Today I attended the launch of the Seesmic Desktop. Seesmic owns the very famous Twitter client Twhirl (1.2 M downloads until today) that is in the top list of  clients with Tweetdeck. Loic Le Meur, the founder of Seesmic presented today, at Seesmic’s offices in San Francisco, the new Seesmic project that will (soon) combine Facebook and Twitter in one client. The event was also live via the Ustream channel of loic with an average of 500 users.

The new Seesmic desktop is a preview and can be downloaded only by the Seesmic team members. You can join the team and download the new Twitter client. There are several new features but the most interesting is the UserLists where you can make lists of your friends and have a separate column for each list. The whole design reminds me iTunes. Simple, with a left sidebar and other ‘Mac design ideas’.

Twhirl has some cons that Seesmic wants to get rid of them.. There is not a twhirl.com domain and its name is quite hard to say it. Seesmic wants also to strength its brand name by creating the Seesmic Facebook application and the new Seesmic Desktop.

So, join the team, test it and give your feedback to Loic and his friends!

Look the pictures of the event…

• Create community around your brand
• Keep content fresh, new, engaging (usually funny)
• Make it participatory – have a point
• Create incentives for viral adoption/growth
• Use it to gather customer feedback – good and bad
• Experiment with different programs – learn/change fast
• Think globally
• Be willing to give up control

Top Marketer Mistakes

• Build it and they will come
• Promotion rather creating relationship
• One-way pitch rather than two-way dialog
• Over-exploiting the social growth
• Interrupting the customer use case
• Pretending to be someone you are not
• Ignoring limitations of your brand/category

After Comcast and other companies, Bank of America joined Twitter recently. Today BoA has more than 750 followers and this number will be increased. BoA announced the new Twitter account with this message:

As of last week, we are now listening AND responding to customers on Twitter. You can find us at BofA_help.

So we are entering a new territory. A place that is not familiar to many in financial services-but a place with tremendous opportunity. I look forward to the journey ahead knowing that for each and every tweet we engage in, we are looking to maintain and grow the trust you have in Bank of America.

The BoA representative is David Knapp, the Official BofA Twitter rep. We hope that more companies will follow BoA..

This presentation gives a great overview of the company’s overall strategy and the reasons it has become what it is today.

On 6th of November, Al Gore joined Twitter… After 3 days, he has 13,232 followers and this number is keep increasing!

Nike is winning a new game that other corporations, from Coca-Cola to Verizon to General Motors, have tried unsuccessfully to play: building brand loyalty via online social networking.

In the two years since it launched Nike+, a technology that tracks data of every run and connects runners around the world at a Web site, nikeplus.com, Nike has built a legion of fans. In August, for instance, 800,000 runners logged on and signed up to run a 10K race sponsored by Nike simultaneously in 25 cities, from Chicago to São Paulo. Now the company is testing a social network to promote its basketball shoes.

How Nike+ benefits the company’s bottom line is harder to gauge. Some analysts back up Nike’s claims that the site is renewing the popularity of its running shoes. SportsOneSource, a Princeton (N.J.) market research firm, says Nike accounted for 48% of all running-shoe sales in the U.S in 2006. Today, its share is 61%. “A significant amount of the growth comes from Nike+,” says Matt Powell, a SportsOneSource analyst.

Nike now hopes to score with another group of jocks: basketballers. The company is beta-testing Ballers Network, a Facebook application that lets players organize real-world games and manage their teams online.

Rivals are joining the race. Next year, adidas intends to introduce in the U.S. a sensor called miCoach that allows runners to upload heart rate and running data to a Web site via mobile phone. But an American miCoach will have a long way to go to catch up with Nike+. About 93 million miles, in fact.

Source: BusinessWeek

Global Social Networking

In August 12, it was announced by comScore that Facebook is the number one Social Networking site in the world with more than 132 millions members leaving MySpace at the second place! In 2008 there was an 153% increase compared to 2007..

For Facebook a significant parameter was the translation tool in 69 countries..