Portfolious

The first release of Facebook Desktop for Adobe AIR application is mediocre at best. (Note: You need Adobe AIR installed for the application to work.)

What you see in this screenshot is what you get. It attempts to do what Seesmic, Twhirl and TweetDeck have done for Twitter.  But all three of these have worked because Twitter has a very simple and limited functionality.  People don’t expect to do much other than update status, retweet, reply, direct message and favorite.

[Adam and I have 15 invites each for the private beta of Aardvark, which is a new social answer-sourcing tool. Leave me a comment with your email or Twitter name if you want one.]

So what is Aardvark?

It’s an IM client from which you can ask a specific question like “What’s a good easy bike path in Irvine, CA for a beginning cyclist?” And it’ll send the query to others who claim to be experts in cycling nearby.

We talk about social media tools and their growth rates in our posts often.  But I think it helps to take a look at a snapshot of where the social media sites are from time to time.

The nature of the Internet, coupled with media buzz such as @Oprah’s debut onto Twitter this week makes it such that the social media landscape could change in a matter of months, days, or even minutes.   Taking a look at positive and negative growth will help your venture (and ours) understand where the people are going to for their information… and thereby where your current efforts are best focused.

Whatever your venture – non-profit, independent or private company – trendspotting can help you understand the buzz around your brand.  Similar to observing and analyzing stock prices over a period of time, trendspotting can give insight into how media coverage, special events, product releases, etc. influence the public’s perception of a brand on different social mediums.

With so many new media sites publicly releasing their APIs, there are many trendspotting applications available, and more on the way.  Which trend apps to apply to your organization depends on your industry and needs.  Filtering the important trends from the rest of the noise is what sets a great social media strategy apart from an average one.

Here, we take a look at some current comparative trendspotting tools available today.

You have a great business idea. You’ve run it by your friends, and most of them love it. the ones that don’t, you’ve rationalized that they just aren’t in your target market. You’re sitting on a million bucks, right? Now what?

I think this is where entrepreneurs truly succeed or fail. Some people just keep moving forward as major risk takers, but they don’t know how to allocate time or money. Others quit because they are risk averse and see the time and money it will take and figure its better to quit now. How do you get over these hurdles?

The average Facebook user has 120 friends.^[1] Imagine your reach if 80% of your contacts became a fan of your service, and 30% of their friends became fans, and so on.  Now pair that potential with the growth figure of 50 million users just in the first quarter of this year. This equals 1/4 of their 200 million total registered users to-date.

The team at Facebook has understood the power of these numbers, and are finally exercising the true marketing potential in the “social network” beyond targeted banner ads.

12seconds.tv is to video, what twitter’s 140 characters is to the written note.

Today, 12seconds.tv reveals its newest feature – the 12omercial – a 12-second video feature that can be linked to Web sites or contact information such as your Twitter or Facebook accounts. This in itself isn’t too unique. One can already tweet their 12seconds video, and people already send links to each other. In addition, now all 12seconds.tv videos track viewing statistics.

I’ve been tasked at work to come up with an 18 month rolling forecast. I think several companies have moved or are moving to a rolling forecast methodology. It’s far more accurate than budgeting once a year, and it can be used as a management tool.

I believe that most companies do not budget properly. Budgeting is that once a year painful exercise where people are asked to submit expense budgets based on some high level revenue target (usually without many objectives for how the revenue will grow), budgets submitted lead to an EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) that’s far too low, management adjusts income statement from a high level, finance cuts expenses, budget managers hate finance, and the budget is fairly useless 1-3 months into the year.

Sound familiar?

Live queries (not to be confused with the jQuery plugin) can be a useful tool for companies when used and managed in the right way.  People who use live query tools are looking for instant answers.

Aardvark and ChaCha are two very different tools for asking questions.  We’ll take a look at both tools and how they can help your marketing and public relations efforts.

I was invited to San Francisco this past week to give a talk to a public relations team and their COO.  We had a great conversation about the potential of Social Media, and how it could help both their PR and marketing strategies.

They asked a really important question about who the users are of the various social networks.  I gave a brief demographic overview in an earlier post here, but we’ll drill down further at Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Ning:

Monthly hits on the social networking sites average:

• Facebook – 78.6 million
• MySpace – 65.7 million
• Twitter – 6.1 million
• Ning– 6.8 million