SnakSocial - Our First Week

To You the Reader,

From yesterday SnakSocial had been blogging for one week and what a week it has been.

We have been reviewing the new Google+, seen Skype come to Facebook, find out that the UK's 168 year old newspaper - News of the World is publishing for the last time on Sunday and MySpace get sold for £22 by News International for a fraction of what they paid for it. So really not a good week for News International which holds News Corp.

We have managed to get readers in over 10 countries, post 21 articles and tweet 35 times.Our Poll closed with Twitter being the favourite business social tool.

So thanks to all our readers! Let us know what you think...

Brands say No - News of the World Goes

The News of the World has had a lot of troubles in its time and the latest phone hacking scandals of celebrities and the British royal family have caused a long line of advertisers to pull the plug such as Boots and Vodafone which made up part of their TOP 10 advertisers who collectively bought in nearly £40m. So Sundays edition will be the last with the proceeds going to good causes according to News Corps Mr Murdoch. 168 years its been going and bad apples in their 200 staff have meant the fruit bowl has to go. The News of the world was part of the UK/ European division of News Corp which had bought in $1.61bn revenue in the year ending June 2010 to News International.

Ofcom reports that  with Sky News they have a TV media reach of 11.7m, press media reach with news corp of 14.5m and an online media reach of 4.6m with news corp in the UK. In April 2011 News of the World had an average Sunday circulation of 2.6m people according to ABC.

This just stresses the importance of the operations of a business affecting a brand. This can be said for many websites online which have their revenue supported or wholly from advertisements. Earlier this year we had Wiki Leaks who had many of their service providers pull out because of the thought that their support would affect their own brands.

James and Rupert Murdoch have been getting quizzed by MP's in the UK.

To Be Continued. Let us know what you think?

15 Billion Downloads - have you got an app?

Apple have recently announced that they have had 15,000,000,000 application downloads and this makes you realise the power of the phone applications knowing that this is no longer a FAD but the way we will consume information globally in the years to come.

So are you involved? I think it is important now for every business to make themselves accessible via an "app" to  engage your customers through mobile because they'l see you everyday. We recently wrote about QR codes and how they can be used to take a user to a website on the go. Applications however give users the choice to see what your business is doing everyday. The problem is they can be expensive to make for the more complicated applications.

Their is a lot of competition in the Apple "app" store with over 425,000 of them to choose. Their are places which allow you to make applications for Androids and Ovi. Ovi App Wizard is in its beta stage and allows you to make an app in minutes for Nokia phones - not doing too well.  Android from Google has an app inventor in Google Labs. Will the other operating systems catch up?

Tell us what you think...

No brands! Well not yet. - Google+

Google+ have today told businesses not to use their service whilst they continue to develop their platform for brands. They still haven't opened up the service to everyone yet either but those brands who have managed to get on their have been told that the service won't be ready until later this year.

With yesterdays launch of Facebook's video calling feature, is this going further damage to the appeal for Google+? because not everyone will need the Hangouts 10 way calling and will users stick to the brand profiles where they are offered things? - on Facebook. We recently wrote about the use of Google+ for professionals!



Let us know what you think...

Facebook + Skype = 2 Way Chat

The recent reports were right - So we now have Facebook with one-on-one video chat, not to long after Google+ launched and gave us hangouts. This i'm sure is going to be quite a problem for Google attracting users, who don't need to chat to more than one person.

So we have Google+ hangouts where you can get up to ten people in to one chat and yet to be opened to everyone. Whilst Facebook has launched its one-to-one chat that brings Skype inside your browser. You don't need a new account either to use the Facebook video chat. I still see Google+ as an additional profile for remote workers and Facebook video calling for those personal social calls. We also found out that Facebook have their 750 million users - WOW!

How easy do you find Facebook's Video Calling - here's a clip from YouTube.

To be continued. Let us know what you think...