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SocialVibe Raises $8M to Help Others Raise Money

Posted: 12 Jan 2009 04:04 PM PST

SocialVibe, a network that helps others raise money for various brands and charities, has raised some money for itself. The company has just closed an $8 million Series B round of financing led by JAFCO Ventures, with first round investor Redpoint Ventures contributing a large portion of this current round as well.

As a monetization platform, SocialVibe provides the destination and distribution tools needed to leverage the social media space for the purpose of promoting a cause and raising contributions for a given charity or brand. It aims to provide direct results for the use of one’s online presence, with a worthy goal in mind. SocialVibe does so through communities on its site, brand solutions for reaching out to relevant users across the web, and other tools for creating “influence” amongst end users.

A number of celebrities, including Hayden Panettiere, have spread their messages across the web via SocialVibe, raising awareness for causes dear to their own hearts. Being a more prominent network site in this space means that the more support SocialVibe receives, the more powerful it’s platform could become. To that end, the $8 million round of funding will go towards aggressive growth for its consumer and business partner relations, as well as increasing its own product developments as well.

These are both very important aspects of SocialVibe in terms of the company’s ability to leverage the online social media space (that includes getting influencers to spread their message on the site) as well as providing custom tools for those brands that need more specific services in order to reach their unique marketing goals. In all, the series B round of funding will heavily be supporting the nurturing of SocialVibe’s business model, which boils down to direct advertising options within the social media space.

In the year since launch, SocialVibe has grown to over 500,000 users, all of which SocialVibes is relying upon to help the company balance social media interaction and engaged marketing for a variety of brands and charities. Whatever success and failures SocialVibe encounters, however, will help the industry overall as brands look to more interactive options for leveraging social media in order to get their messages across.

13 Tips to Hacking Twitter

Posted: 12 Jan 2009 12:22 PM PST

Hey, What are you doing right now?

This is what Twitter answers in a text message of 140 characters or less. This networking tool is something bloggers use to publicize writings, companies use to elicit brand promotion, and people use to network. Here are ten Twitter hacks to better understand and leverage this new social networking tool.

-1- Be reTweet Worthy.

The biggest compliment you can get on Twitter is a retweet (RT). I’ve posted 2000+ tweets and maybe have been retweeted less than 1% of the time.

-2- Gossip Boy.

‘OH’ is when you “overhear” something juicy and tweet it as OH. This is in contrast to citing and sourcing, “@larryChiang’s Drunk tttrs are funny”. Gossip girls and boys, relish in the guilty comfort and anonymity within the confines of an ‘OH’.

-3- Pick a Twitter Thesis.

Twitter generalists bore. Twitter granularists bore most when they ‘report’ on cereal consumption and choice. Solution: pick a thesis or at least a general focus. My focus is “What They Don’t Teach You At B-School”.

-4- Twitter Ambush.

Some elements of a good military ambush are positioning, preparation, monitoring and of course surprise. Position and preparation are functions of what you selected as your focus. Monitor via Summize. A twitter ambush is where people walk into your expertise and your material springs into action.

-5- Squat a Hashtag.

Conversations can be hash-tagged to get tweets organized. For example, “#SXSW08″ is SXSW in Austin and if my math serves me right, #SXSW09 will be next year ;-). In March I’m hosting #VCsecrets as a panel. In the comments below add your hash-tags to various conversations.

-6- Reciprocaters Only.

Ratios on Twitter are very important. The Friend to Followers ratio should be 1:1. Friends are those you follow. The Follow-Unfollow-Follow maneuver is used on someone who isn’t following you. What this does is sends an email notifying you are now following them (even though you were following them all along).

-7- Follow Passion Topics on Summize.

Use twitter search engine called Summize to find tweets about your thesis/focus. You can also use alerts based on keywords.

-8- Oops, I Did Mean to Turn You On

Twitter mistakes are fun and can help communicate a message. Depending on your newbie status, you can ‘fail forward’. For example,
“Favorite @tylerWillis”
This mistake I made when Mr Tyler Willis reTweeted and re-posted a Business Week blog post of mine.

‘Unfollow @gregarious’ is when I didn’t really stop tracking Greg, but wanted to fire a shot across his bow after he talked smack at #BWE08.

-9- TinyURL to Promote.

There are website shorteners for when you’re tweeting a link. This helps you stay under 140 characters. You may have heard of RSS. Twitter is similar to RSS but made slightly more personal.

-10- Live tweet something.

Have access to something newsworthy, informational or breaking?! Live tweet it.
CNN loves the Twitter and your live tweets might make it onto cable TV for hundreds to see.

-11- Read your DMs and @ replies.

Twitter newbies don’t realize that there are DMs - direct messages and @ replies — public DMs. For example, @arielK might tweet “@larryChiang AfterParty at W.” I’d miss it if I didn’t hit my “@replies” from my twitter home page.

-12- Host a Twitter Contest

High brow intellectuals furl at the thought of doing a contest. Me, I have 700 followers because I’ll bribe, tip, comp and bribe people to read my twitter. I said bribe twice because nearly every contestant is a winner.

{CONTEST} Tweet ur fave TIP and WIN a gift card! http://tinyurl.com/twitter20 or http://tinyurl.com/6ak7r2 #larrychiang to play

-13- Pre-publish a Chapter Except via Twitter

There’s an urban legend that a book is getting written via Twitter 140 characters at a time. Maybe its a sequel to “What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School.”

Larry Chiang is the founder of Duck9. His focus is “stuff they don’t teach you at B-school”. It’s material that Chiang has been reading, researching and investigating since he was a sophomore in college studying engineering. Get Chiang’s book “What They Don’t Teach You in Business School” here.

Where’s My SEO From Twitter?

Posted: 12 Jan 2009 07:15 AM PST

As you probably already know, a large portion of my time from day to day is spent writing blog posts on this site and AllFacebook.com. With such a large investment of my time invested in blogging, I have to also figure out methods for increasing the amount of traffic to my sites so that I can increase the revenue generated from advertising. As most people know, the largest portion of traffic to blogs is generated by search engines which is why bloggers invest heavily in search engine optimization.

Aside from search engines, one of my largest sources of traffic is Twitter. I post each of my blog posts through the site and I also receive a large amount of traffic from people retweeting my articles. Something I realized over the weekend is that each of these links are essentially a “vote” for your site just like any other link on the web. Yet Twitter doesn’t want those links to count, choosing to use the “no-follow” tag which essentially removes links from being counted by Google.

If you search for for inbound links to any site via Google and Google Blogsearch, you won’t find any inbound links coming from Twitter. Twitter produces a huge number of links for me and I would argue that those links most definitely deserve to get included in search rankings. While the amount of content included with any link is relatively minimal in contrast to traditional websites, it still is content which deserves to get included in the search indexes.

Twitter already has a large presence when it comes to search engines. Google states that they have around 20 million pages indexed in the search engine. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that any of those links are counting toward my SEO. One reason that the links may not be counted is that most users link to sites with a tiny url (such as TinyURL.com, Bit.ly, or many others).

Twitter’s No-Follow Policy

The no-follow policy by Twitter makes a lot of sense. Spammers already flock to the site and if SEO was included in Twitter, the site could become a spam disaster. I would argue that Twitter can automatically determine who is a spammer and who isn’t. Once that has been determined, the site can remove the “nofollow” tag from all users that aren’t spammers.

Honestly, I want all of my links to count for others. The issue is a complex one though. Given that I post all of my blog posts on the site, should my cross-linking be counted as a “vote”? Probably not but then again, all of my internal links within my site are counted as a cross vote. It’s clearly complicated trying to determine what links are counted and which aren’t.

Personally, when I share content over Twitter, Facebook, or any other social site, the act of sharing should be just as valuable as posting a link on my site. If Google really wants to organize all the world’s information, they need to come up with a better way of including social relevance into their algorithm. Twitter also needs to come up with a more efficient way of sharing that information (unless of course they want to build their own search engine ).