March Madness: The PromoJam Weekly Social Digest!

Kentucky vs. Kansas tonight! Who are you jammin’ with?!

PromoJam is definitely in the spirit of March Madness with one of our own being from Kentucky, we have some hot rivalries going on. In celebration of the big game tonight, we present you with a few ways to ante up the madness!

App of the Week: NCAA March Madness App

The NCAA March Madness app kept us informed with every single game in real time. If you’re going to be anywhere out of reach of a remote control tonight, then get this app ASAP! It only costs $3.99 and you won’t have to miss a beat!

Get yours here: http://www.ncaa.com/march-madness

Video of the Week: College Basketball Dunks of the Year!

Here’s a nice trip down memory lane of all the best College Basketball dunks of this year. It’ll get you pumped to get back on the court!

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SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS RECAP!

The Shorty Awards took place last Tuesday recognizing the best of social media and Twitter.  Every year the anticipation grows for this live streaming awards show centered around Twitter. The big winners this year included @justinbieber [#Celebrity and #Music], his lady love @selenagomez [#actress],  @Instagram [#App], and @OccupyWallStreet [#Activism]. Take a look at all that was hot this year on Twitter here.

Conan takes over Mashable - Did you fall for it?! Mashable claimed to have been “taken over” by the late night giant Conan O’Brian yesterday, with a major April fools prank that had everyone reeling. Leave it to Conan to create “manual tweets,” literally asking people to write tweets down on a sheet of paper. I wonder what other brilliant ideas he had up his sleeve. Read all about it here!

NBA Twitter T-shirts - Starting with basketball, we end off with more basketball! One of the big creative ploys of the NBA this week was creating T-shirts with the Twitter handles of the league’s biggest stars. A creative way to drive followers, these t-shirts are hot! The NBA is catching on quick. Maybe they will start adding QR codes like we did for the NFL and Junk Food clothing!

Speaking of the NBA - anyone out there a big fan of THE SUPERMAN - Dwight Howard? Then CLICK HERE to download his new app, Hey Wooorld! and enter for your chance to win an autographed iPad!!

Enjoy watching the final game of March Madness! May the odds be ever in your favor!

How Facebook Timeline for Pages is changing the Branding Game!

The social media world is abuzz with word about the release of Facebook Timeline for Pages - how will it affect brand marketing and how will it affect the way marketers communicate with consumers?

While the new features and more visual aesthetic requires more careful curation and crafting from the marketer, the overall effect is one that creates a more cohesive brand story for you and the consumer. Change is daunting, but just take the time to play around with the new features, and you will be sure to find new and interesting ways of communicating your brand message! Speaking of which, need some pointers on how to begin crafting your brand spanking new Timeline Page? Check out the official Facebook guidelines for the Pages Timeline! 

Facebook Timeline For Pages - Product Guide - from TechCrunch

And here are some nifty apps that you can use to create personalized and fun cover photos! Have fun with it - you never know what just might work!

CLICK HERE to check the 5 tools you can use to customize your Facebook cover photo!

And don’t forget to check out our new Facebook Page! 

Technology Report: iPhone vs. iPhone

With all the talk about the iPhone coming to Verizon next month, Verizon users (and AT&T users too!) are holding their breath waiting to see what the service— and service plan— will be like once the coveted iPhone 4 hits the Verizon airwaves. The ultra-braniacs over at Mashable created an easy to digest infographic on the subject!

iPhone vs. iPhone: Who will reign victorious?!

Twitter in the News: Twitter Trends Around the World

The breaking news in Twitter-land yesterday was global: Twitter’s locally focused “Trends,” lists of hot topics is now available in 18 countries and 24 cities around the world.

This little Venetian Tweetie-bird knows what’s up in Italy, one of the 13 countries added to Twitter’s “Trends” yesterday, along with Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Turkey and Venezuela.

“Trends” has been under construction for nearly a year now, with Twitter beginning locally-oriented trends for users in early 2010, a more specialized and efficient “Trends” appearing in the Spring, in time for trend-based ads in Summer 2010. 

More multi-cultural Twitter news? The company is currently working on displaying tweets form other languages “in the user’s native tongue”

Twitter “will now be using Google Translate to display Tweet translations in the details pane to give people more access to what people are talking about around the world.” Twitter has been working on a multi-language support system since last year, now the feature is slowly coming to users around the world and should be available site-wide in the next few weeks.

Facebook in the News: Facebook Mail Launches Today

This morning Facebook co-creator and CEO Jesse Eisenberg- er, we mean Mark Zuckerberg- announced at a press event in San Francisco that Facebook is launching a new “modern messaging system,” which will accomodate the more than 4 billion messages that are currently sent via Facebook every day.

Mashable reported that Zuckerberg announced that “Facebook believes that modern messaging is seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal.” This new Facebook messaging is “not e-mail.” It is, however, what they describe “the next evolution of Messages,” allowing Facebook users to decide how they want to send their messages: through text, chat, email or Facebook messages. 

“You shouldn’t have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use,” states Facebook’s blog, “simply choose their name and type a message.” 

The other big Facebook news of the morning? Facebook is providing “@facebook.com” email addresses to every Facebook users who wants one. The Facebook messages and Facebook email are two separate things, though: messages provides no subjects lines, cc, bcc, and messages can be sent simply by pressing “enter.” Messages seeks to make “messaging” more like chat, a real time conversation taking place between friends.

The argument behind Facebook’s “Social Inbox” is that “it seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement.” The Social Inbox doesn’t ignore these other messages, it just places them in an “other” folder- this is also where non-Facebook using friends emails will go, until you move their emails to your inbox. Once a user has been added to your inbox, their emails will continue to be sent there- so you won’t have to worry about Facebook email excluding your non-social networking friends!

The best part of new Facebook messaging? You no longer have to worry about SPAM and getting unwanted messages from strangers- you completely control who is able to contact you. Facebook Messages will become available over the next few months: once a user receives an invitation to messages, they’ll be able to send more invitations to their friends, eventually inviting all of Facebook to join in on the fun. Sounds a little like RockMelt, doesn’t it? 

Facebook in the News: New Facebook App Streams Live Video from Pages

Livestream, the aptly named live video streaming service, has teamed up with Facebook to launch a Facebook application that allows Facebook page admins to stream live video through Facebook pages. 

Livestream for Facebook works with the Livestream Podcaster software, and gives Facebook Page managers the ability to stream live videos to their Facebook page. By partnering with Facebook, Livestream surpasses achievements of competitors Ustream and Justin.tv, which, despite being around for years, have never broken out of the tech and entertainment niche. 

Mashable predicts that Livestream’s DIY Facebook app with popularize live streaming movements for brands and businesses: it’s free, easy, and works within the familiar Facebook setting that 500 million have come to know and love.

Weekly BlogJam, from @copyblogger @swissmiss @techcrunch, among others

This week has been a big one for social media: Kik took center stage in SMS technology, RockMelt exploded onto our computers pairing Facebook with web browser, and Facebook paired with Livestream to bring live videos to your Facebook fan Pages. What else happened? Let’s take a look: 

1.) Social Media Examiner gave us Four LinkedIn Tips to Help You Stand out

2.) Chris Brogan gave up on Google Chrome for the time being.

3.) New York blogger Tina Roth of swissmiss announced tomorrow’s Los Angeles/CreativeMornings breakfast lecture with Kitsune Noir’s Bobby Solomon

4.) TechCrunch reports on Facebook’s plans to build a second data center

5.) Mashable on how social media is making Veteran organizations better

6.) CopyBlogger explains seven ways to energize your writing 

Social Media Milestone: YouTube Users Upload 35 Hours of Video Every Minute

A few weeks ago, YouTube announced that they had hit 1 Billion subscriptions. This week, YouTube has a new exciting announcement: those 1 billion subscribers are uploading more than 35 hours of video… PER MINUTE! 

Back in March, the YouTube blog announced that users were uploading more than 24 hours worth of videos every 60 seconds- that’s more than a day, in just one minute!- but since then a number of changes have taken place at YouTube to facilitate user uploading. The newest factors contributing to their growth?

  • The time limit for videos uploaded by users increased by 50% from 10 to 15 minutes.
  • The upload file size increased over the last few years by more than 10x to 2GB via our standard uploader.
  • Mobile phones have improved dramatically in how quickly and easily they upload videos to YouTube.
  • More companies integrating our APIs to support upload from outside of YouTube.com (Activision’s Call of Duty Black Ops. as one very cool example where you can record and share video footage from within the game).

YouTube’s blog breaks down just what can happen in 35 hours- or one minute of YouTube uploading time: 

This graph from the YouTube blog provides a visual for just how much YouTube has grown since June 2007 — an amazing feat, just the past few months alone! Going forth, YouTube sets a challenge for users: upload 48 hours of video every minute. Two full days…every minute. Think we can do it? Guess we’ll have to see !

Facebook in the News: For Employees, Facebook Counts as Free Speech

Free speech and Facebook are hot topics this week in social media news. New York Times Business Day wrote earlier this week about a company that the National Labor Relations Board accused of illegally firing an employee after she allegedly criticized her boss on her Facebook profile. 

The New York Times reports that the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Lafe Solomon, stated that the recent case concerning Dawnmarie Souza, an employee of the American medical Response of Connecticut was “a fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act- whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that.”

Mashable warns, however, that “not all Facebook activity is likely to be protected speech. Given the nuances of employment law, you may want to call an attorney before you post something derogatory about your boss or workplace- or perhaps just skip the public, online venting altogether.”

According to NLRB’s Facebook page, comments on Facebook may lose their protected status depending on where and how the discussion take place, and the nature of the online outburst. 

So, should Facebook ranters be protected? Mashable’s story has been tweeted 2,341 times and shared on Facebook 6,166 times in just one day- so it looks like the general consensus of social media savvy news readers believe so!

Google in the News: New Google Lets You Preview Search Results

Yesterday Mashable blogged about the new updates to Google’s homepage: the ability to “preview” search results before you click them. It’s Google Instant on steroids.

What is Google Instant Previews? Essentially, it allows Google-searchers to visit a website before they visit the website. Google does this by taking a screenshot of every website it provides in search results, thus giving users the ability to see their search results individually by remaining on Google’s search page- just by clicking a little magnifying glass icon that sits on the right of the search results. 

When a user clicks on or hovers over the magnifying glass, a screenshot of the webpage appears on the right side of the results page. “It’s an at-a-glance view of the website’s content without actually having to visit the webpage.” The coolest part? The Google preview highlights the part of the page that contains the terms you searched for. According to Mashable, Google Instant Preview is “the natural progression” of internet searching- from Google’s Autocomplete to Google Instant to Google Preview, Google is obsessed with making internet searching more efficient. Google Preview’s focus is not on making the actual searching process faster, but making the decision-making process faster. 

Initial studies show that users are 5% more likely to be satisfied with the search results they choose with Google Preview- that doesn’t seem like much, but with a search engine of Google’s scale, 5% gets real big real fast.