(Guest post by Dorine Sinigaglia)

Fotobabble launched its new iPhone app today, allowing people to add voice to the photos they send and share with friends and family via Email, Twitter, Facebook or an iPhone. With the new Fotobabble iPhone app, users can easily create talking photos within seconds with a few clicks on a Web browser or their iPhone.

The possibilities of what one can do with talking photos are simply endless, since adding life to photos is a tool truly everyone can enjoy and benefit from. As if the experience of sharing photos is not fun enough, knowing I can add my voice to a photo I want to share really allows the viewer to share the memories with me. A few cool memories I look forward to capturing my voice & sharing with others: a friend’s live wedding engagement and sharing it with family; sending a picture to my roommate with my voice describing the perfect couch for our living room; recording my voice in a home-made greeting card or send a talking postcard from my vacation to Hawaii. Fotobabble gives a whole new meaning to the famous quote: “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Creating and sharing a “Fotobabble” takes seconds, is free to use and is now available for users who are out and about with their iPhones. After downloading the free Fotobabble iPhone app, users just upload a photo and record their voice directly through their computer’s microphone to create a talking photo. They then have the option to select an existing photo or a snap a new one and then record their voice. Whether using a computer or an Phone, users can share talking photos via Email, Facebook, Twitter, or embed them into a blog or Website.

Kamal Shah, CEO of Fotobabble, noted that there are tens of billions of static photos on the Web without voice or sound – three billion photos of which are uploaded to Facebook each month alone! “Using Fotobabble, people and businesses can greatly enhance these images with the energy and emotion of voice” – says Shah.

Fotobabble for Fun & Communication:

Fotobabble for Business:

Businesses can also utilize Fotobabbles to promote their product, engage with customers online more effectively or to increase the number of visitors to their Website, blog or Facebook page. Fotobabbles are easily embedded anywhere on the Web and greatly improve how images are presented and experienced online for your customers.

Brand and ad agencies may use Fotobabble as a social media marketing platform. Fotobabble’s flexibility makes it easy to build customized viral marketing campaigns that are more engaging than text or static photos and are much simpler than video to create and share. Brands can build truly unique campaigns using Fotobabble in contests, Facebook, Twitter and blogs – to name a few.

Companies and celebrities can leverage the power of Fotobabble by creating talking photos to raise awareness for their brand and better engage with their customers and fans.

Fotobabble takes photo sharing to a whole new level. No software is needed to download the app, since Fotobabble supports PCs, Macs and the Apple iPhone, making it easy for people to create talking photos and share them with friends, family, their business – or with the whole world. You may download the free Fotobabble iPhone App here to start adding life to your static photos.

Dorine Sinigaglia is the Account & Content Manager at Blonde 2.0.

When Blonde 2.0 began to assist HP Israel’s Personal Systems Group with their social media marketing efforts, we found they had no representation in the social media world. A community had not yet been built for the group and their customer base did not have a proper network to turn to for questions and answers. Over the course of a few months’ time, Blonde 2.0 and HP quickly exposed HP Israel’s PSG group to the social media world and began engaging with customers and potential customers in order to increase the group’s brand awareness in the community.
When you build a community from scratch, the target audience you primarily want to attract are community leaders, early adapters and other “movers & shakers” in your industry in order to gain some momentum. Blonde 2.0 launched HP Israel’s Facebook Fan Page in September and started with 0 lonely fans. Since close to a third of Israel’s population has a Facebook profile – 2.5 Million Israelis and the demographic groups we wanted to target were found on Facebook, this social network was a great place to start building a community around HP. We also turned to twitter to reach out to HP’s community, as no other network allows for real-time message updates nor engagement with Israeli industry leaders from the high-tech and digital marketing worlds as Twitter does.
By the end of first month, HP’s fan base on Facebook grew to 150 fans and we noticed an exponential growth each week. By the end of October, HP had 619 fans and by November we reached 810 fans. This quick growth was based on the interesting content we uploaded and our engagement with the fans on the page. We discussed computers, laptops and provided assistance with HP products. We also created all types of interesting activities and contests for the fans to take part in.

Providing incentives for fans and followers to take part in the community is a must when brands take a part in the social media world. A brand should be ready to compensate fans who promote its name both by social incentives as discussed in this post and also by giving fans prizes. In the end of November, early December, we unleashed HP Israel’s first giveaway campaign, asking our fan base to participate in a creative contest that would offer them a chance to win a new HP Mini laptop (the Mini 110c). We wanted to emphasize the product’s easiness of mobility and asked our fans to tell us where they would take their laptop if they won it. We encouraged fans to be as creative as possible, giving them the option to upload videos, sound clips, photos and graphic materials to the fan wall as their contest submission. The response rate was overwhelming and we were amazed at how much fans invested in their creations in order to win. We received over 630 entries within 3 weeks time. The winner of our competition was a creative song writer Nadav Harel who wrote an enthusiastic song about HP: HP song: Cute Little Computer. Nadav received recognition and praise from the community (social incentive) and a new laptop. The HP laptop contest did wonders for our activity and growth of the HP Facebook Fan Page. Our community grew to over 2,580 fans.

Campaigns held on twitter also encouraged HP fans to become more involved in our community. We asked our followers to tweet us a personal experience they had with an HP product. The creators of the three most creative tweets of personal experiences they had with HP products were awarded a bluetooth mouse known as “The Dragon.” During the two weeks of our twitter campaign, HP Israel’s twitter community grew by more than 140 followers.
With twitter, we continually monitor what people say about HP PSG’s products and provide assistance in real time. Below, a user complained that he had not received his computer from the service lab on time. HP Israel quickly intervened to fix the problem and everyone came out of this story happy.

It is always exciting to build a brand’s community from the ground up and watch our marketing efforts and activity grow within the social sphere.

We have learned a few lessons along the way and continue to learn daily from our valued community members.

A few tips for the newbies who haven’t yet led any social media campaigns:

1) Listen to what people have to say about your brand and be responsive to their needs. Don’t be defensive. Be attentive.

2) Always remember to be transparent and honest with the members of your community. Make sure that if you promise something, you make it happen. Don’t be afraid to admit when you’re wrong – people appreciate that from a brand.

3) When creating contests, make sure the rules are loud and clear. There’s nothing worse than bitter fans angry after a contest’s rules weren’t made clear in advance.

4) Remember that building a community takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is an online community. Enjoy each one of the phases you go through when building your community and learn from them.

We live in a wonderful age today where brands can interact and have an open communication channel with customers and potential customers. I am happy to share our experiences with the building of one such community. An online community just like an offline community needs to be nurtured with delicate care and fed with content, activity and live discussion at all times in order to keep it buzzing and this is what we aim to achieve above all.

Yesterday I attended Jeff Pulver‘s 140 Conference in Tel Aviv. I really enjoyed @thekotel‘s presentation which unfortunately I didn’t film but go to the twitter profile and check it out. Alon Nir is doing a remarkable job there.

The lecture I enjoyed in particular was Yaniv Golan’s (CTO of Yedda)  “The 140-characters Netscape” where he stated:

“I believe that in 2 years the Twitter brand will be in the same position as the Netscape brand is in now: Twitter will be credited with starting the revolution, and paving the road for followers (pun intended). But at the same time, it will be pushed into a minor position in the market with other players taking the lead (or, as is the case with Netscape, will no longer exist).”

It’s an interesting position and definitely a realistic one. What do you think? Do you see each of the big players creating their own twitter-like services? Do you believe like Yaniv that twitter should switch to a wordpress type model? Check out the video below.

(Guest post by Dorine Sinigaglia)

Recently, I noticed a friend of mine following a food truck company on Twitter. Call me old-fashioned, but I didn’t even know food trucks were still around – let alone had Twitter accounts! Food vendors always reminded me of a place where starved businessmen would run to grab a quick bite in TV sitcoms. I realized I knew very little about this business, so I began to do some research, as the concept of food trucks’ branding and marketing tactics on Twitter began to intrigue me. I was amazed at the amount of information I found online revolving food vendors’ online presence and I quickly grew an appetite to write a new post.

Street food vendors, trucks and carts have been around way before the time of Twitter – so it’s evident that their primary source of growth and ways of  promoting locations on an hourly basis is not solely done through Twitter (most of them have developed websites with full menus and directions to daily location stops). On the other hand, since Twitter is now available as a means of marketing and promoting brands, food vendors have quickly jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and are utilizing its real-time status updates to their advantage. According to Ann Handley from Mashable, “a growing number of street vendors have been leveraging Twitter in innovative and interesting ways, serving up lessons for any business” – in her article Tweetable Eats: What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter. With the help of Twitter, street food vendors can promote their precise stopped locations and what they are serving throughout the day by tweeting to the hungry public.

Many brands are on Twitter but don’t know how to engage with their followers or create constant dialogue to keep them coming back to read about company news or industry updates. When searching for street food vendors’ presence on Twitter, I found that most of them didn’t have more than 2,500 followers – and some had as few as 250 followers. Since their target markets are “geographically constrained” – says Ann, you won’t find food vendors on Twitter with tens of thousands of followers. For street food vendors, “1,000 followers who will actually do business with you are ultimately more valuable to your business that 100,000 less-engaged people.” There are exceptions of course – like Kogi Korean BBQ –  an extremely successful Korean BBQ taco truck that has a dynamic website filled with photos, videos, a blog, and also a Twitter account with almost 50,000 followers! According to an article in the LA Times – Living section featuring this successful taco truck,  Kogi brings in “300 to 800 people each time it parks (often several times in an evening).” But overall, street food vendors have to do much more than just “follow” people on Twitter in hopes of gaining a customer or two – for it doesn’t matter how big the list is if they don’t make it to the food cart.

For street food vendors, it is about finding the right followers in order to ensure a successful lunch hour. There are a few important tips that food vendors must keep in mind in order to get proper exposure in general – and most importantly, before lunch time when its their busiest time for sales.

First, they must know who their target market is. If the local taco stand or hot dog cart tends to remain in the Los Angeles region, for example, roaming from one college campus to another within the same county boundaries, their target audience is specifically people who live in Los Angeles and attending students of those colleges. If the food cart tends to post up near local museums, on the other hand, their target market is much wider and appeals to a variety of crowds. In general, it is crucial to know who their target market is and where these customers roam in order to ensure a high attendance to their parked food cart.

Next, street food vendors must create a tasty demand for their products while simultaneously creating a sense of urgency in their tweets. Some vendors post a brief menu of their available foods or how many items they have left before they run out for the day to create that sense of urgency in the customer’s potential purchase and gets their mouth watering for the vendor’s food (if they can throw in a quick link to a picture of their melting grilled cheese sandwich or their sizzling hamburger, this helps wonders!). According to Ann, food vendors must “communicate the breadth and depth of your products or services on Twitter in a fresh, compelling way, and in a manner that speaks directly to your customer’s needs.”

Food vendors must humanize their brand in order to reach out to their customer’s hungry heart. Monitoring conversations online is key in this business and goes a long way in terms of keeping customers feeling appreciated and humanizing the brand. Responding to customer’s comments and questions in real-time is crucial to keep the business going successfully and they should listen to customer’s suggestions and feedback with the use of Twitter and use this vital information as a resource for product development and ways to improve their business. According to Ann, food vendors must “reveal a little bit about the people and personalities who run your business so that your customers can connect with you on a human level.”

And now, its all about continuous open communication. Twitter’s real-time social platform allows food vendors to be in regular, instant communication with its customers and keep them informed on news and updates – even if the news is not in their favor (for customers respect honesty and would rather know the truth than come hungry and be let down). Whether food vendors publicize their locations and hours on Twitter or send a tweet about how they didn’t find parking on the street, communication is key to keep the customer engaged and coming back for more tasty treats.

Done correctly and with style, Twitter goes a long way in having the ability to connect customers with their business in an immediate, intimate level. But since Twitter is only one social media tool for food vendors to utilize for promoting their brand, like any marketing efforts, spreading the word about their tasty foods is done best when integrated with other valuable tools – like having a company blog, a dynamic website and by reaching out to the blogosphere for other companies to write about their products. Now, Twitter is simply another great resource for food vendors to be able to reach out to their community in a quick fashion with real-time updates and tasty tweets that bring hungry customers to their cart simply because they feel they have to save the last, lonely hot dog from the stand before closing time.

Is it lunch time yet?

Dorine Sinigaglia is the Account & Content Manager at Blonde 2.0

While Biz Stone was in Israel this week, I was interviewed by Globes TV regarding twitter’s role in my life and how twitter can help both brands and individuals in building and enhancing their online image.  The interview was also broadcasted on Channel 1 in Israel. Please note, the interview is in Hebrew. To view, click here.

Illustration credit: Matt Hamm

I was invited yesterday morning to the Biz Stone press conference hosted by the College of Management . For me personally it was very exciting to meet one of the founders of the social platform that I love and admire the most. Biz didn’t surprise us with any new acquisition in Israel but mostly talked about the role that twitter has been playing until now and what the future holds for twitter. He did mention that 2010 is the year that twitter will start making real money.

For everyone who wanted to be there, but couldn’t, don’t say i didn’t think of you…here’s the video (separated into two due to Youtube limitations):

(Guest post by Dorine Sinigaglia)

Brands are using effective social media tools like Twitter more and more these days in creative ways to promote their brand name as a way to reach out to their consumers and attract new ones. Some brands really know how to promote their brand well – and this has been their saving force during the economic downfall over the last year. While thousands of businesses worldwide have closed down or filed bankruptcy as they watched their sales numbers plummet, many businesses actually saw an increase in sales this past year and they can thank their use of their social media network for that. If your company or brand still does not yet hold an active Twitter account – it’s time to wake up, smell the coffee and re-evaluate your strategy on ways to reach out to your consumers.

Take a close look at Starbucks‘ brand presence on Twitter (@Starbucks). The guy behind the Starbucks Twitter account runs the show like I’ve never seen it done before. According to Jennifer Van Grove from Mashable, Brad Nelson – a former Starbucks barista – is now the face behind the Starbucks Twitter account, replying to messages, promoting seasonal drinks found in local stores and helping coffee-addict-customers in every way find resolutions to their problems, questions & inquiries. Grove says it well: Brad is continuously “putting out fires left and right” – in her post 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them. It’s really impressive to see! He turns frowns upside down as he offers solutions to customers’ complaints when seasonal drinks change over the course of time. Take a look at the below response to a customer’s disappointment when a seasonal drink she enjoyed stopped selling at her local Starbucks store (note: Brad’s response came 3 minutes after she wrote him!).

Brands on Twitter must not only engage with their consumers through conversations, but also bring them news and info not only about their brand or company but about related topics as well to hold their attention. When Brad writes customers back and replies to general inquiries about flavored frappucinos and holiday music playing in local stores, he is representing more than Starbucks’ product and service; he is representing the whole coffee industry and related information that is attached to this industry. With an average of 10 Tweets per day, Brad does more than simply promote Starbucks’ coffee brand; he engages with consumers and holds their interest to ensure they keep coming back to hear what interesting comments and updates he has to say about Starbucks.

Despite their announcement last January that they were shutting down 300 stores (and closed down another 600 in July), Starbucks remains an attractive workplace and is still ranked highly in Fortune Magazine‘s Top 100 Best Companies to Work for in 2009 – ranking in at #24 (was ranked #7 in 2008). Just last month, Adam Ostrow from Mashable wrote a post that mentioned The 50 Hottest Brands on Twitter Right Now – and Starbucks’ brand was definitely in that list of 50. Having joined Twitter at the end of November, 2006 — almost 3 years ago to date — Starbucks’ Twitter now has more than 515,000 followers. Starbucks’ Facebook presence is also amazing – with over 5 million fans to date, but since Facebook launched two years prior to Twitter in Feb. 2004 (Twitter launched in March 2006), Starbucks’ online presence got a jump start on Facebook. With an average of over 3,000 new followers daily, Starbucks’ Twitter account could reach to 1 million followers within 6 months.

In addition to their general Twitter account, Starbucks continues to find new & inventive ways of reaching out to its consumers – like using crowd sourcing, where companies let users speak their mind on their brand. Starbucks started a website called My Starbucks Idea – a website that engages with their consumers and encourages them to share their inventive ideas they have for the company and initiate discussions with other Starbucks consumers. They opened a Twitter account (@mystarbucksidea) 4 months ago and already have over 9,000 followers.

Finding new ways of earning customer’s loyalty and increasing consumer numbers is a challenging task to accomplish for any industry. Consumers don’t want to feel like services are after them solely for their money – even when they do enjoy the product. Starbucks’ Twitter presence has come up with an effective formula to do both – gain customer satisfaction and increase sales. Its online presence adds valued content for its veiwers while making sure the customer is always feeling satisfied with a solution to an inquiry. By taking a brief look at Starbucks’ Twitter presence, it is simple to see why people keep coming back for more lattes. Yes, their fond love for peppermint flavored coffee is a big factor; but overall, it’s the complete customer experience they receive – in the store and online.

Dorine Sinigaglia is the Account & Content Manager at Blonde 2.0

Dorine is a dedicated individual with experience in account management, sales and business development for large corporations. She gets to know all the ins and outs of each account she handles and gets up close and personal with everyone she works with.

These days we live in an era of a historian’s wet dream. We are consistently recording history through all our social tools. Our actions, feelings, thoughts, our everything, constantly being recorded. From where we are eating to what we are annoyed about to what it is that makes us tick. Not only are we recording the “big” things but we are recording EVRYTHING. It’s history without hiccups.

Ben Parr wrote an excellent post on Mashable on the topic. Parr: ” For the first time in human history, the day-to-day interactions between people are being permanently recorded and formatted in easily organizable segments of information.”

Millions of us are publicly recording our daily activities on our twitter feeds for the world to know for the rest of time. All details are recorded from who we were with and what we were doing to when and where. Historians in the future will not need to guess any details. They’ll have all the information right in front of them.They’ll actually probably know more than they care to know. With pictures on flickr and videos on youtube and texts on twitter and links on facebook and top it all of, personal blogs, historians will have all the info they need and more about each and every one of us and our interactions with one another.

I can already see future museums displaying this era as an era of communications galore when everyone (well, almost everyone) was about transparency and openess – kind of like the 60′s but digital – free social love for all. We cannot share enough of our daily doings with one another and we cannot hear enough. We long for the feedback from our surroundings and the immortality of our souls by recording everything we do. We feed on the interactions surrounding us.

It is not a coincidence that today Reality TV is one of the most (if not THE most) popular TV genres. People like to watch other people’s lives. For this same reason social tools are also so popular – people like to see what others are doing and interact with them while they’re doing it. People are looking for ways to connect more with one another no matter what geographical location they’re at. In what other age was it so easy to interact with someone two continents away from you?

We are learning more about each other’s cultures, actions, relating more to one another. Perhaps world peace will be achievable? Perhaps we’ll learn to get along? Social media tools are definitely changing the face of history. I cannot write such a post of course without mentioning the story of how the U.S. State Department reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled in June 2009 in order to allow Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to a later time. Lev Grossman from Time.com writes: “Twitter didn’t start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there’s no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before.”

There is no question that social tools are changing the face of history. The real question is: Are we fully ready for the change and its future consequences? Are we all ready for an era of total transparency?

Picture credit: Andrew Long

In my opinion twitter is the best tool we have today to engage with others, spread a message, network, meet other like-minded people, and stay on top of the news, in any industry. The only aspect I’ve always found problematic on twitter was the impossibility of organizing information. This is something that’s changed now with the new twitter lists which allow you to organize people in any sort of list you like.

So how have you been using lists? What sort of names have you been giving your lists?It’s quite interesting to see what lists people have put you under and how you have been “categorized”.  With twitter lists, I can put people I am following into specific categories. So for example, I have created lists of “bloggers”, “social media”, “brands”, etc.

Twitter lists are going to change the way we network and socialize.  No longer are we going to have a list of journalists’ emails to send a press release to but rather we will have a twitter list of all these journalists with their twitter handles. Patrick Kitano writes in his post entitled Twitter Lists will Organize the social graph: “It takes an individual an hour to build a 200-person Twitter List in comparison to the days / weeks it takes to attain a 200-fan FB page. This will make Twitter Lists the prolific standard for organizing the social graph.”

Each of us is organizing his/her own “following” or rather social graph is basically  helping twitter organize its database for them. These lists will become invaluable to us both professionally and socially.  However, please note that one twitter account can only create 20 lists and each list can only contain 500 members, so choose your lists carefully and who’s in them even more carefully.  Robert Scoble wrote an excellent post describing the limitations, bugs, impact and brilliance of twitter lists.

The feature itself I think is revolutionary. The interface and usability? Well, not as great. So here is my top 10 list of  suggestions for improving twitter lists:

10)  Include a “Featured Lists’ section each day/week, based on the user’s interests/preferences

9) Ability to invite people to a private list

8 ) Ability to combine lists

7) Ability to search within specific lists

6) “Ability to build lists by search across following/followers and automatic list creation. For example, I could build an instant list of Berkeley real estate agents by searching “Berkeley real estate” across my following, and clicking a presumed button called “Automatic List”  (Credit: Patrick Kitano)

5) Allow special features for lists, for example: Being able to send a message to all the members of a particular list

4) Allow the ability to decide which lists will display on your sidebar

3) Allow to easily search for people while adding them to lists

2) Ability to add more than 20 lists (perhaps a premium feature?)

1) Ability to add more than 500 members to a list (another premium feature?)

As Scoble writes, what will be the impact of this brilliant feature? “You’ll follow a lot more people. Why? Because you’ll find someone who has done a really great list, say, of programmers, and you’ll add the whole list. I’ve already done this a LOT and found that Twitter has gotten way more interesting because of it.”  Barak Hachamov, founder of My6Sense, a startup that learns users’ behavior over time and prioritizes their information streams for them tells me: This feature is so simple and yet has the potential to have such a huge impact on how people consume and discover real-time information.

I tweeted this week: “It’s no longer about how many followers you have. Now its about how many twitter lists you’re on.” and I stand behind what I said. It doesn’t matter anymore if 100,000 people are following you if you’re not on any one’s list. LindsayT tweeted me saying: “why does this matter? why isn’t the question-how many friends you interact with through this social medium? quality over quantity”. So I answer LindsayT in the most personal of ways: The more lists you’re on, the more you interact with others. People put you on a list because you specifically interact and made yourself a name in that particular category.  Twitter lists are the new measurement these days. Twitter lists are awesome. We will soon enough ask ourselves how we ever lived without them.

Guest Post by Ahuvah

This blog post was inspired by an article I just read in Business Week titled “The Great Trust Offensive”.

As I personally delve deeper into the world of corporate branding, I find it very interesting to come across various insights and tactics to building a brand and maintaining the correct corporate image. Well established corporate brands like McDonalds, Ford and AmEx are all in the process of re-branding themselves and many are turning to social media to help them spread their message.

According to the tone in the article, gone are the days when corporations could depend solely on their history to invoke brand loyalty and credibility. The economy has been hit hard and customers are worried about the financial stability for brands that have been around for 40 or 50 years. Take Ford as an example. Ford no longer depends on its 150 year old image but is now “targeting consumers’ rational left brain, relentlessly pushing themes that inspire street cred : new technology, fuel economy, quality scores.” Customers are seeking out brands that are economically and socially responsible.

The days of standing behind the corporate image shouting at the consumer to “trust us” is long gone. According to the article, “consumers are telling companies in a thousand ways: “If you aren’t open with me, then I won’t trust you.” Consumers and corporations engaging online via social media tools open up direct lines for communication fostering a deeper level of trust from the consumer. If a consumer can talk to the “big bad corporation” directly and be heard, the consumer feels valued as an individual and will convey that feeling within their own communities.

The idea of combining celebrities, social media and corporate branding is even more fascinating to me. Corporations have always turned to so-called “trusted” celebrities to be their spokespeople but only expected them to be the face and voice of the brand in print, radio or on television and not in their personal lives. Now corporations are hiring celebrities to utilize their personal social media accounts to spread their messages and we must assume that some sort of engagement between the celebrity and their community will take place. Recently Ellen DeGeneres was hired by AmEx to promote their new brand image by utilizing her popular Twitter account.

It is interesting to see how now in order to create trusted brands, corporations are turning to social media now to spread the message, and more importantly hiring celebrities to promote brands via their personal online profiles. Obviously social media has the potential to reinforce brand awareness and corporate trust but it all depends on the consumer. Will the consumer trust the message being conveyed by a celebrity on a social media platform?

I think only time will tell.

(Flickr image courtesy of  insect54 )