Internet Marketing & Recruiting

I’m looking forward to presenting to the Wheat Ridge Rotary Club today, July 28th, in Golden, CO.  I will be discussing, at a very high level, what social media is and why it is beneficial to businesses.  The primary social media platforms that will be covered include: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, Reddit, Digg and Yelp!

The slides that will be used in the presentation have been posted and can be found on the webinars page.

I’m looking forward to it!

Travis Scott Webinars delicious, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, reddit, Twitter, yelp

by Travis Scott | RainierDigital | April 19th, 2009

A few weeks ago I espoused Digg’s URL shortening tool- DiggBar. It is extremely convenient and I began using it fairly consistently to not only link to various articles I would post on Twitter or send via email, but to also promote new content on my blog via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to name a few. After a day or so of doing this I noticed something strange when analyzing the Google Analytics for my website. I was generating a lot of traffic from Digg.com but next to nothing from the other sources that had consistently sent readers in the past. I realized that, regardless of the website my users were visiting when they clicked on my link, it would always show them being delivered by Digg.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help me when I am trying to fine tune the marketing of my blog because I obviously am not getting an accurate picture of where my traffic is coming from and any trends that may be associated with this.

With that said, its a great tool for general use and I am still using the it to shorten the URLs of other pages I link to via Twitter or email, but have ceased using it to promote links on my own website. In the meantime, its back to using tinyurl and bit.ly.

Travis Scott RainierDigital Original Digg, DiggBar, URL shorteners

by Stan Schroeder | Mashable.com | April 17th, 2009

2009 is the year of social media. Once, Twitter (Twitter reviews) was a place where you could read about someone else’s cat. Now, it’s the first place you go to when there’s breaking news. Sites like Digg (Digg reviews), Reddit (reddit.com reviews), and Facebook (Facebook reviews) can now leave a huge impact on the real world; lives are changed, important questions are asked (and answered) there. Many milestones have been reached; the growth of nearly every aspect of social media has and continues to be enormous. We’ve dug up some amazing statistics and numbers from this realm.

YouTube, Hulu and Google

In March, YouTube (YouTube reviews) reached 100 million monthly viewers in the US. 6.3 billion videos were viewed on the site. Its competitor, Hulu (Hulu reviews), is also growing fast, but not nearly as fast as YouTube. In March alone, YouTube has grown almost two Hulus in size. According to some calculations, YouTube will serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009.

Is Google getting any money out of it? Hardly. Some reports claim that the video sharing service is costing them $1.65 million dollars per day. Is this money-bleeding causing Google (Google reviews) much grief? Not really. According to their latest financial report, its revenue in the first quarter was $5.51 billion, a 3% decrease from last quarter, but still a 6% increase from the same period last year.

Facebook & MySpace

Facebook has grown from 100 million to 200 million users in less than 8 months. If it were a country, it would be bigger than Brazil. Its traffic has grown immensely in one year’s period, especially in Europe where it grew 314%. According to comScore, it has grown a staggering 2,721% in Italy from February 2008 to February 2009. In other European countries, its growth was also immense: 999% in Spain, 607% in Belgium, 518% in France, 499% in Switzerland.

MySpace (MySpace reviews), the social network that used to break records like these, is now lagging behind Facebook; according to latest calculations, Facebook now has a total of 65.7 million unique visitors versus MySpace’s 54.1 million. MySpace was sold to News Corp. for $580 million in 2005. Facebook’s valuation? Depending who you believe, it could be anywhere from 2 to 15 billion dollars. Not bad, considering the economic situation.

Finally, here’s another sign of the times: Nielsen Online’s latest research shows that social networking is now more popular than email. According to their study, 66.8% of Internet users have used social networks, while only 65.1% have used email.

Twitter & the rest

Remember the time when Robert Scoble had a couple thousand Twitter followers, and it was a big deal? Now there’s a guy with one million Twitter followers. If you type “Ashton Kutcher” into Google, his Twitter account will be the third result.

Twitter itself is growing at a crazy rate; although it already has a very large audience, it grew 76.8 percent just from February to March. Its yearly growth rate? 1,382 percent. According to Nielsen, Twitter currently has 7 million unique monthly visitors. If it keeps growing at this rate, it’ll have nearly 100 million visitors same time next year.

As far as social news sites go, Digg’s recently launched DiggBar has increased the site’s traffic by 20%, or so they claim. And, according to Compete, Digg is at 36 million uniques and growing fast again, despite a dip in traffic in February. Frequently cited as Digg’s main competitors, Reddit and StumbleUpon (StumbleUpon reviews) are also growing, but they have a long way to go before they come anywhere close to Digg. Not everyone is doing this well, though. Another social news site, Propeller.com, is unfortunately dying, having fallen to around 1 million monthly uniques, compared to 1.89 million in September 2008.

Finally, the most recent numbers I’ve had the misfortune to write about: The Pirate Bay four has been sentenced to 1 year of prison each, and they must pay 3.6 million dollars in damages.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Dalaj; DNY59

via The Web In Numbers: The Rise Of Social Media.

Travis Scott External Content Digg, Facebook, reddit, social media, statistics, Twitter

by Travis Scott, CEO at RainierDigital

This week Digg, the popular online content aggregator, launched DiggBar – a URL shortening tool that lets you shorten any URL without leaving the page you are viewing.  It is a great tool!   Nice work Digg!  Gone are the days of copying a URL, opening a new tab or browser, navigating to a URL-shortening website such at bit.ly or tinyurl.com, shortening the link, copying it, opening Twitter and pasting it. Now you can shorten a URL without leaving the page you are viewing.

DiggBar gives you two ways to shorten the URL…the best way is to add the DiggBar button to your browser’s Bookmarks Bar.  This is something you only have to do once.  Once this button is in your browser’s bookmarks Bar, you simply press it whenever you find an article you want to share.  DiggBar will then shorten the URL and the result will be shown in your browser’s address bar.  Copy this and paste it into an email, your Twitter or Facebook status or any other service you use to share information with your peers.

The other way is a little more cumbersome, but still a great alternative to navigating to another website.  If you find a link you want to share, simply type http://digg.com/ in your browser’s address bar in front of the URL you want to shorten.  Press enter and voila!  Shortened URL.

Here’s an example…say I just read an article on ESPN.com about Ichiro, the star player of my favorite baseball team, the Mariners and found out he will not be playing in the season opener next week.  Now I want to share this story with my friends on Twitter and Facebook and need to shorten the original URL.

In my address bar, the original link is:  http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4039525

By simply typing http://digg.com/ in front of this URL in my browser’s address bar and pressing enter I now have the following URL I can use in Twitter or elsewhere:  http://digg.com/u18ql

Sharing content is only going to get easier and this is one more step in that direction.

Get the DiggBar button for your Bookmarks Bar here:  http://digg.com/tools/diggbar

I would love to hear what you think.  Comment below with your thoughts on DiggBar.

Travis Scott RainierDigital Original Digg, DiggBar, Twitter