Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Facebook has a problem.

Grammar geeks will have noticed that Facebook has a lot of made up words in its system, such as “themself” and moments where it has to say “Larry has changed their profile.”

A lot of this comes from people not specifying their gender in their profiles, and this is creating quite a significant headache for Facebook’s translators.

With Facebook now the world’s number one social network, and with expansion to Russia and China among other nations part of the reach, language difficulties are popping up as one of the obstacles to a more united Facebook. In languages like French, where gender is important in determining what words to use, some rather garbled looking results are popping out.
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Multiply is one of those social networks you don’t hear much about, drowned out by the loud buzz of MySpace and Facebook. But Multiply has slowly built a loyal and active user base, and is attempting to monetize by offering high-volume media storage that never expires and ad-free usage for $20 a year.

Attempting to be the “adult” alternative to the mega-sites out there, Multiply is drawing in a good number of users in their upper-20’s to mid-30’s. Assuming users of this age group are more likely to shell out for a premium service, Multiply’s answer to the monetization question is built on the back of this perceived loyalty and maturity.
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Google has released another tool to make live easier for Internet marketers. After entering demographics and other sites marketers are targeting, Google Ad Planner will find other sites that reflect a desired audience.

Most appealing is Google’s refusal to only provide information on sites in their own ad network. All sites are available for perusal, and it’s good to see Google provide the technology without any strings attached.

Google claims that this program is targeted directly at media planners and provides the means to concoct a .csv file that can be exported and presented to clients and managers. Ad Planner is currently available by invitation, and those interested can apply here.
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More bad news for the newspaper industry: 2007 saw the biggest decline yet in advertising revenues for the nation’s top newspapers. The year saw an 8% drop in revenues, and 2008 is forecast to be even worse.

The Internet, however, saw a gain in ad revenue of 33%, which roughly correlates to the lost revenue in other sectors. Print’s loss is the web’s gain.

To make matters worse for newspapers, a very poor housing market in states like Florida and California are leading to big hits in classified ad revenues. Additionally, with free classified services like Craigslist increasing in popularity, one of the biggest money-spinners for newspapers is quickly going south. Hearst estimates The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a day at this point.
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While Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the world’s number one social networking site by widening their global reach, other social networks have more significant regional strangleholds that will be hard to crack. For example, Orkut is weak in much of the world but dominant in Brazil.

The most glaring example of this regional favoritism my be in Asia, where Friendster remains the top dog and isn’t abdicating its advantage anytime soon. With many complaints about the site having been addressed, and the rapidly emerging connectivity of Asia’s nearly 4 billion residents, Friendster is a much ignored behemoth in social networking.

According to comScore, Friendster has increased its monthly unique visitors from 23 million in April last year to around 40 million this year, with the vast majority of new visitors coming from the Asia-Pacific region. Friendster doubled Facebook and MySpace in April for unique hits in Asia, and tripled Hi5 and Orkut.
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