He declined to comment further on the what this could be, however rumours are circulating that it could be anything from the release of an iPad app, to integration with skype, a music service or a photo sharing app.

The announcement of this launch comes at a time when most media attention has been on Google’s new ‘Google+’ social network, which has had positive reviews from the vast majority of its invited testers (including ourselves) and is thought to be a really challenger to Facebook in future.

Can the Harvard graduate’s self built multi-billion dollar social networking juggernaut fend off Google and place the attention back on itself, or will the power of Google, with search and Youtube in its locker to name just a few, prevail?

For more information regarding social media marketing, please call the SEO Nottingham team on 01623 650333.

News Corp purchased the network in 2005 for around $580million (£361million), when it was the market leader, with statistics from the time showing MySpace had 21.9million unique US visitors, compared to Facebooks 8.3million.

Since then however MySpace has been in decline, whilst Facebook and Twitter have had undergone exponential growth, in May this year MySpace brought in 34.9million unique visitors, in comparison to Facebook’s 157.2million, and their near 700million users.

The deal for the sale shows a huge loss for News Corp, following news that the sector they account MySpace under had suffered an operating loss of $156million, they have recouped only $35million – £21million. (according to unconfirmed reports).

The deal see’s small Californian advertising agency Specific Media take majority control, whilst Pop Star Justin Timberlake also has a small stake.

Whether new owners and perspective can help MySpace take on Facebook, Twitter, and even Google+ when its released remains to be seen, but they have a huge task ahead of them to salvage the sinking ship.

For more information regarding social media marketing please call the SEO Nottingham team on 01623 650333.

Just days after their case was dropped, the Winklevoss twins have accused Facebook of ”intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence during their previous long running legal battles.

Tyler and Cameron have long accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea in setting up Facebook. They reportedly hired him to write code for their own ‘ConnectU’ site when all 3 them were attending Harvard university, however Zuckerberg never carried out the work and instead, shortly after, set up Facebook which of course went on to be extremely successful.

A court case regarding this was actually resolved back in 2008 when a settlement of around $65million (£41million) was paid, however this was not enough for the already wealthy Winklevoss duo who reopended the case in January 2011 claiming they wanted more money, considering the huge wealth that Zuckerberg has earnt through the social networking site, making him a billionaire.

Regardless of who actually brought about the idea of Facebook, there is no denying it is extremely popular, and a fantastic free marketing tool, which you  should definitely be incorporating in to your businesses marketing plan.

For more information about social media marketing, then please call the SEO Nottingham team on 01623 650333.

The findings from the survey have shown that social media has evolved into an essential marketing tool for a lot of businesses, with 66% saying their marketing campaigns would ‘suffer’ without social media activity.

Other key findings include -

• Globally, there has been a rise of seven per cent in the proportion of businesses successfully recruiting new customers through social networks.
• One third of companies in the UK (33 per cent) devote up to 20 per cent of their marketing budget to business social networking activity.
• 52 per cent of businesses globally and 48 per cent in the UK use the channel to engage, connect with and inform existing customers.
• In the UK, 50 per cent of firms encourage their employees to join business networks, compared to 53 per cent globally.

These are very encouraging figures as social media marketing is a fantastic way to market your business…time to get the other 59% on board!

For more information about social media marketing please the call the SEO Nottingham team on 01623 650333.

The site lost around 6million users in the USA alone,  dropping from 115.2million to 149.4 according to figures from Facebook. Canada saw a drop of around 1.52million taking figures to around 16.6million, whilst the UK, Norway and Russia all saw drops of over 100,000 users.

The drops in figures may be a sign that is has maximised its growth in the countries which first made it successful, or that many of the original users are turning their back on it, from either lack of interest or due to the seemingly constant issues and debate regarding privacy issues.

Despite the month-on-month fall, the US still saw a 23% overall growth in users between May 2010 and May 2011 to 155.2 million users, while the UK grew by 10% to 29.9 million in the same period. The US is the largest country in terms of users overall, with Indonesia second with 36.4m, followed by the UK and Turkey.

Either way, this is a tear drop in an ocean of users, and it will not start any alarm bells ringing just yet, after all, it is still growing, the US still saw a 23% overall growth between May 2010 and 2011, whilst the UK grew by 10% and they are continuing to head toward an astronomical 700million users.

For more information regarding anything related to Facebook or social media marketing, please call the SEO Nottingham team on 01623 650333.

The new function apparently scans newly uploaded photographs, ‘recognises’ a friends face and then prompts the user to tag that person in the photo. Facebook have said that the purpose of the function is to speed up the process of tagging friends in photo’s, however it has been met of complains over privacy issues and people who were not asked whether they wanted to activate the service.

Whilst the option is available to ‘opt-out’ of being tagged, people are still unhappy at the fact they can be suggested for tags in photos without being asked first – the latest in a long line of Facebook privacy issues.

In the past there has been controversy over Facebook privacy policy, stating that everything should be private by default, with people left to open up their account if desired, rather than than opposite way round. Moves were made to simplify the networks privacy policy, however more has still been called for – although founder Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of his belief that the web ‘should be social’.

For more information regarding Facebook and its use as a social media marketing tool please call the SEO Nottingham team on 01623 650333.

The two are leading a group of internet pioneers to the G8 government meetings being held in France to discuss matters such as internet regulation, privacy and copyright issues. This comes after the ‘e-G8′ discussions held earlier this week which had the blessing of French president Nicholas Sarkozy – however world leaders are under no obligation to listen to what the delegation recommend.

Both Zuckerberg and Schmidt have spoken out against talks of government regulation of the internet, warning it would be a bad idea. Zuckerberg brought up the recent Arab uprising which were praised for their use of the internet to arrange protests and other action, saying ”People tell me on the one hand ‘It’s great you played such a big role in the Arab spring, but it’s also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people’, But it’s hard to have one without the other, You can’t isolate some things you like about the internet and control other things that you don’t”.

Schmidt echoed these comments warning that ”Technology will move faster than governments, so don’t legislate before you understand the consequences”.

So it seems that despite their differences, criticisms, and the recent Facebook/Google smear campaign scandal, they can find common ground in the fact that they – rightly – want the internet to remain the playground of free speech, away from regulation of governments.

For more information regarding anything Google or Facebook related, from SEO to Social Media Marketing, please call our friendly team on 01623 650333.

This move follows news earlier this week that Google’s main competitor in the search market, Microsoft’s ’Bing’ had  introduced a deeper integration with Facebook, allowing signed in users to view what their friends have viewed and liked on the search engines results pages.

This also comes following the revelations that Facebook ran a smear campaign against Google, dropping several malicious stories surrounding Google privacy issues – issues which were addressed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt yesterday.

Whether these new integrations with social networking and search will make a difference in the market share remains to be seen, however one thing is for sure, the battle is hotting up.

For more information regarding anything SEO or social media marketing related, please call our friendly team on 01623 650333.

Facebook have admitted to hiring the PR company, Burston-Marseller, however deny the fact it was a ‘smear campaign’ and claim it was to expose things which Google was doing that “raised privacy concerns”. The story was broken after blogger Chris Soghain released an email conversation he held with the PR company Burston-Marseller regarding a smear campaign to release several stories about Google’s privacy issues.

Facebook partly tried to justify their actions by saying they ‘resented’ the fact Google use Facebooks data in their own social services, however in the end, this just puts more shadiness over the image of 2 companies who have had plenty of issues regarding privacy in the past few months, and leaves the ‘friendly Californian surfer dude company’ image in tatters – it won’t do much good for Burston-Marseller either!

For more information regarding anything related to Google or Facebook, be it SEO or Social Media Marketing, please call our friendly team on 01623 650333.

The annual ‘brandZ’ studywhich has seen everything search and SEO giant Google rank top for the last 4 years, showed that Apple’s iPad and Iphone have helped increase the brands value to an estimated $153billion (£93billion).

This goes along with last years ‘most valuable technology company’  list where Apple managed to overtake Microsoft to take the top spot.

Peter Walshe, global brands director at ‘Millward Brown’ has put Apple’s success down to great products, meticulous attention to detail, but also ‘breaking the rules of pricing’, acting as ‘luxury brands’ to, by using a high price to increase peoples desire to get the products.

Of the top 10, 6 were telecoms or technology related, the full top 20 of values and changes from last year can be seen below:

1. Apple – $153bn, +84%
2. Google – $111bn, -2%
3. IBM – $101bn, +17%
4. McDonald’s –  $81bn, +3%
5. Microsoft – $78.2bn,  +2%
6. Coca-Cola – $73.8bn,  +8%
7. AT&T – $69.9bn, unchanged
8. Marlboro – $67.5bn, +18%
9. China Mobile – $57,3bn, +9%
10. General Electric – $50.3bn, +12%
11. ICBC – $44bn, +1%
12. Vodafone – $43bn, -2%
13. Verizon – $42bn, N/A
14. Amazon.com – $37bn, +37%
15. Walmart – $37bn, -5%
16. Wells Fargo – $36bn, +97%
17. UPS – $35bn, +35%
18. HP – $35bn, -11%
19. Deutsche Telecom – $29bn, N/A
20. Visa – $28bn, +15%

*Social networking giant Facebook ranked at number 35, worth an estimated $19.1billion.
Source

This list gives a good perspective of the economy and markets at the moment, with web and technology definitely being the way forward.

For more information on developing your brand online, or anything web design and SEO related, please call our friendly team for a chat on 01623 650333.