As you may have heard, Facebook is testing a new feature among several top retailers that would allow users to create “wish lists” of products that they like or want to buy. This feature, appropriately titled the “Want Button”, is a button designated by users and distributors to images of retail products available for purchase. Once clicked, the button would automatically post an update on the user’s wall and add the item to a stored list of Wanted products. Lists or individual items can be shared among friends in much the same way photos and albums are shared now.

So how does this affect businesses? First and foremost, it will allow companies to share their products more quickly and reliably over Facebook; interested parties can follow the source of a Want back to the manufacturer/distributor in just a few clicks. This helps to alleviate the burden of identifying a product or brand from the customer while simultaneously eliminating a major hurdle within the marketing funnel.

The other benefit is increased visibility for specific material. Since companies can designate what is Want-able, they have control over the quality of the presentation. A calculated investment can then become part of a concentrated Social Media campaign instead of a blanket presentation. Segmentation and Insights can then lead companies to better strategies and a deeper understanding of their Facebook audience.

For more Facebook news and updates, be sure to visit our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. You can find Social Media Tips and Tricks here on our Blog – check out How to Schedule a Facebook Post, Why Facebook?, or How to Make a Great Custom App Image.

… and it looks kind of familiar.

This video has been circulating the web for a little while now and, believe it or not, it’s the real deal. You can sign up here: https://new.myspace.com/

I’m definitely not the first to point out the similarities to Pinterest in the new layout. Still, it looks like they’ve taken that idea and expanded on it in the right direction. I’ll have to take a few more days before I give my final verdict, but good on Myspace for taking the initiative.

Video Break-Down:
We start out with sleek, box-less sign-in screen. Very simplistic. This type of high-minded design is usually avoided on websites for fear visitors will get confused without obvious direction. It sure looks pretty, though.

We can see from the next section that Myspace is emphasizing integration with other networks like Facebook and Twitter, especially in transferring media like pictures and videos. This will be important if they’re going to steal any business away from these two.

The basic layout of the main page looks like someone asked “What if Pinterest was sideways?”, but the addition of a large background photo mixes up the formula a little. This format also extends to their “Events” section, where individual parties play out like their own profile.

Music is back in full force, and it looks like there will be a few different options like fluid playlist creation and searching by artists or venues.

The most interesting new feature is this built-in API, which seems to be very in-depth. Charting fandom will be big for Myspace’s music-heavy userbase, as will the ability to directly message your top fans, but both should see use in other circles once the network starts expanding. It’ll be exciting to see where they take it.

Boss theme song, guys.

I’ve never been a big fan of Google+, but I’ve got to hand it to them here. Not only are they tying themselves to what is bound to be a huge property, but they’re making themselves an integral part of the fan/artist relationship. It feels all kinds of wrong to think that Google+ might actually have a future on the web, but a few more power plays like this and they might have themselves a legitimate market. Well played, sir.

… I will rise from the ashes to lay eggs of marketing knowledge in the mind nests of the audience perched on the cliffs of overly-stretched metaphors. Sorry for the unannounced break everyone; we’ve been busy here at HID and my attentions have been required elsewhere. Good news, though: I’m back, and I’ll be approaching the blog with a much more personal touch this time around. We’re also looking to hire a new intern, so watch out for guest posts over the next few weeks. In conclusuion:

In less than a week, the High Impact Designer Team will be giving a presentation at the 38th Massachusetts Innovation Night, a Boston-based trade show and product development seminar. If you’re in the area and you’d like to see our products first-hand, you can swing by the Microsoft NERD Center at 6:00pm on Wednesday, May 9 and check out all of the great new products Mass Innovation has endorsed. Also, if you’d like to show your support for HID and help get us a spot in closing presentation, you can vote for us at http://mass.innovationnights.com/events/may-9-2012-mass-innovation-nights-min38. Thanks, we’re looking forward to seeing everyone next Wednesday!

PS – May the 4th be with you, always.

Earth Day’s just around the corner so, in the spirit of the season, here are a few tips on how to get your business running greener.

Honorable Mention: Carbon Footprint Calculator
While this won’t help you become greener outright, a carbon footprint calculator will help you to determine the impact your business is having on the environment as well as the potential benefits to changing some of your practices. There are plenty of carbon calculators available for free online (this is a good one) and many services offer an in-depth analysis for a modest fee.

5. Solar-Power your Chargers
Lots of people, myself included, like to keep spare chargers at work for phones, tablets, and other devices we aren’t really using while in the office. The thing is, most drip chargers draw power even when they’re not charging anything, and that can wattage can really add up over time. The solution? Recent breakthroughs in solar technology have made small, efficient solar panels like these more useful than ever. While one panel may not power your laptop all day, it’s more than enough to charge a few phones. Try placing one or two in a central, sunny location and encourage your staff to make the most of them.

4. Carpooling
An old standard, encouraging your employees to carpool is still one of the best ways to reduce your business’s carbon footprint. Offer small incentives for people who carpool regularly – preferred parking, an extra vacation day, etc..

3. Recycle (Properly)
While the jury’s still out on whether standard recycling practices are actually good for the environment, there are cheap ways that you can recycle around the office that don’t involve a recycling truck.* For example, having a separate garbage bin for food scraps will greatly reduce the load of your regular trash and allow for the possibility of composting. Many urban areas have dedicated composting programs and, if expenses are incurred, they often qualify as a tax write-off.

*Repurposing paper to a mill or manufacturing plant is another good option.

2. Office Kitchens
Many workplaces have a break room or pantry for employees to use during their lunch breaks. What most offices don’t have is dedicated kitchenware. Even something small, like coffee mugs (which you can buy on Amazon for less than $1 a piece), will go a long way in reducing your waste.

1. Cloud Computing
The Paperless Office was a pipe dream. However, it is getting easier to collaborate electronically thanks to internet-based sharing tools like Dropbox and Google Docs. If you’ve never had the chance to use these programs, you should give them a shot; both are free to use and, once you’ve had some experience with them, they can be a great asset to your office.

4. People Need to be Looking for You
In order for your business to be successful, people need to be looking for your products. Now, even if you don’t have a mobile campaign, most of your online information is accessible on an internet-enabled device. That’s great and all, but professional websites and emails are essentially unreadable on a 3.5” screen. For an example, here’s a Google search page on an iPhone, unaltered:

If you can read that without squinting, congratulations, you have the highest screen resolution/best vision combination I’ve ever heard of. For the rest of you, this type of display just won’t work. Sure, people can zoom in, but the harder you make them work for you the more likely they are to give up and buy from your competitor instead. And if you think no one buys from their phone, think again. While actual purchases on mobile platforms may be low, over 65% of smartphone users browse and research products on their devices. Put simply, having a mobile infrastructure will make it easier for customers to buy from your business.

3. Mobile Campaigns Reach More People
There are over 67 million mobile email users in the United States, and if current trends continue, that number’s only going to go up. 20% of the entire population is way too much to ignore.

2. Phones and Tablets are Social Devices
People use their mobile devices to connect with one another and manage their electronic lives in a social environment. It’s never a guarantee, but when you market to a mobile user, you have the potential to reach the people they’re currently interacting with. This is a great opportunity to raise your brand awareness and reach people you normally wouldn’t be able to.

1. People Pay Attention to their Phones
If paranoia has taught us anything, it’s to never go anywhere without your phone.

You never know when you might get that important call that absolutely can’t wait another second. And for that same reason, we depend on our phones, allowing ourselves to be distracted enough to miss a turn or walk into a bear. This is great news for marketers. Not only will your emails and landing pages be reaching more people, those people will be more inclined to engage with and explore your content, netting you more bang for your marketing buck.

It’s Opt-in

The main reason email marketing is so effective is that, unless you’re doing something seedy, people will only get your messages if they WANT to get them. This way, potential customers have a great deal of control over what they see. They value that control and appreciate your respect for it.

It’s Personal, yet Virtually Anonymous

Because people opt-in to email marketing campaigns, they can pick and choose what kind of content they’d like to receive. This makes what comes into their inboxes very personal and allows them to create a marketing experience tailored exclusively to their interests. At the same time, people usually have to give up very little personal information. This lends them a sense of security in an increasingly public marketing world.

It’s Private

Social media advertising will never match up to email for the simple reason that it has and will always be far too public. While it might not be incredibly stressful, publicly acknowledging support for a brand adds an extra level of anxiety to the marketing relationship and can potentially affect every interaction the fan or follower ever has

It’s Non-Invasive and Easy to Manage

Personal email management, i.e. the ability to send incoming mail directly to specific folders within an email manager, has done more for online marketing than many businesses are aware of. While it’s not preferable for your fliers and advertisements to get shoved off into a barely-opened offer graveyard, having the ability to make that happen gives customers a sense of control and privacy that is impossible to achieve by any other means. As I mentioned earlier, if people have opted into your campaign, they want your content and will be looking for it, so there’s not a lot to worry about.

It’s a Well-Established Bare Minimum

People know that if they want to engage with a brand on an electronic level, they’re going to have to give up some form of contact information; that just makes sense. As we’ve seen, electronic mail has very little associated risk, therefore making it the most popular choice. Combine that with email marketing’s familiarity and effectiveness, and it’s clear to see how it has been and will continue to be the most popular digital medium for reaching out to consumers.

4. Half of Twitter’s Users Were Never Even Active

Before you start thinking this is a gross exaggeration, think about the people you know and how they interact online. How many of your friends have signed up for Twitter? Of that number, how many are still posting regularly? Is it difficult to believe, with so many people you probably know now dropping off, that most users never got beyond trying Tweets on for size? Consider this graph, created by Twitter’s own API in mid-2011:

From this, we can clearly see that, by Twitter’s own admission, most tags created in the last 5 years have generated little to no traffic since they were activated. How does this affect us? For one, this inactive user pool is a huge drain on resources for Twitter itself, making it more difficult to police and update services efficiently. Secondly, that pool of 500 million users we think we’re interacting with is probably closer to 200 million. Impressive, yes, but not what we expected. Luckily for everyone, recent expansions in membership are indicating strong increases in user activity, so we’re likely to see this situation improve. In the meantime, we can turn to more established methods to getting our messages out there…

3. Facebook Ads Have a .001% “Success” Rate

Take a second and think back to the last time you were on facebook. Right now? Great. Look to the right side of your screen. How many of those ads are relevant to you? Most of them, probably. But how many times have you ever clicked on one? If you’re like most facebook users, the answer is never. This is a common trend on facebook and by and far the biggest problem facing their investors today.

All in all, this isn’t as big a problem as the numbers would make it out to be. .001% of 845 million active users is still 8,500 customers. Also, .that statistic is a blanket figure applied generally to all facebook advertisers. In reality, well-known and respected companies often have much higher Click and Conversion rates. Still, small businesses face the obstacles created by this low success rate on a constant basis.

To counter the ill effects of low ROI, many small businesses are now investing in the drawing power of their Pages. By creating attractive Landing Tabs and Like-Gates, they can secure Likes and reach a larger and more interested audience for their products. For many small businesses, this is becoming the solution to Facebook marketing and other dwindling Social Media prospects.

2. YouTube Generates More Hours of Content in 1 Month than all Major Television Networks Combined, Ever

How many hours of TV do you think exist? Think about every season of every sitcom you’ve seen or every football game you’ve watched. All of that footage could be uploaded to YouTube in the time it would take to set your DVR. Currently, people upload videos to YouTube at a rate of 48 hours per minute. That’s over 25 million hours a year and growing. While this is great for YT, it doesn’t do much for their users, who have to struggle daily to stay afloat against ever-growing tidal waves of rival content. There aren’t even enough people to watch all of that footage, even with Google creating accounts for all of its members. Yep, they’re doing that.

1. Google+ Members Average Less than 5 Minutes of Use per Month

We’ve all heard the dismal reports about Google+ usage: Growth is slowing down, people aren’t connecting as well as expected, etc.; but our hopes have been kept afloat by the reported increases in membership, the array of new features being introduced, and the relentless television and internet advertising. Now, research firm ComScore Inc. has revealed that that optimism may have been misplaced, releasing a study this week claiming that active Google+ members spend, on average, 3.3 minutes on the sight per month.

Keep in mind, this isn’t all members we’re talking about. If ComScore had factored in all the accounts created since G+’s release, the numbers would probably have been even worse. No, this is a study of people who have accessed their accounts recently, and it’s telling us that the average user spends about 8 seconds on G+ per day. To put that in perspective, most people spend a 2 full minutes a day brushing their teeth.

Obviously, decisions need to be made about the future viability of Google+. Despite the lack of prolonged use, it still has a powerful backing and a variety of user and business-friendly tools, and that has to factor in to any major consideration. In the meantime, it would be best to focus on more popular media.

Are You Missing Valuable Marketing Opportunities?: The Well-Kept Secret of Industry-Specific Networks

For most people, “Social Media” brings to mind some big names: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.. It makes sense; those sites have changed the way we interact with one another and generated an entire new world of personal and business potential. It’s important to remember, however, that the biggest game in town isn’t the only one to play.

Recent expansions of social networking capabilities have created a dramatic increase in the number of industry-specific social networks over the past few years. Notable examples include PureVolume, a free music sharing and promotional tool for bands; iShade, a networking platform for accounting professionals; and Biznik, a thriving online community for growing small businesses. In the short time that they’ve been around, each of these networks has created a distinct space for itself amongst the social media giants, and even more are following in their stead.

Too Focused?

Obviously, this trend represents a fantastic opportunity for businesses to focus their marketing efforts directly on their target industry. “But so what?” some might say, “I target multiple industries and focusing on one won’t help me at all!” That’s where Social Media Managers come in. Apps like Hootsuite and Ping can integrate with your social media platforms and distribute posts and messages in group format, allowing you to target different markets simultaneously over a variety of social media channels. Implemented properly, Social Media Managers allow you to take advantage of Industry-Specific Networks while maintaining a mainstream social media presence.

Expanded Workshop

One of the best features of Industry-Specific Networks is that they often use unique or specialized tools to process and distribute information within their systems. PureVolume, for example, has a highly adaptive music sharing system that allows bands to distribute their tracks in order to increase traffic and manage exposure. Using similarly adapted tools, one could make extensive use of an online community in a unique and direct manner not available on major sites.

In conclusion, Industry-Specific Social Networks are an excellent option when marketing to a specialized industry. At the very least, they can be a useful and effective facet to a larger marketing picture. Obviously, the larger media networks are an important and necessary consideration for any business, but it’s important to remember that there are other options out there.