RAAK

The story behind Dominos Social Media success

Earlier this year Dominos Pizza reported a 29% rise in profits, a feat they ascribed to Foursquare and other social media tools. RAAK contacted them to find out more and they happily obliged. 
 

Social Media for teenagers? Think again.

The average age of a Facebook user is 38! And more than 61% of Facebook users are over 35. The average age of Twitter users is 39, Linkedin 44 and MySpace 31. See this infographic for more.
 

The SEO implications of Google Instant

Last week Google launched Google Instant. User can now get instant feedback – as they type – on whether their search queries are correct. Cool. But what about the impact on websites and SEO? Econsultancy featured some educated guesses by SEO experts that are worth considering.
 

Android on the rise

While Nokia has a new boss, trendspotters predict that the Android will be the world's second biggest mobile operating system, pushing Blackberry as well as Apple down the pecking order.
 

MyFry

Whatever mobile platform will become most popular, the app culture will somehow be part of its success. Early adaptor Stephen Fry has just launched his autobiography The Fry Chronicles in app form. And not just as an eBook. The MyFry app comes with a nice-looking visual interface and content tagging, which cleverly enables people to read it in a non-linear way.

 

Are URLs the new cookies?

Twitter's yearly traffic is up 400%. But the traffic on their own website is up by only 100%, with users preferring the use of clients like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. Twitter has now announced a redesign of their .com site, which they hope will make it a far more popular destination. Techcrunch did a good appraisal.

But Twitter's real power may lie in the humble URL shortener. Alistair Croll points out that:

Web marketers obsess over the "funnel" — the steps from first contact to purchase. They try to optimize it constantly, tweaking an offer or moving an image. They want to know everything about a buyer or a visitor.

Web analytics is a huge industry, but the tools marketers rely on to understand visitors are breaking. Cookies, long the basis for tracking users, need web browsers to store them. In a world where we share URLs via email and social networks, those cookies get lost along the way, and with them the ability to track viral spread of a message.

And when we're talking apps this problem becomes worse. However, because Twitter controls the core of its service it does not have this problem. Croll again:

This is why short URLs are so important. URLs survive the share. Because the interested reader is forced to go to the URL shortener to map the short URL to the real one, whoever owns the shortener sees the engagement between the audience and the content, no matter where it happens. That's why URLs are the new cookies.
 

Spot the pig

A South African is being hunted by police for his reporting of police road blocks on Twitter. A debate over circumvention of the law versus citizens organising against corrupt police has eschewed.

Is this evidence of the malevolence of the crowd or another Ushahidi? At first @pigspotter reported road blocks himself. Now his 'crowd' are sending him reports and he Retweets it. Read an interview with him here. Thanks to @Kuberkoos for the informing us.
 

Creative of the week – Evan Roth

Remember those GIF animations? Those were the days. Now, artist/researcher and founder of the Graffiti Research Lab Evan Roth has edited his archive of his old school animations into a 10-minute GIF-fest.
 

Tech insight of the week – Death of RSS? Or Death of XML?

This week saw a flood of Death of RSS posts, tweets, and statuses. Most of these came in the wake of the announcement that Bloglines, the web-based RSS reader, will be shutting down on the 1st of October. It made Adriaan think about the Death of XML.