“Speaking at the international advertising festival Cannes Lions 2009, Mildenhall admitted the multi-national corporation had been slow to embrace UGC and social media.
“We’ve been really nervous about user-generated content and, in terms of other brands in the space, we’re playing catch-up,†he said…”
Read more here. Contact Tug today for a bespoke social media campaign!
MySpace laid off 420 employees in its US offices yesterday with more cuts in its international divisions and other News Corp Fox Interactive Media (Fim) properties expected to come.
The cuts, making up about a third of its staff, had been rumoured for a number of weeks and affect all divisions of the company.
MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta said the layoffs will help it “operate as a nimble and entrepreneurial company with the adaptive mentality of a start-up”…Read the rest at Brand Republic
Facebook officially began registrations of the URLs on Saturday (June 13th), allowing users to associate their profiles with URLs containing the username of their choice in addition to the standard numbers-based URL.
Figures from the website show that 500,000 people had registered a vanity URL within 15 minutes of the launch, with this figure rising to more than one million within an hour and three million after 12 hours.
The vanity URLs are also available for those with Facebook Pages, although those who registered a Page after May 31st or a normal profile after June 9th might not be able to sign up for a username straight away due to protocols created to ward off cybersquatters….read the rest at IAB
Facebook have recieved a $200 Million investment from a Russian company called Digital Sky Technologies. The Company takes a 1.96 percent stake in Facebook, which gives Facebook a value of $10 Billion. When Microsoft bought their shares for $240 Million, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, this is a drop of $5 Billion! Here’s Forbes take on the investment:
“The $10 billion valuation for Facebook is less than the $15 billion value implied in 2007, when Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the company – even though Facebook has substantially grown since then. However Facebook’s own appraisal after the Microsoft deal gave the company a market value of about $3.7 billion, according to details revealed in a legal settlement.”
Read more at TechCrunch.
If you are a regular Twitter user, im sure you’ve noticed the short urls with the TinyURL domain such as http://tinyurl.com/dgxf78. This is done to help fit your whole message into Twitter aswell as a URL in the short space of 140 characters. Twitter have recently swapped with TinyURL service with the Bit.ly service, so you will now see links such as http://bit.ly/rkYqH. The obvious advantage of this being it’s even shorter, allowing users to add even more to their message. Twitter and Bit.ly are also linked with the invester, Betanetworks. TechCrunch also reported on this matter here. Follow Tug on Twitter!“Today, though, rumors popped up that Apple may be looking to buy Twitter. “Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June,†said a normally reliable source this evening, adding that the purchase price would be $700 million in cash. The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. If these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed. We would have passed on reporting this rumor at all, but other press is now picking it up...”
Read more here.
 “Every public update sent to Twitter from anywhere in the world 24/7 can be instantly indexed and made discoverable via our newly launched real-time search. What was that loud noise outside your apartment? Did you just feel an earthquake? What do people think about your company, your product, or your city? With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now…“
Read the rest here.
News Corporation today announced the appointment of Owen Van Natta to the role of MySpace Chief Executive Officer effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be based in Los Angeles and report directly to Jonathan Miller, News Corporation’s CEO of Digital Media and Chief Digital Officer…read the full press releaseÂ
“In May 2007, eBay purchased StumbleUpon at $75 million, to much confusion in the blogosphere. At the time, eBay was taking a “wait and see†approach before integrating any of its holdings with the sharing and discovery toolbar. Just under two years later, with the help of well-known VCs, the service is returning to its roots as an independent start up, including bringing the founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, back…”
The CEO of StumbleUpon had the following to say:
“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths”
Read the rest here.
Seeing as Twitter has been in the news lately, we thought it appropriate to invite you to follow us!
http://www.twitter.com/tugsearch
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