CampusByte » Social Media

SEED – Where Your Content Flourishes

TimWillingham — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:08:31 +0000

This is a guest post by Tim Willingham, a college freshmen at Texas State University. He also runs a dope music blog about song remixes, new music and music news. Make sure to check out his SXSW section.

Remember that company in the 90’s who would send you free “Frisbees” in the mail every month? Yes, I’m referring to AOL. Well, imagine that same company but instead of 4 free months you get a paycheck. Introducing Seed, AOL’s new social media experiment where you create the content behind AOL’s 80+ family of websites.

How It Works

I love to write, so I decided to give this thing a try. Once you sign up, you will see a list of available assignments. The assignment will have a title, topic, how much they will pay you and how long until the deadline.

Click on a topic to read detailed information about the assignment. Once you have found a project you feel like you can accomplish click “claim”.

Seed gives you the ability to save your assignment so you can work on it anytime before the deadline. Every time you log in Seed shows your current assignments, and also your completed ones.

After you create material for the project and submit it to Seed, there is a five to seven day waiting period after the deadline where your work is looked over. If AOL decides your work is good enough for one of their sites, they will publish it.

I actually got my second assignment purchased by Gadling. It was only a 10 dollar score, but I only spent 5 minutes writing the article. That seems like a good “profit to work ratio” to me.

Writing’s not your strong suit? Make sure to check out the “creating content” section for writing advice.

Payment

Once you get an assignment accepted, and you’re ready to be paid you must fill out the W9 for tax purposes. Make sure you know your social security number for this.

Payment at the moment is usually $20 to $50 per assignment. Although, Seed hopes that in the future there will be a “Shared Earnings” feature. This feature would enable you to split the advertising revenue off of your work.

Non-Monetary Benefits

Seed will be publishing your stories to some of the most trafficked sites on the internet. For your resume, what could be better than to say you have an article published on Engadget, or a photo published on Stylelist. Even though you may not make all of the projects you apply for, the skills you will sharpen from writing more frequently could be valuable for school and a future career.

Facial Profiler on facebook, Find Your Twin

CampusByte — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:23:35 +0000

Coke Zero has released a Facial Profiler on facebook that analyzes your facebook photos and finds people who look like you. It also gives you the ability to connect with your look-alike! Talk about creepy. Even the sound effects on here are creepy. As you can see, my twin doesn’t really look like me, but some of the other matches I’ve seen are amazing.

“Join the Facial Profiler to find out if there’s someone out there who’s a lot like you. The Facial Profiler uses next-gen facial recognition technology to analyze your face and then match it against faces from all over the world. How you use that information, well that’s up to you.”

Click here try it out.

Is Social Media a Fad? (Video)

CampusByte — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:57:20 +0000

Stats from Video:

By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
Only 14% trust advertisements
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
90% of people that can TiVo ads do
Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

The above statistics and “Social Media Revolution” video tell the story, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Please feel free to share with any non-believers!

Source: Socialnomics.net

[tags] social media, fad, technology, twitter, facebook, youtube, linkedin, google, iphone, ipod, apple [/tags]

Your Grandparents Are Taking Over Facebook

CampusByte — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Facebook is getting older, much older. According to facebook’s own estimates, the number of high school and college students has declined 15% and 20% respectively in a mere six months. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site.

As a site that started initially for college students, this comes as a shock. Where have all the kids gone?

Anyone can go through Facebook’s self-serve advertising program and see the user demographics numbers the company estimates now. However, iStrategyLabs captured that data six months ago and saved it for comparison. The changes have been dramatic.

As you can see in the chart above, young people by age are up a small amount, but young people by school level are down. Users with undeclared education levels are way up, implying that many high school and college students may simply no longer be listing their schools at all on the site. It’s no secret that facebook is deviating from its original demographic of school aged kids, but this shows us that advertisers may be more interested in a users age group than their school level.

The chart also shows the dramatic spike in older users. This could mean totally new possibilities for advertisers, but what does it mean for us college kids? Well, unfortunately all this shows is that Grandma and Grandpa will be commenting on your status and inviting you to kill zombies with them. Keep an eye out for Grandma’s “Bunco” facebook event. I wonder if ‘guests are allowed to bring friends to this event’?

For more on facebook and Grandparents, check out the full story below.

ReadWriteWeb: Facebook’s Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users

Are your grandparents on facebook? Let us know in the comments.

[tags]company, computers, demographics, facebook, grandparents, new media, Tech, technology[/tags]