TV set and via smartphone and tablet devices.
The app will be available on Panasonic’s new HDTV line, as well as some devices created in 2010, via a software update.
Early channels on MySpace TV will focus on music, and then expand to movies, news, sports and reality channels.
“We see MySpace as a companion to what the social community is watching,” Marcus Liassides, executive VP of MySpace, told Mashable. “We plan to integrate the service with other social networks such as Facebook in the future too. But we aren’t trying to reinvent TV. We’re just evolving it and make it a shared experience even when you’re not in the same living room.”
Liassides said the experience will likely be optimized by viewers using tablets and smartphones. A companion apps will be available on tablets and smartphones.
“Why text or email your friends to talk about your favorite programs after they’ve aired when you could be sharing the experience with real-time interactivity from anywhere across the globe?” Timberlake said in a press release. “As the plot of your favorite drama unfolds, the joke of your favorite SNL character plays, or even the last second shot of your favorite team swishes the net, we’re giving you the opportunity to connect your friends to your moments as they’re actually occurring.”
Although the company hasn’t revealed when MySpace TV will become available, it’s expected to roll out in the first half of 2012. Liassides noted that it’s also working with other TV manufacturers to offer the app on other devices.
Will you use MySpace TV? Could this be the resurgence of MySpace? Can Timberlake bring it back? Let us know in the comments.

4 Pillars Of LinkedIn Marketing For Businesses

By Jason Keath at SocialFresh:
With more than 134 million members, LinkedIn has changed the way employees and employers connect – and how professionals and businesses find partners.
Anyone building a business (online or offline) should take a close look at how this powerful network can work for their business.
LinkedIn is a very simple platform. People, in large majority, use the site for job searching. And because of this most LinkedIn users are not active as often as those on Facebook or Twitter. However, there are niche opportunities that many businesses can take advantage of and should make sure they are considering.
Here are the 4 cornerstones to using LinkedIn for your marketing. Make sure you are not missing out on an opportunity.

1- LinkedIn Groups: 
This is the favorite LinkedIn activity amongst heavy users, yet while savvy businesses recognize that creating a LinkedIn group gives you the ability to generate (hundreds and thousands of) leads, they understand this is only the first step on the long journey to success.
When creating a group on LinkedIn for business purposes, your goal is to create a group that holds value for the audience first. A few tips:

1. Look for a niche topic in your industry. Look at pain points that your customers have a lot or growth areas of your business and focus there.
2. Name the group for the niche and not for your business name. This helps search and helps guide the group toward audience value and not the business goals.
3. Make the group open so that it can grow more easily.
4. Promote the group to your existing channels.
5. Target existing brand champions and passionate fans and ask them to stop in once a week to help promote discussions.
6. Have a plan for maintaining activity in the LinkedIn group. How often will you or other employees promote discussions? What messages are allowed and how often will you moderate group posts?
7. Use the best discussions and reoccurring questions as inspiration for blog posts and new products/services.

2- LinkedIn Answers: 
Similar to Yahoo Answers, this professional network has a Q&A section, available for users to post (niche-related) questions to their network, inviting connections and other users to answer. LinkedIn answers is the largest professional based Q&A site out there. Recent trendy Q&A site Quora is another good direction for this type of networking, but LinkedIn certainly still has some street cred when it comes to business networking.
When you take advantage of this option and actively participate inside on a weekly or daily basis, you start to naturally build your credibility by connecting with new professionals and top experts in your industry. Some tips for using LinkedIn Answers.

1. Have a schedule and interact regularly, either weekly or daily
2. Pick a handful of topics to focus on and become a heavy hitter in these sections of the site
3. Provide overly useful answers, pointing to many resources. The more helpful you are the more attention you will get from potential business partners and customers.
4. If you are acting as a company, use multiple people to support each other in discussion in a show of force. There is not need to game the system and just comment with “attaboys” and “I agree”. But having multiple employees with smart helpful discussion can only help your cause.
5. Make sure you don’t go into sell mode and overwhelm other users by pushing your product constantly or aggressively.
6. Again, look for opportunities to reuse your answers and discussions as blog posts to keep the thought leadership going.

3- LinkedIn Events:
This is a fantastic way to engage with your clients and leads online, or offline. Here you can post your events, with a short compelling description about each, and a link to the registration page.
Towards the end of 2011, LinkedIn overhauled their events application and made it much more use friendly and much more useful to businesses. Attendees to events can connect more easily with one another. And event search is better making it easier for you to get your event in front of new eyeballs.
A few LinkedIn Event tips:

1. Use events for more occasions. If you have a sale on your product coming up for black friday, make an event people
2. Fill out everything, including: Full and descriptive event title, avatar, short powerful description, times, location, and registration link.
3. Link the event to your LinkedIn company page
4. Direct all potential attendees to click on the “I’m Attending”. Each time someone is added, it gives you more chances to show in their timeline and for their friends to be influenced to find out more about your event.
5. Setup the event early in the your planning process to get all volunteers, speakers, partners, participants active as “attending” to make the event look as popular as possible.
6. Promote your event through LinkedIn Groups
7. Promote your event through LinkedIn Ads

4- LinkedIn Advertising: 
Imagine how it would feel like to be able to tap into specific audiences like for example 1.3M small business owners, 12M small business professionals or 2M C-Level execs, and have total control over your advertising budget, by only paying when someone clicks or views your ad. LinkedIn calculates a quality score for your ads, similar to Google AdWords, but only uses your all-time CTR (click through rate) and your bid. LinkedIn ads have far fewer options than Google or Facebook ads but can still be a great performer.
Your text-ad will appear at the top, right under LinkedIn navigational menu, and/or on the right sidebar with your logo, next to it.
A few tips for LinkedIn ads:

1.  Your headline will be 25 characters in length while your description 75, meaning what you say should be concise & compelling.
2. Target, target, target. Just as with Facebook ads, targeting your audience is one of the most important aspects of your ad, as well as one of the largest benefits. Use the filters available.
3. You can advertise LinkedIn groups, events, company pages, and profiles. As well as outside URLS.
4. Split testing is easy with LinkedIn Ads so setup groups of ads to test performance on your copy, your targeting, and your images. Your minimum daily spend on LinkedIn Ads is only $10 so it is very affordable to test.
5. Social networking ads see user fatigue often. Pay attention to performance declining. You may have to change out your ad creative weekly to maintain performance.

LinkedIn claims to have a more affluent and attractive user base than Forbes, Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek. There is value in this network. Leverage these 4 techniques


Jason Keath is the founder of Social Fresh, a social media education company. He is a social media speaker and analyst. He also consults with corporations and agencies on building community and influencer outreach.... View Full Profile

Jumptap: Android Keeps Lead in Mobile Apps/Web

By Susan Kuchinskas at ClickZ:
Analysis of traffic on the Jumptap mobile ad network found that the Android operating system continued to grow its market share in November, maintaining its lead over Apple's iOS.
In November 2011, Android devices accounted for 52.7 percent of traffic on the Jumptap network, up from 44.7 percent in October. Apple iOS devices accounted for 22 percent of the traffic.

Jumptap's MobileSTAT report analyzes its network of more than 11 billion impressions, 95 million users and 13,000 apps and websites.
Ad requests were almost evenly split between apps and mobile websites. Android now makes up the majority of mobile app requests, accounting for 56 percent in November, as well as 25 percent of mobile web requests, versus 19 percent for iOS.
Apple device users were more likely to click, however: The Apple iOS clickthrough rate was .72 percent, versus .64 percent for Android devices, .56 percent for Symbian devices and .48 percent for mobiles using Blackberry OS.

While traffic slightly decreased over the Thanksgiving holiday, clickthroughs actually increased, thanks, perhaps, to holiday boredom.
Jumptap got creative with its data crunching and spit out one fascinating nugget: Traffic to the Angry Birds mobile game spiked at midnight on Black Friday in areas within a kilometer of Wal-Mart stores. Evidently, shoppers stuck in long lines or spouses idling in the car represent an underserved attention pool.

INFOGRAPHIC: The Three Stages of Facebook Attacks

Via Infographics Archive:
The report investigates the three stages of Facebook attacks: Social engineering tricks, how attacks spread between friends, and how cybercriminals benefit from the attacks.
Brought to you by commtouch.com.