Twitter revealed a re-engineered version of its website today at a press conference. According to Twitter’s blog, the new and improved interface features:

New design:
The site has a cleaner timeline and a rich details pane that instantly adds more impact to individual Tweets while still maintaining the simplicity of the timeline. And, experience infinite scroll — you no longer have to click “more” to view additional Tweets.

Media:
Now, it’s easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with DailyBooth, deviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.

Related content:
When you click a Tweet, the details pane shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.

Mini profiles:
Click a username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.

These changes will roll out as a preview over the next several weeks starting with a very small percentage of registered accounts today. During the preview, users will be able to switch back and forth so they have time to grow accustomed to the way things work. Eventually, everyone will have the updated version of Twitter.com.

As more and more business are adopting Foursquare as a marketing channel by adding incentives for checking-in, the need to track and analyze this data has resulted in the launch of a Foursquare dashboard.  In order to use this dashboard, you must claim your venue. You do not have to be the person that created the venue to claim it, but you must be available at the venue to answer a phone call from Fourquare and provide details/proof that you are eligible to manage it. You can either manage the account through your personal Foursquare account, or start a new one, as the details of the manager’s account are public.

This dashboard is a collection of venue check-in analytics including stats like:

Key Metrics: (Overview of activity)

- Total check-ins
- Unique visitors
- Percentage of check-ins shared with Twitter
- Percentage of check-ins shared with Facebook
- Gender percentages of check-ins

Top 3 Visitors

12 Most Recent Check-ins

All Check-ins (detailed list)

Time Breakdown (time users are checking in)

See Below:

Currently, there is no way to access the information by a certain week, month, or day, so for now, we are forced to record this data and move into a spreadsheet or other tracking software.

This is a great step in the right direction for a business using Foursquare. We anxiously await more detailed tracking options from Foursquare in the near future.

For me the telling number is at the bottom; whereas, 22 links appear on Reddit before Digg compared to 6 links appearing on Digg before Reddit.

While everyone is aware of the popularity of social media consumption by consumers there are important differences in how small business approach the use of the channel as compared to larger corporations.

Key Insights:

• Small business are more focused on investing in efforts where there is a direct return:
  While large companies may execute social media programs out of a sense of obligation (i.e. to seem innovative, because competitors are doing so, because it is part of their stated department responsibility, etc) small businesses will generally only focus time on where they feel they will get legitimate value (i.e. revenue) in return.

  This is also driven by the fact that small businesses are often times resource constraint, thus making it difficult to allocate resources to focus in incremental activities that do not have an obvious, positive and immediate impact on the core business. This compared to larger companies who can hire (through direct resources, vendors or agencies) resources to focus on broader activities.

• Small business marketing is more direct and local:
  Given the small business (and their owners) are often closer to the customer through direct interactions and operating specific locations, they are also often more involved with customer service and location specific marketing efforts.

  This is translating into small businesses using social media channels (such as Facebook and Twitter) to provide support to their customers and social mobile services (such as Foursquare) to offer incentives for customer visits.

  Often times small businesses also have clearer value from customer review sites such as TripAdvisor, Yelp and Angie’s List as they have a direct impact as to the perception of their operations on consumers. Many times, given limited marketing dollars, these may be the primary channels in which consumers learn about these companies.

• Small business customer scale and focus drives small business approach to social media:
  Given that small businesses are often focused on a specific offering (compared to large mass market corporations) and specific locations, they are often times able to focus their social media activity to specific categories of conversations and geographic focus. This allows them to be as relevant as possible to their target market.

Opportunities for small businesses in social media:

Promote through small business blogger outreach:

• Target influential small business bloggers to seed content within the small business blogosphere
• Provide incentives to bloggers, like discounts to their readers or exclusive content that they can’t find anywhere else
• Contribute useful content to the blogs, like advice for small business owners or news about upcoming events

Address small business audience through current social channels:

• Use current Facebook and Twitter accounts to reach out to small business owners
• Create a small business tab on fan page with exclusive small business content
• Create two-way conversations with Facebook and Twitter updates by asking small business owners questions and including them in the overall social media conversation.

Create group and messaging in LinkedIn:

• Being a major influencer in the ecosystem and the largest professional social networking site, LinkedIn could be an effective way to reach small business owners.
• Create a small business group and invite small business owners to join.
• Create conversation with small business content and tips with group members right where they network with each other.

Partner with current small business community to promote the brand/service:

• Explore the possibilities of becoming a partner with an already-established small business community, such as OpenForum.com.
• This will give exposure in a channel that small business owners are already actively using.

Picture Source: Ted.me

Life In A Day is a historic global cinematic experiment aimed at creating a user-generated feature film. On July 24th, you have 24 hours to capture a glimpse of your life on camera. Video submissions will be accepted from July 24th – July 31st. The most compelling submissions will be edited into a documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin MacDonald.

The documentary film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and will also be available on YouTube. If your submission makes it into the finished film, you’ll be credited as a co-director. 20 people will be chosen from the list of co-directors to be flown to the Sundance Film Festival to celebrate the premiere!

For more details on guidelines, ideas and how to submit your video, check out the Life In A Day YouTube channel.

If you are looking for other events I recommend checking out Mashable’s event list.

Social Platforms

Meebo’s Enhanced Social Play
“Meebo — which facilitates the integration of multiple services like Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger in one interface — has launched XAuth (Extended Authentication), which automatically recognizes active social platforms and lets users connect with ease on participating publishers’ sites.”

The idea is to increase engagement while diminishing user confusion.

Facebook Makes Major Announcements at F8
The “Become a Fan” button has become a “Like” button. Based on Facebook’s research, they found that users are two times more likely to press a “Like” button than a “Become a Fan” button, increasing engagement with brands.

Facebook also announced the development of the Open Graph API that will allow the “Like” button to be implemented almost anywhere on the web, increasing the reach of Facebook. The Open Graph API also allows people and brands to pull fans from Facebook to other web properties.

Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all

How Big is Twitter
Twitter announced this week for the first time, the actual size of its registered members. According to Twitter they have over 105 million worldwide registered users with 180 million unique visitors every month.

Twitter Stays Strong as Growth Slows
Traffic on Twitter has begun to plateau according to Comscore, Nielsen, and Compete. However, engagement on the platform continues to grow.

Mobile Technologies

Use of cell phone for pictures and video popular across age groups
Here is a great visualization of the rise of the use of mobile technologies across the “Teen” demographic for multimedia (photos and videos).

Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Who’s Winning the Geolocation War? [INFOGRAPHIC]
A great infographic of the battle between Foursquare and Gowalla, both geolocation platforms for mobile technologies. Users “check in” to locations they visit to score points and update their friends.

Decreased Media Usage Hurts Ad Market
Ad spending was down in 2009 as was the amount of time users spent with media (12 hours/day down from 14 hours/day). Every media witnessed a decrease in activities except one; mobile, which was up 39%.

Talk time on mobile was up 12%, while average daily mobile Web use rose 36% to 11 minutes. Texting was also up, by 55%, to take up 27 minutes a day in 2009.

Online Video Viewers Hungry for New Tech
With YouTube turning 5 this week, we still see it reign king in online video ranking way above other video platforms. However, we’re beginning to see a shift from strictly user generated content and more towards network programming and news.

How do the Most Successful Companies use Social Media?
The social media tools studied are diverse and serve many purposes. Companies reported using these tools for several reasons. They reported that the tools provide the following:

• Another way to communicate
• Added value to customers
• Product/brand awareness
• Ability to keep up with trends and competitors
• Demonstration of product
• A more cost effective and productive form of marketing

Portals Vital for Users and Marketers

“eMarketer estimates more than 57% of all US online ad revenues will go to the four major portals in 2010. By 2011, nearly 9% of total media ad spending in the US will go to these four sites.” An amazing display of the continued power of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.

Full Details On Twitter’s Long-Awaited Ad Platform: Promoted Tweets
I’m sure you’ve probably heard about the Promoted Tweets on Twitter. It’s a long-awaited ad platform that will be pretty exciting to see it play out. There was a lot of buzz this week around the new launch, so here are a few other articles with different opinions.

Businesses Split on Paying for Twitter

First Take Analysis: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem

Facebook May Be About To Jump Into The Virtual Currency Offers Game
Virtual currency is becoming a huge hit online… So big in fact, behemoth Facebook is getting into the mix. With no real details about what offers they will provide, it’s a great mystery to see how this virtual currency will work in Facebook’s favor. Then to see how brands can tap into the predicted $2 billion/year industry.

Consumers Follow Social Brand Referrals
68% of consumers said they would be likely to buy a product or visit a retailer fan page based on a positive referral from a friend. By engaging our online community in a positive, “shareable” manner, we can tap into their social network and begin to build new, positive relationships.
What is a Facebook Fan Worth?
$3.60 each… According to AdWeek, “On average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year. The company’s findings are based on impressions generated in the Facebook news feed, the stream of recent updates from users’ networks.”

Yesterday I wrote a quick blog post on my personal blog called, “Keeping Social Media Going.” The basic idea was “we are all set up on Social Media, now what?” It’s a fear of many companies and something that is continually on my mind. How do we as marketers stay relevant on social media while continuing to communicate our brand message on a consistent basis without overwhelming? There is an art to walking this thin line.

The answer… create a content strategy with two components:

A Backbone Message – This is the overall brand message that we want to continually communicate to our consumers. This will become the starting point for all messaging and content throughout our social programs. This could become the “big idea” that draws consumers to engage with our company.

Campaign Specific Messaging – To keep our company relevant and exciting and to create multi-touch engagements throughout a given year, we need to create campaign specific messaging. While creating our social strategies for the year, we will need to identify these different campaigns. These could be product launches, community involvement, marketing campaigns, etc. These campaigns will likely become the big ideas that continually engage consumers. During the engagement, the consumers will then be exposed to the backbone messaging, allowing us to communicate our brand correctly during each engagement.

This combination of backbone and campaign specific messaging is vital for any social success. Too much of one or the other will sway the consumer in the wrong direction. Too much Backbone Messaging, the consumer will feel “marketed too,” which they don’t like. Too much Campaign Specific Messaging, the consumer won’t fully understand the brand message and our marketing objectives won’t be achieved.

Here’s some bullet points that I outlined in the Keeping Social Media Going post from yesterday to help with other strategies to stay relevant and engaging:

• Keep responding and answering fans, followers, friends
• Continue to share content of affinity organizations and information relevant to your brand message
• Cultivate relationships with your most loyal followers and your loudest influencers
• Build mini conversational campaigns around company milestones or important company dates
• Continue to scan the ecosystem for opportunities, discussion topics, etc.

What are your thoughts? How do you stay relevant to your consumers?

Photo courtesy of Flickr – Paul Garland